Re: OT: Super OT: Re: CHAT: JRRT
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 7, 2004, 20:47 |
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On Saturday, March 6, 2004, at 06:38 PM, And Rosta wrote:
> David P:
[snip]
>> Yeah, I think I was assuming too much when I said this. I think
>> I was assuming that Tolkien meant for his languages to be realistic,
>> but now that I'm thinking about it, I have no idea.
>
> Contrary to Mark Reed's reasonable views, I think that the Elvish
> languages were intended to be realistic, and are realistic.
Yes, I agree. Indeed, for the past half century I've been assuming JRRT
meant his languages to be realistic and have found them to be realistic.
Maybe I've been naive & laboring all these decades under a double illusion.
But so far no one has told me why the languages are not realistic.
[snip]
>> ..................................... Everyone's
>> advice is: Remember your audience; think of the type of reader you
>> want reading what you write; etc.).
>
> As John Cowan reminds us (or me -- maybe it was private mail), JRRT
> is a towering figure in 20th century literature for the completeness
> with which he ignored these dicta. He wrote only for himself, or
> for an imaginary audience, with not a sop to the actual market,
> and in full (and, at the time, very reasonable) expectation of
> being alternately ignored and derided.
Absolutely - he had to be persuaded to get the stuff published; he didn't
think there was a market so it'd be a wee bit difficult for him to have
remember his audience etc.
[snip]
>> *That's* what I enjoy, and that's what I'm not getting from what
>> I call "genre fiction", and I think it's because the point is the
>> genre and not the writing.
>
> I completely agree. _The Lord of the Rings_, though, is excellently
> written (even if not to everybody's) taste, and is the very
> antithesis of genre fiction. It virtually *defines* the antithesis
> of genre fiction.
I agree with And on every point here. All the stuff about "genre fiction"
has seemed a massive irrelevance to me.
[snip]
> The films offer mere glimpses of the majesty of Middle Earth, which
> is why they distress and delight me in equal measure.
Yep - quite so; they have the same effect on me. They are no substitute
for the books IMHO.
> Interestingly,
> the most novelistic element of the book, viz the character of
> Gollum, is handled well in the film.
I agree - I was pleasantly surprised how well Gollum is done. But the poor
Ents are somewhat glossed over. Where was the great march on Isengard with
the stirring chanting? What the film gave us was something nothing like it.
and the stay in Lothlorien was almost skimmed over; the unlikely but IMO
very moving relationship that grew between Galadriel & Samwise Gamgee was
completely ignored, and so I could go on...
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On Saturday, March 6, 2004, at 04:09 PM, Jeffrey Henning wrote:
[snip]
> He was the first conlanger since Swift to have many languages in a story,
> each clearly with its own personality, even if the language in reality was
> no more than a sketch.
A very good point - there are a diversity of languages and they do have
their distinctive personalities.
> I think some criticism of his conlanging abilities would be anachronistic
> --
> there was little or no interest in fictional languages when he started
> writing them in the early 1900s, so he never published any primer for any
> of
> his languages, as there was assumed to be no market for such.
I think he still thought so when the books were published. I'm sure it
would've surprise him greatly to know that there are people who actually
study his languages almost as though they were trying to reconstruct now
dead languages from surviving fragments, inscriptions etc.
=========================================================================
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On Saturday, March 6, 2004, at 05:11 PM, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à David Peterson :
>
>
>> There's a lot of information here that's new to me. What's the best
>> site to go to get online info specifically on Tolkien's languages (all
>> of them, not just one), perhaps with some history to put it all in
>> context?
>
> The best site I know about Tolkien's tongues is Ardalambion:
>
http://www.ardalambion.com/> It contains articles about even the most ill-known languages from Tolkien
> :)) .
Quite so - it's a salutory reminder that JRRT created other conlangs
besides Quenya & Sindarin.
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==========================
[snip]
> It's a hard life being an elf.
> As if murderous orcs and magic spells weren't enough to contend with,
Ach - this is just the sort of superficial writing that makes me wince; it'
s practically a Disneyfication.
> there are two languages to learn -
Wow! Two languages! I just don't know how you guys that live in bilingual
communities managed.
> loosely based on Welsh and Finnish.
Groan - to say that Sindarin is in any way _based_ on Welsh completely
misses the point. A Welsh or 'Celtic' sounding language had been present
in JRRT's mythos right from the start because it seemed to fit the Celtic
type of legends & stories he had in mind. In its earlier manifestation it
was called Gnomish or "I-Lam na-Ngoldathon" (the language of the Gnomes
[Noldor]) and round about 1917 he did compile an extensive Gnomish
dictionary and was working on a Gnomish grammar - but the latter wasn't
completed because by that time the language was undergoing another
transformation. Oh yes, it has a certain Welshness to it - but the
phonology is not simply a Welsh mimic and the consonant mutations are
worked out rather differently. Any discerning person will find other
influences besides Welsh in Sindarin. Welsh was the more noticeable
ingredient in the mix that went to make up this language. But any good
cook will tell you that getting the right balance of all the other
ingedients is an art.
But one might forgive the "loosely based on Welsh" - but "loosely _based_
on Finnish" is not correct at all for Quenya. One might just as well say
'loosely based on Latin' or 'loosely based on Classical Greek'. Indeed,
JRRT more than once referred to Quenya as a kind of 'Elven-Latin'.
Arguably Latin was the greatest influence of all the manifold strands that
make up this language.
I have learnt that when, like me, he first came upon Finnish he was (as I
was) struck by the beauty of the language. I know not every one thinks
thus - it's very much a subjective thing. Quenya had been developing
before JRRT met Finnish and IIRC much is due to his schoolboy acquaintance
with the Latin & ancient Greek.
It's perhaps little wonder that I, who had been brought up on the Latin
and Greek Classics and had found Finnish so attractive, should have found
Quenya such great language when I first met it.
Ray
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760
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