Re: tolkien?

Interesting replies from all.  I have to exclude myself from any JRRT
influence, however.  I became _fou de langue_ around 1947 (age 13 of course)
when I stumbled on "Sanskrit" or maybe "Pali" in my grandfather's huge old
encylopaedia; one cross-ref led to many others.. (I was probably looking up
"sex" or "penis" or something....) About that same time I got hold of one of
those flag thingies that WW II pilots in the Far East wore on their
jackets-- it had "I am an American pilot. My plane has crashed.  If you help
me evade the enemy you will be rewarded" or such, in French, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Thai. Spent hours trying to puzzle out the French and
Vietnamese, and admiring the Thai script. (My first non-Latino-Sanskrito
conlang used a vaguely Thai-inspired script, as does Kash.)  Then there was
older sister's Spanish grammar book, seldom used by her, and mother's 1920s
college Latin and English (with complete subjunctive paradigms!) grammars.
Latin in high school, Spanish there and thru college, plus Italian. Brief
flings with Eo, TY Portuguese, Swedish, OE. and much browsing in Schoenhof's
Foreign Books in Cambridge Mass.  When I actually got around to reading
Tolkien (Hobbit 1964, LOTR 1976), I knew he'd invented a world and a script,
but my editions didn't go into his languages much.
The direct inspiration for Kash was LeGuin's "Left Hand of Darkness" in
1976, plus by that time my head was full of Indonesian stuff.

How nice it would have been, at age 13, or even in 1976, to have known that
I wasn't totally crazy.