So I was at a party tonight with some linguistics majors and a lot of what they were talking about pretty directly related to the way Tolkien described the development of different Elvish languages.
We were mostly talking about the similarity of different languages: for example:
1. English and French
This similarity comes from the fact that the Norman French (a Viking culture who invaded Normandy) got bored of France and invaded England instead. Okay, this is not really how this happened but bear with me. I included a super cool example about how the English language changed below, and we can still sometimes understand lots of French cognates.
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2. Arabic and Hebrew
This one I wasn't familiar with, but my friend who has been taking Arabic classes for about 6 years was telling me that when he watched this one show (where some characters spoke Hebrew and some spoke Arabic) that it was hard to even tell which language was being spoken without the subtitles on.
3. French and Italian
This then led to a series of anecdotes that reminded me of one of my own: I have a coworker at Satellite named Mara who speaks Italian. She can understand when my manager is speaking Spanish (usually complaining secretly about customers), but I can't. I can, however, understand when she tells me what he said in Italian, even though I only speak French. As a group, we play a pretty regular game of telephone from French to Italian to Spanish and back.
This just reminds me greatly of the fabricated language development Tolkien used, and I can understand why, especially as a European who was (I'm making a wild assumption here) in contact with several more languages regularly than many Americans.
1 comment:
First off: Where are you finding parties with a bunch of linguistics majors? I want in!!
Secondly: this is super fascinating and it reminds me of several conversations I have had this semester about very similar experiences. I have for a very long time thought of French as a strange combination of English and Spanish, so I am intrigued by this game of telephone that apparently happens while I am waiting casually for my latte. I was telling a friend that I am frustrated with learning German because I can never go through a whole conversation without switching over to French or defaulting to my other two base languages. She said that the 4th language is always the hardest to dominate but that once you do, everything in your brain snaps into place and you are able to pick everything else up super easily. SO! I hope to dominate this sucker and move on to my goal of 7 major languages by the time I am 30.
This makes me think that maybe Tolkien had a similar experience. He began seeing very intricate paths in languages that most people dont and he made connections in a way that permitted him to not only create new languages, but to adapt them and their implications and cultures into his perspective and later, into his world building. Wouldnt you just give anything to have tea with Tolkien and talk back and forth in at least 4 languages?
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