The Great Tolkien Legendarium Thread

[malloc]

So here's what bugs me about Quenya and Sindarin. Where's the sound change come from? Sound change in human languages presumably comes from generational shift. My kids hear and say words subtly different from me and generation on generation as we live and die that changes the sounds of English. But elves are immortal. The elves still knocking around Valinor presumably speak Quenya the same way they did tens of thousands of years ago. Galadriel, still knocking about in RotK, came over with the Noldor in the First Age to get the Silmarils back. I cannot imagine she spoke either Quenya or Sindarin any differently to she did the thick end of 8000 years (?) previously. So how did Sindarin get to be different? How did anybody start to speak differently?

Perhaps there are differences in human and Elf psychology that make the Elves more likely to produce and acquire sound changes even after childhood.

[/ˌnɐ.ˈɾɛn.dɚ.ˌduːd/]

I like the idea of a stubborn old-timer type elf who refuses to adopt changes in language even as others do and thus speaks an entirely different language.

[Raphael]

I like the idea of a stubborn old-timer type elf who refuses to adopt changes in language even as others do and thus speaks an entirely different language.

Hah!

[WeepingElf]

So here's what bugs me about Quenya and Sindarin. Where's the sound change come from? Sound change in human languages presumably comes from generational shift. My kids hear and say words subtly different from me and generation on generation as we live and die that changes the sounds of English. But elves are immortal. The elves still knocking around Valinor presumably speak Quenya the same way they did tens of thousands of years ago. Galadriel, still knocking about in RotK, came over with the Noldor in the First Age to get the Silmarils back. I cannot imagine she spoke either Quenya or Sindarin any differently to she did the thick end of 8000 years (?) previously. So how did Sindarin get to be different? How did anybody start to speak differently?

Perhaps there are differences in human and Elf psychology that make the Elves more likely to produce and acquire sound changes even after childhood.

I think the point is that slow, gradual changes tend to go unnoticed, at least in a way that when you look back, you can tell that things are no longer as you remember them to once have been like but cannot tell when exactly the change happened. At least, this has happened to me several times. And the Elves are perhaps not that different from us in that point.

[Glenn]

Reviving this thread, at least temporarily...

Perhaps there are differences in human and Elf psychology that make the Elves more likely to produce and acquire sound changes even after childhood.

In at least one of Tolkien's posthumously published writings, he says exactly that, describing the Elves as "natural conlangers" who are conscious of the features of their language, and enjoy playing with them.


When this thread first appeared, there were several posts that I wanted to respond to, as someone with an interest in Tolkien's writings and what other people have written about him, but I did not have either the time or the opportunity to do so. I have a bit more time now, as I am currently recovering from surgery, but I am not sure whether it would be appropriate to resurrect the thread in order to do so.

[alice]

... describing the Elves as "natural conlangers" who are conscious of the features of their language, and enjoy playing with them.

Just who invented the word "conlanger", anyway?

[Glenn]

... describing the Elves as "natural conlangers" who are conscious of the features of their language, and enjoy playing with them.

Just who invented the word "conlanger", anyway?

Please note that Tolkien did not use the word "conlanger"; that was my paraphrase.

Etymonline gives the word "conlang" as being in existence in 1991, but does not give an origin or initial citation. According to another source that I found, the Oxford English Dictionary traces "con lang" (initially spelled as two words) to a Usenet post about Loglan in 1991, and cites "conlang" (one word) in a Toronto newspaper article about online conlanging in 1999. "Conlanger" was presumably coined by analogy somewhere along the way.

The full phrase "constructed language" goes back further; apparently it was first used by the linguist Otto Jespersen in 1928, although I was not able to confirm the details.

[WeepingElf]

... describing the Elves as "natural conlangers" who are conscious of the features of their language, and enjoy playing with them.

Just who invented the word "conlanger", anyway?

Please note that Tolkien did not use the word "conlanger"; that was my paraphrase.

Etymonline gives the word "conlang" as being in existence in 1991, but does not give an origin or initial citation. According to another source that I found, the Oxford English Dictionary traces "con lang" (initially spelled as two words) to a Usenet post about Loglan in 1991, and cites "conlang" (one word) in a Toronto newspaper article about online conlanging in 1999. "Conlanger" was presumably coined by analogy somewhere along the way.

Conlang originally was the name of an Internet mailing list founded in 1991 which still exists today - the list server had a 7-letter limit for list names in those times. It was, of course, an abbreviation for constructed language, and came to be used on that list in the sense we know today. Conlanger, conworld, auxlang etc. also originated on the Conlang Mailing List, and they were of course analogically derived from conlang. I can't tell you when that happened; it all was way before I joined the Conlang Mailing List, which was in the year 2000.