Entish = polysynthetic?

[So Haleza Grise]

I've been reflecting for a while now that Tolkien's description of Entish might have been a joke or a sendup - or, more charitably, partially inspired by - what he had read about North American polysynthetic languages. I have no evidence that he read/knew much about them, but they were certainly a hot topic among linguists generally in the early C20th. At least his reference to making his languages "of a European type" implies he knew something about other models.

What we know about Entish = "long-winded", uses tonal distinctions, uses a mindset suited to Ents but not to hobbits
What a well-read academic might have known about North American languages in the early C20th = multimorphemic, often use tonal distinctions, use grammatical categories that seem "alien" to Europeans

Again, this is all speculation on my part, but does anyone else find this plausible? We already know that he was inspired by Semitic languages for "Dwarven" and "Mannish", so it makes some level of sense to me that he could use different linguistic areas as inspiration for different races.

[Kuchigakatai]

I believe Tolkien says at some point that Entish was long-winded because the trees would share their entire knowledge of every object when mentioning them, namely their past, their present and imagined future, leaving nothing to assumed knowledge.

[Vardelm]

I thought it might be worth linking the Ardalambion article on Entish.

"Polysynthetic" might be an understatement. Just take the Entish "word" for orcs, from Ardalambion:

On a later occasion, Treebeard started to render the Entish designation of Orcs directly into the Common Speech, then realized that this would take far to long time when he was speaking to human-like species: "There was a great inrush of those, burárum, those evileyed - blackhanded - bowlegged - flinthearted - clawfingered - foulbellied - bloodthirsty, morimaite - sincahonda, hoom, well, since you are hasty folk and their full name is as long as years of torment, those vermin of orcs."

If each "noun" is (to coin a new linguistic term) superpolyadjectival, then thinking verbs would be "just" polysynthetic doesn't seem a stretch at all.

Hoom. Sorry to be hasty, but I need to be online for work in 3 minutes...

[Pabappa]

Very interesting idea. I remember reading in an appendix to the LOTR that the Ents made themselves a language that was different from all the others and took a long time to speak, but I dont remember the entry (loooool) being any more detailed than that. I had assumed that it was just a very wasteful "take it slow" language, as if for example the word for house was, if represented with human phonology, something like /watatatatapibaba/, with no interest whatsoever in making communication efficient, simply because the Ents have all the time in the world. But now I know it is morpheme-dense like human languages after all, .... so they take a long time to say everything because they have a lot more to say.

Regarding stereotypes of Native American languages ... one scene I found hilarious in a Bugs Bunny cartoon was where Bugs meets a Native American .... no idea if it was a human or an animal with a headdress on ... who speaks in an unknown language with subtitles. He takes about 20 seconds just to say "What's up, doc?" and maybe says a few other things. Then he says [eʔeʔ] and the subtitle translates it into something like "Now is the time for all good men to come together...." and goes on for an entire paragraph that fills the bottom of the screen.

[zompist]

I'm sure if Tolkien wanted to do polysynthesis, he'd do a much better job. I think he's trying to do something truly nonhuman, a language that goes in the opposite direction on efficiency and simplicity.

[sasasha]

I also think that far from a linguistic joke or send-up, Tolkien was trying to be genuinely poignant in his depiction of a thought process native to a species that inherently represented all that was good about the pre-industrial, even pre-agricultural world: the tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution before the first forest was burned. In that deep-time (fairly fictional) Eden-like nostalgia, there was no encroachment on the desire for individuals of all species to commune with each other at any length they wished. Being able to enjoy commingling without undue outside pressure was a virtue which Tolkien accused the modern world of threatening throughout his mythos.

I think his work specifically highlights the joy of in-depth communication and the value of the emotional connection that can be achieved through that communication. Yes, Entish is a little funny. But only gently, in the way that most of his work is all the time - it's a humour that seems perhaps designed to bring about a little warmth and a tiny smile to someone like the Tolkien who was once stuck in the trenches trying to conworld his way through the horror of it all - it's not slapstick.

[Moose-tache]

Tolkien wasn't above using language to illustrate a mindset (How do we know elves are elegant? Because they have names like Illandelil!). But I'm not aware of him ever doing the opposite in writing. The Quenya propensity for noun cases is not shown to us in the books as "a curious obsession with the trailing ends of their words" or such-like. So it's a fun idea, but probably not what Tolkien was doing.

That said, I have often fantasized about writing a book from the perspective of a poorly-trained field linguist on a hated assignment. Maybe now's the time, since it's NaNoWriMo e'rry day.