"Hwenti" - Tolkien's lost Elven language

[WeepingElf]

J. R. R. Tolkien, as is well known, was not only a Germanic philologist but also a lover of the ancient Germanic languages. So why, then, did he not create an Quendian language with a Germanic-like phonology, with a consonant shift paralleling "Grimm's Law" and all that?

The answer is that he did, though the language never rose to prominence in his legendarium. In the early 1920s, he entertained the notion that Ilkorin, the language spoken by the Elves left behind in Beleriand (the later Sindar), was just such a language.

Later, he abandoned that notion: the Ilkorin entries in The Etymologies show a phonology without "Grimm's Law", but quite similar to that of Noldorin. Why? The reason can be found in The Lhammas (1937), where in §8 it is said that the language of the exiled Noldor changed much under the influence of the Ilkorin language; in other words, Ilkorin acted as a substratum in Noldorin. (Substratum theories of this kind then were very much en vogue in historical linguistics, especially in Celtic and Romance studies, and Tolkien himself entertained the notion of an Elvish substratum in Insular Celtic in his novel fragment The Lost Road. Today, such substratum theories have fallen out of favour, as more research has shown that the Romance languages show no good typological relationships with the pre-Roman languages, and much damage has of course been done by the nonsensical idea of a Semitic substratum responsible for the aberrant typology of the Insular Celtic languages.) In order to act as such a substratum, Ilkorin had to have undergone similar sound changes as Noldorin, and this close resemblance between the two language is indeed shown in The Etymologies (and allowed Tolkien later to merge them into one language, namely Sindarin).

Yet, the idea of a "Germanic-like" Quendian language did not disappear from Tolkien's mind. A sound change chart dated to "c. 1940" reproduced in the volume Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (Catherine McIlwaine, ed., 2018) shows that Tolkien pondered such a shift for Danian (the later Nandorin), but abandoned it again. (The few Danian entries in _The Etymologies_ show no such shift, either.)

But the idea of a Quendian language with "Grimm's Law" lived on. In the essay Quendi and Eldar, posthumously published in the volume The War of the Jewels, Tolkien gives the names of six Avari tribes, one of them being Hwenti - which is just what one would expect the cognate of Quendi to resemble in such a language! So the notion of a Quendian language with Germanic-like sound changes never died in Tolkien's mind, it just never rose to prominence, perhaps because that would have necessitated changing many names in the legendarium.

[hwhatting]

Good to know!

[WeepingElf]

The question is why Tolkien did not allow this language to play a major role in his legendarium and relegated it to an obscure Avari tribe. But a look at the Proto-Quendian phonology gives a possible answer: the PQ stop system is of the T-D-Th type, and thus actually quite close to Germanic already - spirantizing the aspirated stops of course wouldn't have been a big deal, and indeed he had it happen in all Eldarin languages. And there aren't any voiced aspirated stops, so a "Grimmified" Quendian language would have lacked voiced stops, unless something like Verner's Law had happened. Tolkien probably simply did not like the outcome much.

[keenir]

Tolkien probably simply did not like the outcome much.

If he hadn't liked it that much, wouldn't he simply have had it spoken/used by elves who, like the oliphants' masters and Aragorn's island ancestors, had fallen under the sway of Sauron?

I mean, thats what he did for Black Speech, basically; this would just be for elves rather than orcs.

[WeepingElf]

He probably did not detest it, but perhaps did not like it as much as Quenya or Sindarin.

[Jonlang]

I think the answer lies in the quote: "Most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."

Just because he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon it doesn't necessarily follow that it was his favourite language. He was also quite taken with Gothic but we also see no Gothic-inspired languages in Middle-earth as far as I'm aware. He seems to be taken with Anglo-Saxon myths and culture more than the flavour of the language - he noted that earendel was an AS word which seemed to not fit AS because it sounds beautiful. He also said that Sindarin's Welsh flavour suits the Celtic-style myths of the Silmarillion, so, in his mind, it seems that Sindarin was inevitably going to be Welsh-ish. There's also the notion of you don't shit where you eat - maybe Anglo-Saxon was his job and so playing with Welsh, Finnish, Latin, and Semitic languages was outside of that and that's why the Elves spoke non-Germanic sounding languages.

[WeepingElf]

Right. But he felt attracted to the ancient Germanic languages, which is why he made them his profession.

[Moose-tache]

I once made a West Germanic conlang on a lark. I wanted it to be realistic, mostly using unique versions of sound tendencies already established in other languages. Some local flair, but still thoroughly nestled in its linguistic context. The result was just Dutch-German. Sure, I had pages and pages of sound changes that made it distinct from Dutch or German, but the fact is the space between the Germanic languages is way narrower than we're used to imagining. If you make an even slightly realistic Germanic conlang, non-linguist readers will just parse it as "some weird dialect of Dutch or German."

Emily solved this problem with Modern Gothic by just grabbing the "random wacky bullshit" lever and pulling it until it breaks. But other Germanic conlangs all just sound the same.

[So Haleza Grise]

we also see no Gothic-inspired languages in Middle-earth as far as I'm aware.

To the contrary! Taliska was modelled on Gothic. Based on what I had read, I had assumed that it was Gothic, in much the same way that Old Norse was borrowed to furnish names for Dwarves and Northern Men, and the language of Rohan is (non-diegetically) OE. But it appears that it isn't the same as Gothic, and at one point he sketched out a grammar for it. We can't say for sure though because the relevant papers haven't been published.

Aside from doing no real work on them, Tolkien's conception of the Avarin languages (much like everything else really) was not fixed and changed over time. At one point, it sounds like he planned to make a Q-Celtic Elvish ... it is a real shame to me that he never got around to it. Yes, I know he said he didn't like the sound of Irish; but I can't find anything he wrote praising the sound of Semitic languages, and he still was influenced by them when it came to Adunaic and Khuzdul.

[WeepingElf]

Aside from doing no real work on them, Tolkien's conception of the Avarin languages (much like everything else really) was not fixed and changed over time. At one point, it sounds like he planned to make a Q-Celtic Elvish ... it is a real shame to me that he never got around to it. Yes, I know he said he didn't like the sound of Irish; but I can't find anything he wrote praising the sound of Semitic languages, and he still was influenced by them when it came to Adunaic and Khuzdul.

That is a very interesting article; thank you!

[Jonlang]

we also see no Gothic-inspired languages in Middle-earth as far as I'm aware.

To the contrary! Taliska was modelled on Gothic. Based on what I had read, I had assumed that it was Gothic, in much the same way that Old Norse was borrowed to furnish names for Dwarves and Northern Men, and the language of Rohan is (non-diegetically) OE. But it appears that it isn't the same as Gothic, and at one point he sketched out a grammar for it. We can't say for sure though because the relevant papers haven't been published.

Aside from doing no real work on them, Tolkien's conception of the Avarin languages (much like everything else really) was not fixed and changed over time. At one point, it sounds like he planned to make a Q-Celtic Elvish ... it is a real shame to me that he never got around to it. Yes, I know he said he didn't like the sound of Irish; but I can't find anything he wrote praising the sound of Semitic languages, and he still was influenced by them when it came to Adunaic and Khuzdul.

Taliska may have been inspired by Gothic but it hardly plays any real role in the stories. We only ever encounter Quenya, Sindarin, Adunaic, and Khuzdul in any meaningful way.

On the point of Gaelic-Elvish; there is a quote from one of his letters, I believe, in which he tells the recipient that he had pretty much given up on trying to learn Irish because it was too difficult. I imagine it would have been given that he would have been learning exclusively from 19th Century grammars and having, probably, no Irish speakers to practise with. I don't know if he ever said anything of his opinion on Irish phonology. It seems he was defeated by both Irish and Finnish.

[Travis B.]

I once made a West Germanic conlang on a lark. I wanted it to be realistic, mostly using unique versions of sound tendencies already established in other languages. Some local flair, but still thoroughly nestled in its linguistic context. The result was just Dutch-German. Sure, I had pages and pages of sound changes that made it distinct from Dutch or German, but the fact is the space between the Germanic languages is way narrower than we're used to imagining. If you make an even slightly realistic Germanic conlang, non-linguist readers will just parse it as "some weird dialect of Dutch or German."

Emily solved this problem with Modern Gothic by just grabbing the "random wacky bullshit" lever and pulling it until it breaks. But other Germanic conlangs all just sound the same.

I tried to make a (now lost) Germanic auxlang, which I called Twiskengermaansk, and it was effectively High German syntax plus Low German phonology and Dutch and Low German vocabulary but with simplified morphology.

[WeepingElf]

Taliska may have been inspired by Gothic but it hardly plays any real role in the stories. We only ever encounter Quenya, Sindarin, Adunaic, and Khuzdul in any meaningful way.

As we all know, Tolkien did not use any real-world languages in his legendarium - he was too aware of the fact that thousands of years ago and before a major cataclysm that drastically altered the geography of the world (we must not forget that Arda was meant to be not an alien planet nor a parallel dimension, but an antediluvian Earth), people just wouldn't have spoken the same languages. While I can't say what Taliska was like in the 1930s, we know that in the "mature" version, there was nothing "Germanic" about Adûnaic, Westron or whatever Mannish languages were related to them. Rather, they seem to have been inspired by "Hamitic" (as they were called back then) languages such as Egyptian. That Germanic language thing, as he says in the Lord of the Rings Appendix F, was merely to give the reader an impression of the remote sense of familiarity the hobbits would have with the Mannish languages, while the Quendian languages and Khuzdul would have been utterly foreign to them.

But I have been told by a fellow CONLANG member who knows much more about Tolkien's languages than I know, that Tolkien once made up two Elvish languages - Danian and Leikvian - after the models of Old Norse and Old English, though without applying Grimm's Law to Proto-Quendian; rather, he took PQ as it was as his "Proto-Germanic". As I have already said, PQ with its T-D-Th stop system would have been much like PG, the spirantization of the aspirated stops not being a big deal (it happened, after all, in all Eldarin languages).

On the point of Gaelic-Elvish; there is a quote from one of his letters, I believe, in which he tells the recipient that he had pretty much given up on trying to learn Irish because it was too difficult. I imagine it would have been given that he would have been learning exclusively from 19th Century grammars and having, probably, no Irish speakers to practise with. I don't know if he ever said anything of his opinion on Irish phonology. It seems he was defeated by both Irish and Finnish.

I dimly remember reading somewhere that he didn't like Gaelic, but I don't know whether that meant Goidelic as a whole or just Scots Gaelic, and I don't know what specifically he disliked about it.

The roster of abandoned Elvish language designs Tolkien produced probably is long and convoluted; there appear to have been many ideas he tried out and scrapped again.