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The Constructed Languages of JRR Tolkien (Patreon)

Published:
2020-07-17 13:04:39
Edited:
2020-07-17 13:12:22
Imported:
2021-02

Content

I hear u like elvish in your elves -- I wrote an hosted the latest episode of It's Lit, and today we are talking about Tolkien and conlangs! 

Files

The Constructed Languages of JRR Tolkien | It’s Lit

For more It’s Lit, subscribe to Storied: http://bit.ly/pbsstoried_sub Tolkien is widely regarded as the most influential author on the fantasy genre… period. But one of the less-discussed aspects of his work is the way Tolkien used constructed language in his writing. Nowadays authors are constantly making up words and languages for the worlds they build, but Tolkien was unique in that he constructed languages first, and then created worlds so his fictional languages would have somewhere to live. Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Hosted and Written by: Lindsay Ellis Director: David Schulte Executive Producer: Amanda Fox Producer: Stephanie Noone Editors: Derek Borsheim, Sara Roma Writing Consultants: Maia Krause Executive Producer (PBS): Adam Dylewski Editorial Producer (PBS): Gabrielle Ewing Produced by Spotzen for PBS Digital Studios. Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/itslitpbs https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis https://twitter.com/weekesprincess Follow us on IG: https://www.instagram.com/itslit_pbs/

Comments

Anonymous

This one was fascinating! If only you had had time to get to LangBelta, but I see The Expanse on your shelf so it's all good :D

Carl Sage

"Things tribal, yet futuristic... like the Papyrus font." 10/10.... Excellent!

Anonymous

Tolkien, the patron saint of every DM who spends 50+ hours fleshing out the campaign setting for his D&D game, then suddenly remembers to come up with an introductory adventure half an hour before the players arrive.

Anonymous

Klingon is not developed until the first movie, it doesn't feature in the original series

Anonymous

The passing mention of Dragon Age has me wondering if anyone on the team for this episode has some spicy Dragon Age hot takes. 👀

Anonymous

I was forbidden to do a whole paper in high school on LOTR itself (I was such a Tina Belcher/Daria hybrid back in the day and kinda still am) so I did one on Tolkien. I was amazed at just how young he was when he started writing his own languages and grew even more respect for his work on crafting the whole of Middle Earth. I have Finnish ancestry and remember my grandma speaking it when I was a kid and could understand how Elvish and Finnish were related in certain ways. Btw, I NEED that shirt Lindsay is wearing!

Anonymous

That was a great video. But honestly I'm just here to say I love Lindsay's shirt & I want one. 😄

Anonymous

I love all of the It's Lit videos to pieces.

Anonymous

I was in the LOTR fandom in the late 90s, and I remember this article ( https://folk.uib.no/hnohf/elfnam.htm ) being the gateway drug for learning elvish.

Anonymous

Spent longer than I care to admit on the bookshelf

JM

I did a dramatic reading from Tolkein for English class in 8th grade and got an "A".

Anonymous

A few fantasy series have taken Welsh and other celtic languages as inspo for stuff and while it works well in LOTR (i can understand some of it!), The Witcher most recently used the phrase "Rhwydwaith carthion" for some herbal potion? Yea, that most closely translates to Sewage System....

Anonymous

I enjoyed this episode and have been wondering for awhile about how far the fantasy languages go. So much of modern English descends from idioms or words that have changed their meanings over time that I figure it would be extremely difficult to create a "truly living" fantasy language. For example, "I figure" above doesn't mean simply "I think" but something like "I create in my mind the shape of this" from what originally was a Latin noun... et cetera, et cetera. It is *hard* to invent a language that is chock full of cultural associations, idioms, shifted meanings, et cetera. I figured most TV series invented languages are probably pretty sparse.

Anonymous
>>40657816

I don't think it's either realistically possible or desirable to create a language that mimics the complexity of real languages in terms of what you're talking about. Slang, the interaction between meaning and prosody, references to specific history are too complex to model even if you somehow had a world complex enough to base things off of. And usually you don't. Tolkien has complex mythology and well thought-out etymology, but that's about it. Klingon has a very simplistic quasi-religious belief system (with like two religious figures existing in canon). *any* fictional culture almost inevitably becomes unrealistically monolithic. Star Trek has Klingon culture, which when you think about it is ridiculous. Imagine the same logic applied to 21-st century Earth. What hats do humans wear? What are the staple human foods? What's the word humans use for greeting? If you answer any of these, you're probably defaulting to, at best, one nation. There are no human clothes, human music, human values. What's "human opera"? Is Italian opera or Beijing opera more "human"? But in Star Trek, you have "Klingon opera". No fictional world or culture is robust enough to support a language even approaching the complexity of extralinguistic meaning or nuance. At best, you have blunt metaphors and references to established huge events in the fictional world. But that's not all language. Dothraki will never have a word like "yeet", because we don't know, and will never know, the popular slang of Dothraki teenagers. We don't know much about local dialects of Tolkien elves, or the jargon dwarfish goldsmiths use among themselves, or the words that entered common lexicon from the Middle-Earth equivalent of thieves' cant (if such a thing even exists there). It's fun to think about, but the most developed fictional, constructed language is Klingon. It has about 3000 words. To approach native-level of competence in a language, you need to learn at least 15 000 words. When a fictional language can hope to have at most 20% of the words a typical bloke knows in its entire vocabulary, the language will be extremely literal. Expecting nuance is on par with trying to discern individual tree branches or leaves in a satellite picture of a forest. Fictional languages struggle to even express moderately complex abstract concepts. Nuance and layers of meaning and multiple words for one concept (and how they differ)? That stuff is not even on the table.

Anonymous
>>40657816

(languages do add "colour" in some very specific circumstances, and those can be fun in their own right. From what I understand, the most common greeting in Klingon literally means "what do you want?", and that's a good piece of worldbuilding in its own. But the language would come close to feeling natural if it had not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of such little bits, and the Klingon culture that's been created and developed for the ST movies and shows is just too sparse to support that)

Anonymous
>>40657816

Also, even people who know a language well are not necessarily *aware* of the little ways the language is weird and special. So it's hard to reproduce that in a language you invent. The most common Polish word for "hi" and "bye" is "cześć", and nobody in their right mind would translate it in any other way. But if you want to be nitpicky about it, this very informal greeting would literally mean "honour". But nobody means it like that and nobody perceives it like that. If you pointed out to a Polish person that "cześć" derives from the word for "honour", you'd probably short out their brain just for a moment.

Anonymous
>>40657816

I agree with the bulk of your comment (the languages invented for fictional entertainment lack the depth of real languages. Ironically, however, with respect to "what is 'human' for 'how are you?' or "hello!", languages surprisingly gravitate toward "how is your health?" (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Latin, English). That still doesn't indicate universality, but from such a broad swathe of languages, across language families, one could generalize that when "humans" say "hi", the expression originated from a "question about health or a wishing of good health"

Anonymous
>>40657816

But yeah, I follow what you mean: "Klingon", realistically, would have had to have been either the dominant culture's language or a "compromise language" (a bit like "Mandarin Chinese" (which is a hodge-podge of northern Chinese that no one people actually spoke verbatim until the language became established (mandarin is what D&D would call "common")

Stephen Gillie

Ever wonder if J. Michael Straczynski was inspired by Khazad Dum when creating Z'ha'dum for Babylon 5?