1 00:00:00,567 --> 00:00:01,601 great. 2 00:00:01,601 --> 00:00:07,140 So a crucial part of the texture of Tolkiens writings lies in the names, 3 00:00:07,374 --> 00:00:10,910 the names of people, places and things such as Aragorn, 4 00:00:10,910 --> 00:00:15,248 Galadriel, Minas Tirith and Parador and so on. 5 00:00:15,982 --> 00:00:18,385 And today we're going to be looking at language 6 00:00:18,385 --> 00:00:21,855 in middle earth and the Tolkien himself as a language creator. 7 00:00:22,055 --> 00:00:25,225 His harmless advice, as he called it in a famous essay. 8 00:00:26,426 --> 00:00:28,995 Tolkien was a philologist of astounding 9 00:00:28,995 --> 00:00:31,998 skill and created languages throughout his life. 10 00:00:32,298 --> 00:00:33,199 As his friend C.S. 11 00:00:33,199 --> 00:00:34,934 Lewis put it in an obituary. 12 00:00:34,934 --> 00:00:37,937 It was as if he had been inside language. 13 00:00:38,638 --> 00:00:41,641 I'm using the word philologist rather than linguist. 14 00:00:41,741 --> 00:00:44,377 Philology is the rich discipline that involves 15 00:00:44,377 --> 00:00:48,114 tracing the historical development and interrelationship of languages, 16 00:00:48,415 --> 00:00:53,386 often with a broad, extended sense that encompasses textual and literary study. 17 00:00:54,187 --> 00:00:56,489 So it's perfectly possible 18 00:00:56,489 --> 00:00:59,492 to have an intricate philological knowledge of a given language, 19 00:00:59,526 --> 00:01:02,495 but be unable to speak it to any great degree. 20 00:01:02,495 --> 00:01:04,931 And this is true of Tolkien's Elvish languages. 21 00:01:06,399 --> 00:01:09,269 By the time he had written the Lord of the Rings 22 00:01:09,269 --> 00:01:12,772 in the early to mid 1950s, two of his art languages, 23 00:01:12,872 --> 00:01:18,445 Quenya and Sindarin, had reached a vast level of order and complexity. 24 00:01:19,012 --> 00:01:22,682 It was easily enough for Tolkien to be able to compose texts in them. 25 00:01:23,650 --> 00:01:26,986 Though Tolkien also devised dwarvish and managed languages too. 26 00:01:27,220 --> 00:01:28,955 It was the languages of his immortal 27 00:01:28,955 --> 00:01:32,092 beautiful elves which clearly preoccupied him most, 28 00:01:32,559 --> 00:01:35,728 and as he repeatedly explained to incredulous correspondence, 29 00:01:35,995 --> 00:01:39,999 the languages were the reason for the legendarium, not the other way round. 30 00:01:40,366 --> 00:01:43,369 The languages came first. 31 00:01:44,003 --> 00:01:45,805 So today I'm going to discuss one of those 32 00:01:45,805 --> 00:01:48,808 languages, Sindarin, in grammatical detail. 33 00:01:49,008 --> 00:01:53,513 But first I want to stretch sketch out the intellectual and historical background 34 00:01:53,746 --> 00:01:58,218 against which Tolkien's achievement as a language creator needs to be seen. 35 00:02:00,753 --> 00:02:01,621 Tolkien was 36 00:02:01,621 --> 00:02:02,822 not the first person 37 00:02:02,822 --> 00:02:06,759 to have invented a language, although he took it far, far beyond 38 00:02:06,993 --> 00:02:10,697 what anyone else had done, and effectively spearheaded the modern vogue 39 00:02:10,964 --> 00:02:13,967 for constructed languages in fantasy settings. 40 00:02:14,501 --> 00:02:17,570 As a medievalist, Tolkien would have known the handful of medieval 41 00:02:17,704 --> 00:02:21,407 and early modern attempts at language construction, none of which approached 42 00:02:21,407 --> 00:02:24,978 anything like the scale on which he himself came to work. 43 00:02:25,512 --> 00:02:28,581 It's as though a few people had grubbed around with Lego bricks, 44 00:02:28,715 --> 00:02:32,418 and then Tolkien came along and single handedly built the Tower of Babel 45 00:02:34,087 --> 00:02:34,654 to begin with. 46 00:02:34,654 --> 00:02:36,656 Two contrasting medieval examples. 47 00:02:36,656 --> 00:02:41,127 A language understood in heaven and a language known only in hell. 48 00:02:42,695 --> 00:02:45,698 Let's see if this works. 49 00:02:50,603 --> 00:02:52,205 In the early 12th century. 50 00:02:52,205 --> 00:02:55,808 The German abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen created the world's 51 00:02:55,808 --> 00:02:59,078 first known artificial language, which she called lingua, 52 00:02:59,479 --> 00:03:03,416 to the unknown language in modern linguistic jargon. 53 00:03:03,616 --> 00:03:08,821 It's simply a reflex ification that means a substitution of devised words 54 00:03:08,888 --> 00:03:13,293 for familiar ones slotted into Latin grammar and sentences. 55 00:03:13,760 --> 00:03:16,362 And there must have been over a thousand words in her language. 56 00:03:16,362 --> 00:03:20,433 And she even devised this special, actually rather token resembling 57 00:03:21,801 --> 00:03:23,703 alphabet for it. 58 00:03:23,703 --> 00:03:26,673 Here is a little piece of text. 59 00:03:26,739 --> 00:03:28,942 In a mixture of Latin 60 00:03:28,942 --> 00:03:31,945 and her linguistic note. Her 61 00:03:32,011 --> 00:03:35,381 or his ecclesia arm is divine is pressed into it. 62 00:03:35,381 --> 00:03:41,054 Hyacinth or nata to a domestic Martin loy folium it all of chiaro 63 00:03:41,454 --> 00:03:45,124 002 is etam Santa in alto sono. 64 00:03:45,291 --> 00:03:46,926 It is Hausa. 65 00:03:46,926 --> 00:03:50,964 Gemma and one of the leading scholars of Hildegard of Bingen. 66 00:03:51,331 --> 00:03:53,299 Barbara Newman has attempted the translation. 67 00:03:53,299 --> 00:03:55,602 Don't know what these words mean? 68 00:03:55,602 --> 00:03:57,604 And that's what she suggests. 69 00:03:57,604 --> 00:04:00,607 They probably are. 70 00:04:02,041 --> 00:04:04,577 Hildegard did gloss some of her words. 71 00:04:04,577 --> 00:04:07,580 You can see some of them here. 72 00:04:07,780 --> 00:04:12,118 I can't, I can't God, I arrogance angel, devil. 73 00:04:12,118 --> 00:04:15,121 It's devil. It's spirits. Spirits. 74 00:04:15,421 --> 00:04:17,323 And what you can see there, 75 00:04:17,323 --> 00:04:20,360 is that there's an effort at implying linguistic relationship, 76 00:04:20,393 --> 00:04:21,461 the word for God 77 00:04:21,461 --> 00:04:23,296 and the word for angel, which have something to do 78 00:04:23,296 --> 00:04:26,299 with each other, looks something like each other. 79 00:04:26,366 --> 00:04:29,302 And there's also refraction of familiar Latin words. 80 00:04:29,302 --> 00:04:33,706 The evidence looks like diabolo is, but it looks like spiritus. 81 00:04:35,375 --> 00:04:38,378 Now for a language of hell. 82 00:04:39,946 --> 00:04:40,847 In Dante's Divine 83 00:04:40,847 --> 00:04:44,717 Comedy, written in the early 14th century, we come across Nimrod, 84 00:04:44,717 --> 00:04:48,254 great grandson of Noah, who is depicted as a giant. 85 00:04:49,155 --> 00:04:51,424 And Nimrod speaks in the poem 86 00:04:51,424 --> 00:04:55,528 and he has an incomprehensible line of gibberish, which is. 87 00:04:55,528 --> 00:04:59,265 I'll just read it for you, Rafael, mimic Xabi and me 88 00:04:59,265 --> 00:05:03,236 coming to agree to Lafayette a bocca quinones de convenient. 89 00:05:03,236 --> 00:05:07,173 You told me, Rafael, my own kids are beyond me, began 90 00:05:07,173 --> 00:05:11,644 to bellow that brute mouth for which no sweeter songs would be appropriate. 91 00:05:13,112 --> 00:05:16,416 This is his only line in the poem, and Virgil, Dante's 92 00:05:16,416 --> 00:05:17,984 Guide to Hell in Purgatory, 93 00:05:17,984 --> 00:05:22,322 explains that every language is to him the same as his to others. 94 00:05:22,322 --> 00:05:25,325 No one knows his tongue. 95 00:05:25,591 --> 00:05:27,660 Nimrod is the builder of the Tower of Babel, 96 00:05:27,660 --> 00:05:30,863 after which human languages were confused and multiplied by God. 97 00:05:31,264 --> 00:05:34,834 He speaks a language of which the speech community is one. 98 00:05:35,802 --> 00:05:37,770 He's the only speaker. 99 00:05:37,770 --> 00:05:41,641 It's vaguely Hebrew sounding, but not translatable. 100 00:05:42,141 --> 00:05:46,412 It gives us the feel of a natural language, of antique strangeness. 101 00:05:47,013 --> 00:05:50,383 And because it's untranslated, we can't guess at its vocabulary 102 00:05:50,383 --> 00:05:54,420 or semantics or grammar, presumably because there isn't one. 103 00:05:56,856 --> 00:06:00,259 A very different example comes from 1516, 104 00:06:01,094 --> 00:06:05,932 when Sir Thomas Moore published his famous Latin tract Utopia, which purported 105 00:06:06,032 --> 00:06:09,535 to be a traveler's account of the customs of an unknown 106 00:06:09,535 --> 00:06:12,538 land, in the far Atlantic. 107 00:06:12,605 --> 00:06:16,976 The name of the island is, of course, no place in Greek utopia. 108 00:06:18,478 --> 00:06:21,614 More's text was prefaced with a few lines of verse, 109 00:06:21,814 --> 00:06:24,817 which purported to be in the utopian language, 110 00:06:25,051 --> 00:06:28,087 as well as the utopian alphabet, and you can see it 111 00:06:28,087 --> 00:06:31,090 there, on the side. 112 00:06:31,958 --> 00:06:33,693 And I'm just going to, 113 00:06:34,861 --> 00:06:37,864 read it out to you. 114 00:06:38,831 --> 00:06:39,899 We're gonna have a bobcat. 115 00:06:39,899 --> 00:06:40,333 Sarah. 116 00:06:40,333 --> 00:06:43,336 Come on, come on. Bottle hemoglobin back. 117 00:06:43,469 --> 00:06:46,472 Someone famous of, a grammar 118 00:06:46,939 --> 00:06:51,144 double, a novel called Barnabas and London called Valentin. 119 00:06:51,144 --> 00:06:54,147 I'm learning. 120 00:06:55,615 --> 00:06:58,618 A little hint or a little, embarrassed confession. 121 00:06:58,651 --> 00:07:01,621 I filled this one out into a full language, 122 00:07:01,788 --> 00:07:04,791 as a kind of neurotic copy of my own token style. 123 00:07:06,392 --> 00:07:06,959 So it's weird. 124 00:07:06,959 --> 00:07:10,062 I could I can read it and understand it, too, so I it's, someone else's, 125 00:07:10,329 --> 00:07:11,364 is it's a real language. 126 00:07:11,364 --> 00:07:14,367 Very strange. 127 00:07:14,834 --> 00:07:17,503 If you look at the page on the right, 128 00:07:17,503 --> 00:07:20,206 you can see a Latin translation and the alphabet, 129 00:07:20,206 --> 00:07:23,810 it all adds up to a kind of intellectual puzzle and invitation. 130 00:07:24,410 --> 00:07:26,479 Can you figure it out? 131 00:07:26,479 --> 00:07:28,981 For humanist scholars of the period, it evokes 132 00:07:28,981 --> 00:07:32,618 how you had to begin learning Greek or Hebrew or Arabic. 133 00:07:32,618 --> 00:07:34,120 Once you've got your Latin down. 134 00:07:35,421 --> 00:07:38,057 Now, Hildegard's linguistic igniter 135 00:07:38,057 --> 00:07:42,395 and Dante's language of Nimrod advanced a metaphysical claim. 136 00:07:43,329 --> 00:07:47,033 They seem to say there's a relationship between phonology and syntax 137 00:07:47,033 --> 00:07:51,571 and morphology, and the spiritual or ethical status of the beings who speak it. 138 00:07:52,405 --> 00:07:56,209 Hildegard's unknown language is mysterious, veiled, ecstatic. 139 00:07:56,609 --> 00:07:59,912 It's used in her hymns to break the singer out 140 00:08:00,079 --> 00:08:03,716 of the chains of earthly signification and take them to heaven. 141 00:08:04,350 --> 00:08:08,588 Heaven, heavenly things make nonsense of human wisdom. 142 00:08:09,622 --> 00:08:13,459 Nimrods language, on the other hand, suggests the way that damnation 143 00:08:13,659 --> 00:08:16,662 is a state of infinite isolation. 144 00:08:17,263 --> 00:08:20,666 A kind of embargo upon the possibility of communication. 145 00:08:21,000 --> 00:08:25,671 What you have inside can never be brought out and conveyed to anyone else. 146 00:08:26,005 --> 00:08:30,209 So they bring up interesting things about the philosophy and theology of language. 147 00:08:31,577 --> 00:08:34,580 Most utopian, on the other hand, is the odd one out 148 00:08:34,680 --> 00:08:38,885 because it invites you to figure it out on a secular level. 149 00:08:39,752 --> 00:08:44,090 The verse that you can see that is spoken by you topos the island of utopias. 150 00:08:44,090 --> 00:08:45,658 Legendary founder. 151 00:08:45,658 --> 00:08:49,262 He separated the island from the mainland by severing the isthmus 152 00:08:49,495 --> 00:08:50,796 that had connected it. 153 00:08:50,796 --> 00:08:56,736 And he says, so the Latin tells us out of a known island, I made an island, 154 00:08:58,371 --> 00:08:59,872 and we can pick out 155 00:08:59,872 --> 00:09:03,476 a word for island and something that looks like case marking 156 00:09:03,709 --> 00:09:07,446 eye endings, indicating the role of a word within its close. 157 00:09:08,080 --> 00:09:13,853 So, You look at that, you can see how, 158 00:09:14,654 --> 00:09:17,657 which must be, hum. 159 00:09:17,890 --> 00:09:20,893 Which must be a foreign same word with an ending 160 00:09:20,893 --> 00:09:23,896 indicating a different grammatical row. 161 00:09:24,764 --> 00:09:26,465 It's also possible to spot 162 00:09:26,465 --> 00:09:29,468 what must be the negative 163 00:09:29,602 --> 00:09:30,236 here. 164 00:09:30,236 --> 00:09:33,239 Nakama unknown island. 165 00:09:33,873 --> 00:09:36,776 Not live on the wrong border. 166 00:09:36,776 --> 00:09:38,544 Not unwilling. 167 00:09:38,544 --> 00:09:41,547 Okay. 168 00:09:41,747 --> 00:09:44,517 Now, as it happens, that's very close to the Arabic 169 00:09:44,517 --> 00:09:47,520 negative la Hebrew law. 170 00:09:47,987 --> 00:09:50,623 So this fragment of utopian is something new. 171 00:09:50,623 --> 00:09:51,324 It holds out 172 00:09:51,324 --> 00:09:55,061 the promise that on some level, this constructed language all makes sense. 173 00:09:55,361 --> 00:09:59,699 It gives the illusion that a complete language lies behind the fragment. 174 00:10:00,266 --> 00:10:04,337 It's much more realistic as a fragment of the language of a society. 175 00:10:04,704 --> 00:10:08,307 It's deployed for verisimilitude within the fiction. 176 00:10:08,941 --> 00:10:13,112 And so this is much, much more, like the fragments of Elvish language 177 00:10:13,312 --> 00:10:16,849 that appear in the Lord of the rings, like Galadriel. 178 00:10:17,650 --> 00:10:20,653 Great lament in Quenya, 179 00:10:20,853 --> 00:10:23,356 in lost, Laura and I, Lori Lanter. 180 00:10:23,356 --> 00:10:27,326 Lastly, Serena and Yanni, you know, time away from their own, 181 00:10:28,861 --> 00:10:30,696 like gold for the leaves and the wind. 182 00:10:30,696 --> 00:10:33,899 Long years numberless as the wings of trees. 183 00:10:34,800 --> 00:10:38,270 The translation invites linguistically curious readers 184 00:10:38,437 --> 00:10:43,442 to do exactly what most utopian fragment invites us do to believe 185 00:10:43,442 --> 00:10:48,514 that a real language underlies the text we are reading, and by looking for 186 00:10:48,514 --> 00:10:53,519 repeated words and changes of form, to try our luck at figuring out the grammar. 187 00:10:54,487 --> 00:10:56,856 And of course, in Tolkiens case, that grammar 188 00:10:56,856 --> 00:11:00,026 actually existed, albeit only in his own notes. 189 00:11:00,960 --> 00:11:03,963 I would love to know whether, 190 00:11:04,630 --> 00:11:08,701 more and his collaborator had a more elaborate version 191 00:11:08,701 --> 00:11:11,704 of utopian necessarily to write that fragment. 192 00:11:12,638 --> 00:11:13,472 Tolkien style. 193 00:11:13,472 --> 00:11:16,008 We don't know. 194 00:11:16,008 --> 00:11:19,912 It's important to note something that none of these medieval and early 195 00:11:19,912 --> 00:11:24,550 modern texts, they are not attempts at a priori philosophical languages. 196 00:11:24,550 --> 00:11:28,421 So lots of people, after Thomas More tried inventing languages, 197 00:11:28,688 --> 00:11:32,191 it became a bit of an intellectual fad in the 17th and 18th centuries. 198 00:11:32,525 --> 00:11:35,494 But all of them, designed from first principles 199 00:11:35,494 --> 00:11:38,497 to iron out the kinds of ambiguity, 200 00:11:38,898 --> 00:11:41,600 that are inherent in human speech. 201 00:11:41,600 --> 00:11:45,771 They aim to create an intrinsically transparent medium of communication, 202 00:11:46,472 --> 00:11:49,008 that would render thought clear. 203 00:11:49,008 --> 00:11:53,079 And the results, in most cases are hilarious, hugely unwieldy 204 00:11:53,212 --> 00:11:57,049 and impractical, edifices which don't render anything transparent. 205 00:11:57,783 --> 00:12:00,052 That's not at all what Tolkien was trying to do. 206 00:12:00,052 --> 00:12:03,155 None of his languages are philosophical languages in that way. 207 00:12:05,124 --> 00:12:05,691 So at this 208 00:12:05,691 --> 00:12:08,694 point, I want to suggest that we need special terminology 209 00:12:08,794 --> 00:12:11,597 to take the measure of Tolkien's achievement. 210 00:12:11,597 --> 00:12:14,600 And here are three portmanteau terms. 211 00:12:14,734 --> 00:12:16,502 And these are drawn from, 212 00:12:16,502 --> 00:12:20,372 the kind of language creation community that they're commonly, drawn terms 213 00:12:21,073 --> 00:12:24,210 are not clang or natural language of the real world 214 00:12:24,543 --> 00:12:27,246 is something that exists in the present or past, 215 00:12:27,246 --> 00:12:30,249 like English or Latin or Navajo. 216 00:12:30,616 --> 00:12:34,286 An orc slang or an auxiliary language is one that's designed 217 00:12:34,286 --> 00:12:39,492 as an aid to communication between people who do not share a natural language. 218 00:12:40,059 --> 00:12:43,062 Esperanto is the most famous orc slang 219 00:12:43,729 --> 00:12:47,700 But of course, because some Esperanto enthusiasts have brought up their children 220 00:12:47,967 --> 00:12:50,903 to be native speakers of Esperanto, 221 00:12:50,903 --> 00:12:53,105 a few a few hundred people. 222 00:12:53,105 --> 00:12:55,541 Esperanto is a nutmeg as well as an orc. 223 00:12:55,541 --> 00:12:55,908 Slang. 224 00:12:58,110 --> 00:13:01,313 Conlang is the final one, a constructed language 225 00:13:01,347 --> 00:13:05,584 meaning an artificially created language, often but not always, designed 226 00:13:05,584 --> 00:13:10,723 for use in a work of fiction or to express some ideological or cultural point. 227 00:13:11,490 --> 00:13:14,693 My favorite example of a conlang is La Arden 228 00:13:15,427 --> 00:13:20,833 created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 as a language which would intrinsically, 229 00:13:21,066 --> 00:13:26,005 by virtue of its grammar and structure, center women's experience. 230 00:13:26,705 --> 00:13:29,942 The implication is that natural language is, patriarchal 231 00:13:30,543 --> 00:13:32,311 and sent to male experience. 232 00:13:32,311 --> 00:13:36,448 So La Arden has a grammar designed to necessitate the expression 233 00:13:36,682 --> 00:13:41,787 of shades of feeling, of bodily experience and evidentiary meaning. 234 00:13:41,787 --> 00:13:43,289 How sure a speaker is that? 235 00:13:43,289 --> 00:13:45,157 What they're saying is the truth. 236 00:13:45,157 --> 00:13:48,994 So Arden has, a grammatical way of saying, 237 00:13:49,228 --> 00:13:52,364 stating that, you know, a fact because you saw it in a dream. 238 00:13:53,098 --> 00:13:54,567 It's full of delightful things like that. 239 00:13:56,402 --> 00:13:57,469 It all seems 240 00:13:57,469 --> 00:14:00,773 a little bit old fashioned 40 years of gender politics later. 241 00:14:01,106 --> 00:14:04,109 But, it is a beautiful thing. 242 00:14:04,543 --> 00:14:08,881 These three terms nat, lang, Oaks, Lang, and conlang are widely 243 00:14:08,881 --> 00:14:13,185 used within the language creation community today and are very helpful. 244 00:14:14,253 --> 00:14:16,021 What then of tokens languages? 245 00:14:16,021 --> 00:14:18,224 What are Quenya or Sindarin? 246 00:14:18,224 --> 00:14:22,962 According to this terminology, it might seem obvious to say that they are 247 00:14:22,962 --> 00:14:27,666 conlang constructed languages, but in fact this is a bit problematic. 248 00:14:27,867 --> 00:14:30,402 And this brings me to the key point. 249 00:14:30,402 --> 00:14:33,539 Quenya and Sindarin, the two most complex of Tolkien's 250 00:14:33,539 --> 00:14:37,743 art languages, form part of a family of languages descending 251 00:14:37,877 --> 00:14:41,847 from an ancestral language, which we might call Primitive Quentin 252 00:14:42,014 --> 00:14:44,850 or proto Elvish. 253 00:14:44,850 --> 00:14:48,821 Quenya and Sindarin are thus related, but rather distantly, 254 00:14:48,988 --> 00:14:53,025 having developed amongst two very widely dispersed groups of elves. 255 00:14:53,192 --> 00:14:56,195 According to the backstory of Tolkien's legendarium, 256 00:14:56,929 --> 00:15:00,666 Tolkien carefully elaborated and orchestrated their vocabulary, 257 00:15:00,833 --> 00:15:05,304 tracing the two languages transformations in their descent from a common ancestor 258 00:15:05,537 --> 00:15:08,474 to a common series of roots. 259 00:15:08,474 --> 00:15:12,978 This is, of course, what real languages do for real language families do, 260 00:15:13,178 --> 00:15:14,546 which is why we can trace 261 00:15:14,546 --> 00:15:18,751 how English is related to German or Dutch or Icelandic, for example, 262 00:15:18,918 --> 00:15:23,522 going all the way back to the common ancestor language we call Common Germanic. 263 00:15:24,256 --> 00:15:26,292 And this was Tolkien's day job. 264 00:15:26,292 --> 00:15:27,092 Amongst other things. 265 00:15:28,127 --> 00:15:30,663 Now he did this, and this is the crucial point 266 00:15:30,663 --> 00:15:34,633 with such skill and verisimilitude, that his art languages 267 00:15:34,633 --> 00:15:38,237 can be analyzed with the technical tools of historical linguistics. 268 00:15:39,104 --> 00:15:41,373 They are, in effect, not conlang, 269 00:15:41,373 --> 00:15:44,376 but simulated, not Lang's. 270 00:15:44,410 --> 00:15:47,346 The realism has chronological depth. 271 00:15:47,346 --> 00:15:50,349 Only a philologist of great skill could have done it. 272 00:15:52,484 --> 00:15:53,619 It's worth remembering 273 00:15:53,619 --> 00:15:56,622 that within the fiction, within the imaginary world, 274 00:15:56,989 --> 00:15:59,792 there are philologists, elven lore masters, 275 00:15:59,792 --> 00:16:02,928 who reflect on language and its transformation. 276 00:16:03,629 --> 00:16:05,130 Pangalos out of Gondolin. 277 00:16:05,130 --> 00:16:06,632 Is that the supposed source 278 00:16:06,632 --> 00:16:10,636 within the fiction that the texts that become included in The Silmarillion? 279 00:16:10,936 --> 00:16:13,939 The name means scholar guy, 280 00:16:14,073 --> 00:16:17,343 in Elvish, and he's a kind of mouthpiece for Tolkien 281 00:16:18,510 --> 00:16:19,178 to him. 282 00:16:19,178 --> 00:16:24,216 Tolkien ascribes the mysterious aphorism, quote, the making of a lumber. 283 00:16:24,550 --> 00:16:27,853 The lumber is the chief character of an Incan. 284 00:16:27,853 --> 00:16:31,890 Linked lumber is the Quenya word for language or tunnel. 285 00:16:33,092 --> 00:16:35,928 So the drive to express oneself in words 286 00:16:35,928 --> 00:16:40,065 is the essential characteristic of all beings, in which a spirit 287 00:16:40,065 --> 00:16:44,269 and a physical body are fuzed together, which includes both elves and men, 288 00:16:44,970 --> 00:16:49,475 making languages spontaneous and natural to them, and lore masters like Pangalos 289 00:16:49,675 --> 00:16:53,979 delight, as Tolkien himself did in tracing the twists and turns 290 00:16:54,179 --> 00:16:57,182 of the natural development of language. 291 00:16:58,050 --> 00:17:01,353 What no one within the legendarium, with one exception, 292 00:17:01,620 --> 00:17:05,357 does, is make a commonly constructed language. 293 00:17:05,891 --> 00:17:08,560 There is only one being in the world of middle 294 00:17:08,560 --> 00:17:11,663 earth, who makes an artificial language to suit his own ends, 295 00:17:11,864 --> 00:17:15,267 and that being is Sauron, the dark Lord. 296 00:17:15,868 --> 00:17:20,039 We are told that orcs speak a degraded set of jargons of their own, 297 00:17:20,305 --> 00:17:25,210 but Sauron desired to impose a language of his own devising upon Mordor. 298 00:17:26,045 --> 00:17:29,481 The language of the ring ring versus the hideous Black Speech, 299 00:17:29,615 --> 00:17:33,385 which causes the Elves and Rivendell to cover their ears. 300 00:17:34,286 --> 00:17:38,757 But remember that, according to Tolkien's politics, central planning of any kind, 301 00:17:39,458 --> 00:17:42,461 he was a small c conservative is a bad thing. 302 00:17:42,728 --> 00:17:46,398 So language, planning, imposing an orc slang 303 00:17:46,698 --> 00:17:50,335 upon people, as is bad can. 304 00:17:51,136 --> 00:17:55,207 So the Black Speech is a conlang, which was intended by silent 305 00:17:55,207 --> 00:17:56,742 to function as an orc. Slang. 306 00:17:58,944 --> 00:18:01,747 At this point I need to introduce the languages themselves, 307 00:18:01,747 --> 00:18:05,150 and as mentioned, I'm mainly going to talk about Quenya and Sindarin. 308 00:18:07,286 --> 00:18:10,289 So the earliest root of 309 00:18:10,589 --> 00:18:13,592 Quenya, she's kind of elven Latin, 310 00:18:13,992 --> 00:18:18,230 is that it's designed to echo, the delight that Tolkien took 311 00:18:18,397 --> 00:18:22,034 in discovering the grammar of the Finnish language as an undergraduate. 312 00:18:22,034 --> 00:18:25,337 He has a wonderful description, of finding Finnish grammar. 313 00:18:25,537 --> 00:18:28,540 It's like a cellar full of bottles of wonderful wine. 314 00:18:28,874 --> 00:18:32,177 Of a completely unique and unknown flavor to him. 315 00:18:34,012 --> 00:18:35,447 And then, 316 00:18:35,447 --> 00:18:37,282 I've giving you a quotation here. 317 00:18:37,282 --> 00:18:40,352 The archaic flavor of law is meant to be a kind of elven Latin. 318 00:18:42,121 --> 00:18:44,223 So Quenya is used, 319 00:18:44,223 --> 00:18:47,626 within the world of the text for high, ritual 320 00:18:47,626 --> 00:18:50,629 and solemn purposes. 321 00:18:51,630 --> 00:18:54,333 It's spoken in the blessed realm in man, 322 00:18:54,333 --> 00:18:58,337 and is brought to middle earth by nodal exile, such as Galadriel. 323 00:18:58,437 --> 00:19:01,373 Quenya is Galadriel's native language. 324 00:19:01,373 --> 00:19:04,877 I don't want to discuss its grammar too much, but we might notice things about 325 00:19:04,877 --> 00:19:06,345 it that it's vowel rich. 326 00:19:07,379 --> 00:19:10,382 It doesn't have a lot of consonant clusters. 327 00:19:12,351 --> 00:19:14,520 And it has a very restrictive phonology 328 00:19:14,520 --> 00:19:18,390 that the way that sounds can can be combined is quite limited. 329 00:19:18,524 --> 00:19:21,527 So it has a very distinctive sound on the ear. 330 00:19:21,560 --> 00:19:24,563 It's also highly inflected, 331 00:19:24,897 --> 00:19:26,632 meaning that it has lots of cases. 332 00:19:26,632 --> 00:19:29,635 9 or 10 Finnish has 14 333 00:19:30,402 --> 00:19:33,772 and cases are used to indicate things 334 00:19:33,772 --> 00:19:37,276 that in English we do with prepositions normally. 335 00:19:37,609 --> 00:19:42,648 So, I've given you a quotation from a lindell's famous oath, 336 00:19:43,549 --> 00:19:47,686 the beginning of it, which is sung by Aragorn at his coronation in the film. 337 00:19:47,686 --> 00:19:50,556 That's in the third of the trilogy. 338 00:19:50,556 --> 00:19:53,792 At a r l low end or end to end. 339 00:19:54,693 --> 00:19:57,729 A real low means out of the sea. 340 00:19:57,963 --> 00:20:00,966 The l ending is a case called the ablative 341 00:20:01,366 --> 00:20:04,336 end or end to middle earth. 342 00:20:04,336 --> 00:20:07,940 The end is the case called the additive. 343 00:20:07,940 --> 00:20:09,141 The going to case. 344 00:20:11,343 --> 00:20:11,977 It's also 345 00:20:11,977 --> 00:20:15,147 what's called a gluten ative a gluten native, 346 00:20:16,081 --> 00:20:19,418 which means that there are multiple endings can be tacked onto one root 347 00:20:20,352 --> 00:20:22,554 meaning different things in each case, 348 00:20:22,554 --> 00:20:26,391 so that a single word can express a quite complex idea. 349 00:20:26,892 --> 00:20:29,895 Here is a phrase for you nitrogen tense 350 00:20:29,962 --> 00:20:32,831 nigh is a particle that's used to indicate a wish. 351 00:20:32,831 --> 00:20:37,669 To prove a is the future of the verb, meaning to keep them to means they 352 00:20:38,971 --> 00:20:39,805 means it. 353 00:20:39,805 --> 00:20:42,441 Night rant is all one word. 354 00:20:42,441 --> 00:20:43,675 Okay, that's a gluten ative. 355 00:20:43,675 --> 00:20:45,010 And that's how finish works. 356 00:20:45,010 --> 00:20:48,013 That's a Hungarian works, amongst other things. 357 00:20:48,680 --> 00:20:52,284 So Quenya has a kind of lofty, beautiful complexity, 358 00:20:53,285 --> 00:20:57,022 a lovely open structure combined with the capacity 359 00:20:57,022 --> 00:21:00,025 for dense expression of ideas. 360 00:21:01,460 --> 00:21:04,529 As with the image of finish as a cellar filled with bottles 361 00:21:04,630 --> 00:21:08,300 of mysterious and wonderful wine talking, as we've seen with 362 00:21:08,300 --> 00:21:11,803 that, Tolkien was very fond of talking about languages having a flavor, 363 00:21:12,437 --> 00:21:14,806 and the flavor of Welsh 364 00:21:14,806 --> 00:21:18,377 was particularly to his taste as a boy. 365 00:21:18,543 --> 00:21:20,812 He never lived near a railway station in Birmingham, 366 00:21:20,812 --> 00:21:24,483 and first saw Welsh written on the side of vehicles. 367 00:21:26,218 --> 00:21:27,052 Okay, this is a quote 368 00:21:27,052 --> 00:21:30,155 that those of you that, I know at least some of you in the room speak Welsh. 369 00:21:30,455 --> 00:21:32,291 We'll get the joke with this one. 370 00:21:32,291 --> 00:21:33,925 I heard it coming out of the West. 371 00:21:33,925 --> 00:21:37,095 It struck me in the names on coal trucks and drawing nearer, 372 00:21:37,095 --> 00:21:40,666 it flickered past on station signs, a flash of strange spelling, 373 00:21:40,899 --> 00:21:43,735 but a hint of a language old and yet alive. 374 00:21:43,735 --> 00:21:46,738 It pierced my linguistic heart. 375 00:21:47,939 --> 00:21:49,841 The joke, by the way, 376 00:21:49,841 --> 00:21:53,078 is that the English and the Welsh in that sign don't match. 377 00:21:53,779 --> 00:21:56,181 The Welsh says I'm not in the office at the moment. 378 00:21:56,181 --> 00:21:59,184 Send any work to be translated. 379 00:22:03,755 --> 00:22:07,159 This quotation gives a hint of how unusual Tolkien was. 380 00:22:07,492 --> 00:22:09,061 What kind of young, 381 00:22:09,061 --> 00:22:12,664 youngish adolescent has a linguistic heart and is able to articulate it? 382 00:22:13,131 --> 00:22:14,766 It's a kind of question I should ask. Interview. 383 00:22:16,835 --> 00:22:19,137 So, he was possessed of an 384 00:22:19,137 --> 00:22:22,441 extreme, inborn kind of sensitivity to language. 385 00:22:22,908 --> 00:22:26,311 That esthetic response, that piercing of the heart is the root 386 00:22:26,311 --> 00:22:29,881 of the undergirding idea behind Tolkiens art languages, 387 00:22:30,449 --> 00:22:35,554 that phonology and grammar can themselves be the medium of exquisite 388 00:22:35,821 --> 00:22:38,824 artistic expression, as oil and canvas 389 00:22:38,890 --> 00:22:41,760 are for the painter, 390 00:22:41,760 --> 00:22:45,297 Sindarin or gray elven amounts to a linguist 391 00:22:45,297 --> 00:22:48,667 lifelong and passionate homage to the Welsh language. 392 00:22:49,167 --> 00:22:50,268 If you seen the Peter Jackson 393 00:22:50,268 --> 00:22:53,872 films, almost all the conversation in Elvish is in this language, 394 00:22:54,272 --> 00:22:57,776 and much of the Elvish dialog in season two of Rings of Power, 395 00:22:58,443 --> 00:23:00,846 is also in Sindarin. 396 00:23:00,846 --> 00:23:02,714 People moan on about the Rings of Power. 397 00:23:02,714 --> 00:23:04,883 Sorry, sorry, 398 00:23:04,883 --> 00:23:07,018 I really like it and I love hearing more of it. 399 00:23:07,018 --> 00:23:08,820 Clark, who's a native Welsh speaker 400 00:23:08,820 --> 00:23:12,224 speaking Sindarin because she gets it exactly right. 401 00:23:12,457 --> 00:23:13,492 Exactly right. 402 00:23:15,827 --> 00:23:16,561 And here I want to 403 00:23:16,561 --> 00:23:19,564 give you, a practical demonstration. 404 00:23:19,564 --> 00:23:21,900 My favorite bit, 405 00:23:21,900 --> 00:23:24,903 in the two towers, 406 00:23:24,903 --> 00:23:27,572 in the Jackson trilogy, in The Two Towers is a poignant scene 407 00:23:27,572 --> 00:23:31,176 in which Elrond speaks to Arwen and prophesies her future. 408 00:23:31,643 --> 00:23:35,347 It's the most haunting and emotionally plangent part of that film. 409 00:23:35,347 --> 00:23:36,281 For me. 410 00:23:36,281 --> 00:23:38,216 And he says, 411 00:23:38,216 --> 00:23:41,553 but you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness 412 00:23:41,553 --> 00:23:44,656 and in doubt as night fall in winter, which comes without a star. 413 00:23:45,290 --> 00:23:49,327 Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading trees. 414 00:23:49,628 --> 00:23:51,229 Until all the world is changed. 415 00:23:51,229 --> 00:23:54,332 In the long years of your life, utterly spent. 416 00:23:55,967 --> 00:24:00,405 And I've translated this into high register, faintly biblical Welsh. 417 00:24:00,739 --> 00:24:03,575 And I want you to look at this and listen 418 00:24:03,575 --> 00:24:07,446 with your linguistic heart, like the young Tolkien looking at the cold shocks. 419 00:24:09,681 --> 00:24:10,549 Now identify 420 00:24:10,549 --> 00:24:14,319 for Mark to Baha man to what look like man poetry. 421 00:24:14,352 --> 00:24:15,220 Stir that. 422 00:24:15,220 --> 00:24:18,990 But you can also look I have I thou have Saturn and the rocket 423 00:24:19,324 --> 00:24:22,727 and heart of the other identical season poly 424 00:24:23,094 --> 00:24:26,431 he nested all feed Kiley no wheat archival. 425 00:24:26,431 --> 00:24:29,401 Another item yon devoted gaily 426 00:24:30,001 --> 00:24:32,971 gaily dsb and slew it. 427 00:24:34,473 --> 00:24:35,974 Here is the same passage 428 00:24:35,974 --> 00:24:40,045 translated into center in Aki. 429 00:24:40,111 --> 00:24:43,882 Yeah, lean, but any other folk means the wealth, I may add witness. 430 00:24:44,182 --> 00:24:47,085 So he will lend me three with old Ellen. 431 00:24:47,085 --> 00:24:51,690 See that the guanine and mini again doing new light video. 432 00:24:51,957 --> 00:24:53,358 Nardini, Jonathan Bank. 433 00:24:53,358 --> 00:24:55,827 We stand then Arthelene and Ethan. 434 00:24:55,827 --> 00:24:58,363 I'm a gilded 435 00:24:58,363 --> 00:25:01,299 and here I would like to thank my student Jasmine Ashworth. 436 00:25:01,299 --> 00:25:02,934 Jasmine, wave your hand. 437 00:25:02,934 --> 00:25:06,137 Who checked and corrected my senior in with great expertise, 438 00:25:06,137 --> 00:25:07,439 so thank you very much. Jasmine. 439 00:25:09,040 --> 00:25:09,474 It should 440 00:25:09,474 --> 00:25:14,246 be apparent that in sound and texture, these are very close 441 00:25:14,679 --> 00:25:17,549 chefs talk about the mouthfeel of a dish. 442 00:25:17,549 --> 00:25:22,354 By analogy, we might talk of the airfield, of these two languages, 443 00:25:22,721 --> 00:25:26,124 if you didn't speak either, it might be quite hard to tell them apart. 444 00:25:27,459 --> 00:25:29,761 What do they have in common? 445 00:25:29,761 --> 00:25:32,697 There are no medial or final voiced stops. 446 00:25:32,697 --> 00:25:36,968 That is no purpose to occur inside or at the end of words. 447 00:25:37,202 --> 00:25:40,205 Instead, you have but does and Gus. 448 00:25:40,705 --> 00:25:43,708 There are clear vowels in the continental manner. 449 00:25:43,942 --> 00:25:47,379 The diphthongs are I, o, and oin. 450 00:25:47,512 --> 00:25:50,515 An egg there are rolled R's are. 451 00:25:52,017 --> 00:25:55,654 The Welsh translation has the very distinctive 452 00:25:55,921 --> 00:25:58,623 Welsh double l sound, as in fluid. 453 00:25:58,623 --> 00:26:01,626 The last word complete, utter. 454 00:26:02,027 --> 00:26:05,030 This is the sound you get in phonetically or somebodies. 455 00:26:05,163 --> 00:26:07,832 Whilst it didn't occur in the Sindarin passage 456 00:26:07,832 --> 00:26:10,201 as I've translated it there, thanks to Jasmine, 457 00:26:10,201 --> 00:26:14,072 it did occur in the language just much more rarely than in Welsh. 458 00:26:14,072 --> 00:26:16,908 You get it in words like squeak, which means a single ear. 459 00:26:18,743 --> 00:26:21,813 Great elven is designed, as Tolkien specifically said, 460 00:26:22,013 --> 00:26:26,351 to be distinctively European in style and structure, but not in detail. 461 00:26:27,152 --> 00:26:32,190 Now Tolkien you medieval Welsh very well purchasing John Morris Jones, a Welsh 462 00:26:32,190 --> 00:26:36,861 grammar when he was an undergraduate, and his Sir John Morris Jones. 463 00:26:37,262 --> 00:26:41,032 This was the great grammar of the language by one of the greatest Welsh 464 00:26:41,032 --> 00:26:42,567 scholars of Tolkien's day. 465 00:26:42,567 --> 00:26:46,404 Here's a portrait of him looking very dignified in his doctoral robes, 466 00:26:47,272 --> 00:26:50,275 so it's worth imagining the young Tolkien 467 00:26:50,342 --> 00:26:55,614 poring over the pages of a grammar and absorbing the detail, of, 468 00:26:56,014 --> 00:26:59,184 the language, looking under the bonnet of Welsh, as it were. 469 00:26:59,784 --> 00:27:02,587 In order to transmute all this detail into something, 470 00:27:02,587 --> 00:27:05,790 it became part of, his world. 471 00:27:06,291 --> 00:27:09,227 I just want to draw attention to this hilarious phrase, 472 00:27:10,428 --> 00:27:12,030 annoying, less inclined. 473 00:27:12,030 --> 00:27:14,766 So you have to make. 474 00:27:14,766 --> 00:27:16,968 I know your wife wouldn't do that. 475 00:27:16,968 --> 00:27:19,971 And for a lot. 476 00:27:22,474 --> 00:27:23,975 There's just happened to be the first page 477 00:27:23,975 --> 00:27:26,978 that I photographed when I opened the ground. 478 00:27:28,546 --> 00:27:30,649 I think the most important thing to get over 479 00:27:30,649 --> 00:27:34,753 about centering is the fun esthetic element behind its creation. 480 00:27:35,186 --> 00:27:38,189 It's designed to be supreme, beautiful to the ear. 481 00:27:38,590 --> 00:27:41,593 Tolkien found Welsh extraordinarily lovely, 482 00:27:41,693 --> 00:27:44,596 a judgment which I wholeheartedly share. 483 00:27:44,596 --> 00:27:47,332 And his artificial language has something of the subjective 484 00:27:47,332 --> 00:27:50,502 feel of Welsh as well as its own distinctive quality. 485 00:27:51,970 --> 00:27:54,973 At this point, we need to think about what Welsh is. 486 00:27:56,141 --> 00:27:59,110 I need to try and go back here. 487 00:28:00,412 --> 00:28:03,281 Welsh is descended from the British language, 488 00:28:03,281 --> 00:28:05,850 part of the Celtic language family. 489 00:28:05,850 --> 00:28:06,985 This is why Tolkien 490 00:28:06,985 --> 00:28:10,588 admiringly used to call Welsh the elder language of the men of Britain, 491 00:28:10,789 --> 00:28:14,926 because, at least in its roots, it's been here longer than English has. 492 00:28:15,627 --> 00:28:18,630 The word British in this sense may be unfamiliar. 493 00:28:19,230 --> 00:28:22,233 It means the Celtic language of the ancient Britons, 494 00:28:22,367 --> 00:28:26,471 those squabbling, squabbling, woad painted guys. 495 00:28:26,471 --> 00:28:28,606 Where are they in the picture? 496 00:28:30,208 --> 00:28:32,444 There they are. 497 00:28:32,444 --> 00:28:33,845 The squabbling, woad painted people 498 00:28:33,845 --> 00:28:36,848 that the Romans encountered in the conquest of the island, 499 00:28:37,115 --> 00:28:40,118 and who themselves became romanized in due course. 500 00:28:40,785 --> 00:28:43,788 In Tolkien's day, the preferred term for this language was. 501 00:28:44,289 --> 00:28:46,925 But these days we say British. 502 00:28:46,925 --> 00:28:48,927 Between roughly 500 A.D. 503 00:28:48,927 --> 00:28:53,531 and 700 A.D., the British language transformed into Welsh 504 00:28:53,798 --> 00:28:58,436 by a complicated and concatenating series of sound changes in exactly 505 00:28:58,436 --> 00:29:03,308 the same way that Latin turned into Italian or Spanish or French or Romanian, 506 00:29:03,641 --> 00:29:06,644 as well as their other siblings. 507 00:29:07,412 --> 00:29:09,647 Any given language changes 508 00:29:09,647 --> 00:29:14,052 over time via the operation of changes in pronunciation, 509 00:29:14,052 --> 00:29:18,556 which we call sound changes, and these sound changes follow sound laws, 510 00:29:18,590 --> 00:29:22,093 as they're called, and these are regular and scientific. 511 00:29:22,260 --> 00:29:25,263 They happen to all the words in a given language. 512 00:29:25,630 --> 00:29:28,733 This may seem a bit unexpected if you haven't encountered 513 00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:33,271 before as an idea, but the point is, linguistic change is scientific 514 00:29:33,438 --> 00:29:36,407 because ultimately it's rooted in the biological apparatus 515 00:29:36,407 --> 00:29:39,410 of our lips, tongues, mouths, throats, and so on. 516 00:29:39,577 --> 00:29:41,813 So when a language changes, 517 00:29:41,813 --> 00:29:44,616 and all spoken languages are changing all the time. 518 00:29:44,616 --> 00:29:48,920 The ways in which they can change are very large, but not infinite. 519 00:29:49,687 --> 00:29:53,792 And philologists can reconstruct a kind of body of algorithms 520 00:29:53,792 --> 00:29:58,163 which show, predictably and in great detail, how a parent language 521 00:29:58,263 --> 00:30:01,766 transformed over time into its daughter languages. 522 00:30:03,001 --> 00:30:06,004 We work out what changed and when. 523 00:30:06,871 --> 00:30:09,240 Now, speaking in an extremely broad 524 00:30:09,240 --> 00:30:12,210 brush way, 525 00:30:12,877 --> 00:30:15,580 slides are out of order. 526 00:30:15,580 --> 00:30:19,117 Tolkien took the sound laws with the sound changes that had changed 527 00:30:19,117 --> 00:30:23,688 Welsh British into Welsh, which were very well understood by his day, 528 00:30:24,122 --> 00:30:27,525 and he applied them to his common elder in series of roots. 529 00:30:28,126 --> 00:30:31,196 And the result was Sindarin, with its Welsh. 530 00:30:31,196 --> 00:30:33,498 If you. 531 00:30:33,498 --> 00:30:35,767 I want to look at how these changes work. 532 00:30:35,767 --> 00:30:38,770 In the case of British being transformed into Welsh. 533 00:30:39,604 --> 00:30:43,408 So on the left hand side you can see some names in British, 534 00:30:43,675 --> 00:30:46,678 and on the right hand side you can see the Welsh descendants, 535 00:30:46,978 --> 00:30:50,615 some Anglo Cronus, a sixth century king becomes Welsh male gone 536 00:30:51,182 --> 00:30:54,452 Moana, the ancient name of Anglesey becomes Mon. 537 00:30:55,053 --> 00:30:55,954 Sabrina. 538 00:30:55,954 --> 00:30:59,257 The ancient name for the Severn becomes Hafren Water. 539 00:30:59,257 --> 00:31:02,227 Gurney's water gun. Bad man. Let's in the Saxons. 540 00:31:02,227 --> 00:31:05,163 Sorry. Anglo-Saxon colleagues. Sorry, sorry. 541 00:31:05,163 --> 00:31:06,931 Becomes Goodsir. 542 00:31:06,931 --> 00:31:08,433 Regan Turner. 543 00:31:08,433 --> 00:31:11,369 Divine Queen becomes the character Rhiannon 544 00:31:12,337 --> 00:31:12,971 and back to 545 00:31:12,971 --> 00:31:16,908 Noss becomes a myth on another mythological figure 546 00:31:16,941 --> 00:31:19,944 from medieval Welsh texts. 547 00:31:21,045 --> 00:31:22,447 What's happened here? 548 00:31:22,447 --> 00:31:25,650 One really obvious thing is that final syllables have been dropped. 549 00:31:27,118 --> 00:31:29,520 Consonant clusters have got similar. 550 00:31:29,520 --> 00:31:30,655 I've got more simple. 551 00:31:30,655 --> 00:31:35,126 So if you look at GLA in Mangalore has become a diphthong mile. 552 00:31:35,894 --> 00:31:38,897 Okay. 553 00:31:39,264 --> 00:31:43,067 Stops have been voiced and cut inside. 554 00:31:43,067 --> 00:31:46,070 Words have become. But the and guh. 555 00:31:46,237 --> 00:31:48,907 Now we can see the same process, the absolutely identical 556 00:31:48,907 --> 00:31:52,944 set of sound changes happening in situ in his and more by the way. 557 00:31:52,944 --> 00:31:54,746 And from British into Welsh. 558 00:31:54,746 --> 00:32:00,018 Yep. Test becomes Danette, PA becomes Gwyneth, Matt Potts becomes Mab, 559 00:32:00,251 --> 00:32:03,488 pathos becomes Tod, mama becomes mum. 560 00:32:04,188 --> 00:32:07,191 Okay, now from some Sindarin examples. 561 00:32:07,825 --> 00:32:10,828 Ara. When they became Arwen, 562 00:32:10,929 --> 00:32:14,065 Minas Tirith became Minas Tirith, 563 00:32:14,766 --> 00:32:19,737 another regal maiden with a crown of light becomes Galadriel 564 00:32:20,371 --> 00:32:25,310 like a fresh or green becomes like an silvan Elvish. 565 00:32:25,777 --> 00:32:31,382 Tolkien Don Ashley noted that became leg, which is why it's Legolas, not Legolas. 566 00:32:32,717 --> 00:32:34,052 Green leaves 567 00:32:34,052 --> 00:32:37,021 Mukta to fight, becomes Mitha. 568 00:32:37,989 --> 00:32:40,992 The sound changes are identical. 569 00:32:43,394 --> 00:32:46,164 In some places, Tolkien introduced deliberate fine 570 00:32:46,164 --> 00:32:50,034 tunings of the phonological developments in order to give a more esthetically 571 00:32:50,034 --> 00:32:53,471 pleasing outcome in his own eyes, and I'll give you two examples. 572 00:32:54,539 --> 00:32:57,542 Welsh words have had since around the year 900, 573 00:32:57,608 --> 00:33:00,611 a strong stress on the penultimate syllable. 574 00:33:00,712 --> 00:33:04,115 It's one of the things that gives the work the language, its distinctive cadence. 575 00:33:04,649 --> 00:33:07,218 Before 900 or so, Welsh words were stressed on 576 00:33:07,218 --> 00:33:10,221 the final syllable, as in Modern Hebrew. 577 00:33:10,688 --> 00:33:14,425 Tolkien tweaked the algorithm that determined the stress patterns 578 00:33:14,425 --> 00:33:18,763 of Sindarin words so that the stress in words of three syllables 579 00:33:18,863 --> 00:33:23,434 will always fall on the first syllable and not on the second syllable. 580 00:33:24,135 --> 00:33:26,571 So we say 581 00:33:26,571 --> 00:33:29,340 Aragorn, Legolas, and Thor, 582 00:33:29,340 --> 00:33:32,310 not Aragorn, Legolas, and then Thor. 583 00:33:33,011 --> 00:33:35,613 Compare Welsh and my son Cherwell in 584 00:33:36,781 --> 00:33:39,784 stress on the penultimate syllable. 585 00:33:39,984 --> 00:33:42,487 For Tolkien, there was apparently such a thing 586 00:33:42,487 --> 00:33:45,490 as sounding too Welsh. 587 00:33:46,591 --> 00:33:48,693 Rather similar is the problem of the distribution 588 00:33:48,693 --> 00:33:51,996 at the sound as in center, in which I mentioned earlier 589 00:33:52,864 --> 00:33:55,133 when Tolkien was composing the Lord of the rings. 590 00:33:55,133 --> 00:33:56,167 The language which he would 591 00:33:56,167 --> 00:33:59,537 later call Sindarin actually had a different name, altering, 592 00:34:00,104 --> 00:34:03,174 and its speakers had a slightly different historical backstory. 593 00:34:03,274 --> 00:34:05,510 Within the legendarium. 594 00:34:05,510 --> 00:34:08,913 In altering historical phonology, any word that had begun 595 00:34:08,913 --> 00:34:12,650 with a look back in common altering would begin with a Fleur. 596 00:34:13,084 --> 00:34:16,087 In altering this was a directly, 597 00:34:16,487 --> 00:34:19,590 A sound change was directly borrowed from British into Welsh. 598 00:34:20,324 --> 00:34:23,327 So, the word 599 00:34:23,795 --> 00:34:26,264 the root lamp gave, you know, durin 600 00:34:26,264 --> 00:34:30,835 some the root lass gave you an altering sound. Is. 601 00:34:33,704 --> 00:34:34,672 So the sound, 602 00:34:34,672 --> 00:34:38,209 as in altering was as frequent as it is in Welsh. 603 00:34:38,576 --> 00:34:41,579 So northern sounded very Welsh indeed. 604 00:34:42,747 --> 00:34:45,850 In the late 1950s and into the 60s, Tolkien decided that 605 00:34:45,850 --> 00:34:50,455 this had been an error, so Orlando Bloom would have been playing Legolas. 606 00:34:50,488 --> 00:34:53,091 If you haven't changed his mind. 607 00:34:53,091 --> 00:34:57,728 Ancient LA, at the start of words he decided had stayed as LA, 608 00:34:57,929 --> 00:34:59,630 not turned into S, 609 00:34:59,630 --> 00:35:03,067 and he set about mechanically changing the ordering into Sindarin. 610 00:35:03,367 --> 00:35:06,370 So Lum now yielded the root, 611 00:35:07,205 --> 00:35:10,208 some language right? 612 00:35:11,409 --> 00:35:14,912 But he had a problem in one place in the Lord of the rings. 613 00:35:14,912 --> 00:35:18,149 He'd already published a name with the sound as on. 614 00:35:18,149 --> 00:35:20,485 So the hill of is to. 615 00:35:20,485 --> 00:35:22,720 After leaving the falls of Rose. 616 00:35:22,720 --> 00:35:26,858 Sam and Frodo paddled over the river and reached I'm on South, 617 00:35:28,092 --> 00:35:29,227 At the time Tolkien 618 00:35:29,227 --> 00:35:32,230 wrote the novel, he'd been thinking in terms of Noldor in, 619 00:35:33,131 --> 00:35:38,136 the route for hearing had been lost in common Elden Ring. 620 00:35:38,269 --> 00:35:39,403 And that gave you the form. 621 00:35:39,403 --> 00:35:41,539 How is it? 622 00:35:41,539 --> 00:35:44,408 Through the various sound changes? 623 00:35:44,408 --> 00:35:47,678 But now, in order to get around the problem, he decided 624 00:35:48,012 --> 00:35:52,016 that the route had to have been slash with a sun on the front, 625 00:35:52,517 --> 00:35:55,186 and that when there had been an original slur sound 626 00:35:55,186 --> 00:35:58,189 that would give you the in Sindarin. 627 00:35:58,322 --> 00:36:02,693 So that meant that he could keep an eye on slough as hill of ears, 628 00:36:03,528 --> 00:36:06,531 and it would give the correct form. 629 00:36:07,365 --> 00:36:09,634 The form that he'd already fixed in the text. 630 00:36:09,634 --> 00:36:12,537 So he must have felt the satisfaction that one feels 631 00:36:12,537 --> 00:36:15,673 when getting away with a very nifty bit of microsurgery 632 00:36:16,774 --> 00:36:18,376 on one's language. 633 00:36:18,376 --> 00:36:20,945 All of this is to stress the fact that nothing is. 634 00:36:20,945 --> 00:36:24,582 By chance, Tolkien didn't hand wave any of these 635 00:36:24,582 --> 00:36:27,585 sound changes away in the Elvish languages as we have them. 636 00:36:27,652 --> 00:36:30,288 We're dealing with an unfinished body of material, 637 00:36:30,288 --> 00:36:33,925 but it's superbly intricate and of staggering precision 638 00:36:34,358 --> 00:36:36,928 and patches and workarounds that this sort are actually 639 00:36:36,928 --> 00:36:39,931 quite rare. 640 00:36:40,665 --> 00:36:41,999 Sindarin, 641 00:36:41,999 --> 00:36:45,303 it should be stressed, isn't called Welsh or any kind of knockoff. 642 00:36:45,703 --> 00:36:50,408 Almost no words are actually the same in form and meaning in the two languages, 643 00:36:50,675 --> 00:36:53,244 although because the phonology are almost identical, 644 00:36:53,244 --> 00:36:54,679 there are lots of times in which 645 00:36:54,679 --> 00:36:58,216 the same sounds a word with the same sound has a different meaning. 646 00:36:58,416 --> 00:37:01,652 So this is actually a really good example of how 647 00:37:02,153 --> 00:37:06,090 he is considering things that in Welsh, 648 00:37:07,258 --> 00:37:10,261 the same sequence of sounds. 649 00:37:11,896 --> 00:37:14,031 There were a few reminiscent words 650 00:37:14,031 --> 00:37:17,368 or means from in both languages, means 651 00:37:17,368 --> 00:37:20,371 and in both languages, but these are pretty uncommon. 652 00:37:21,572 --> 00:37:24,575 The level of design is astonishing. 653 00:37:25,443 --> 00:37:27,612 By his death, Tolkien had elaborated more than 654 00:37:27,612 --> 00:37:30,648 12,000 words, 12,000 655 00:37:31,916 --> 00:37:35,853 and indeed, Sindarin and Elvish in general is particularly full of words. 656 00:37:35,853 --> 00:37:38,689 As far as I'm concerned. The feel appropriate, 657 00:37:38,689 --> 00:37:41,859 the taste in the mind, like the thing that they denote. 658 00:37:41,993 --> 00:37:44,962 This is subjective, but here's some examples. 659 00:37:44,962 --> 00:37:47,431 Think sudden move. Netherland. 660 00:37:47,431 --> 00:37:48,899 Sound of bells. 661 00:37:48,899 --> 00:37:52,103 Paladin a kingfisher, literally a fish chair. 662 00:37:52,503 --> 00:37:54,071 Gwyneth. Virginity. 663 00:37:54,071 --> 00:37:56,574 Gorgo. Wrath. Extreme horror. 664 00:37:56,574 --> 00:38:00,378 Which is the name of the plane in Mordor through winter, 665 00:38:00,711 --> 00:38:04,081 reminiscent of Welsh trail frost glower. 666 00:38:04,081 --> 00:38:06,684 Sunlight, not ness. Mother. 667 00:38:06,684 --> 00:38:09,687 We know that elf children called their mothers Nanna. Mum 668 00:38:10,955 --> 00:38:12,156 Mithril Gray 669 00:38:12,156 --> 00:38:16,727 Canada to play the harp to new Violet Nightingale, or daughter of Twilights, 670 00:38:16,727 --> 00:38:20,765 literally analogous to Storm of Wind died a canopy. 671 00:38:20,998 --> 00:38:22,433 And I love this one guy. 672 00:38:22,433 --> 00:38:25,436 Lilith butterfly. 673 00:38:27,371 --> 00:38:29,206 This brings me to the grammar. 674 00:38:29,206 --> 00:38:33,644 Sindarin grammar is in many ways a close recreation of Welsh grammar, 675 00:38:33,844 --> 00:38:37,748 just close enough to be horribly confusing to me as a specialist. 676 00:38:38,582 --> 00:38:41,585 And I want to talk about two examples here. 677 00:38:42,119 --> 00:38:44,722 The first of which is pluralization patterns, 678 00:38:44,722 --> 00:38:48,092 and the second is something called initial consonant mutation. 679 00:38:50,094 --> 00:38:52,563 So, when you want to make 680 00:38:52,563 --> 00:38:55,800 a word plural in Welsh, there are lots of actually ways to do it. 681 00:38:55,800 --> 00:38:58,235 But a big chunk of nouns do it this way. 682 00:38:58,235 --> 00:39:01,505 If you change the vowels inside the word, 683 00:39:02,106 --> 00:39:06,110 and this derives from a lost final e sound in the plural. 684 00:39:06,777 --> 00:39:10,915 So one koru idea two crew did one a staff 685 00:39:11,248 --> 00:39:15,219 a chamber to Estévez chambers, one taller, 686 00:39:15,720 --> 00:39:18,723 a bore, two tier fours. 687 00:39:19,290 --> 00:39:21,759 We have a class of nouns which do this in English as well. 688 00:39:21,759 --> 00:39:25,730 Man, men, goose, geese, mouse, mice, house. 689 00:39:29,233 --> 00:39:30,201 In Sindarin. 690 00:39:30,201 --> 00:39:32,703 This is the way you make all words plural. 691 00:39:32,703 --> 00:39:36,307 So add an 18 man, one man, two men. 692 00:39:36,841 --> 00:39:39,076 Balrog, Bell reek. 693 00:39:39,076 --> 00:39:40,745 Demons of might. 694 00:39:40,745 --> 00:39:43,748 1 or 2 in. 695 00:39:47,952 --> 00:39:49,120 In Sindarin as well. 696 00:39:49,120 --> 00:39:52,590 Adjectives also pluralize in the way that nouns do 697 00:39:52,623 --> 00:39:55,626 with sound with I affection inside the words. 698 00:39:55,926 --> 00:39:58,929 So Adam a gladder means a glorious man. 699 00:39:59,029 --> 00:40:02,032 Glorious men. Is Edin a glory 700 00:40:02,066 --> 00:40:04,034 with vowel changes. 701 00:40:04,034 --> 00:40:07,304 This only occurs in a small number of adjectives in Welsh, but it is there. 702 00:40:07,772 --> 00:40:09,940 Marrow is the adjective that means dead. 703 00:40:09,940 --> 00:40:13,043 Metal is the plural form of that adjective. 704 00:40:14,011 --> 00:40:16,614 The dead. 705 00:40:16,614 --> 00:40:19,617 And it gets a bit more complicated as. 706 00:40:20,251 --> 00:40:24,422 With this we come to a notorious feature of all the modern Celtic languages. 707 00:40:25,322 --> 00:40:27,725 We're familiar with the idea probably that, 708 00:40:27,725 --> 00:40:31,896 according to changes in grammar, the endings of words will change. 709 00:40:33,130 --> 00:40:33,330 In the 710 00:40:33,330 --> 00:40:36,500 Celtic languages, the beginnings of words change as well. 711 00:40:37,435 --> 00:40:40,271 Okay, according to set patterns, 712 00:40:40,271 --> 00:40:43,274 these changes encode grammatical information, 713 00:40:43,441 --> 00:40:46,143 and they're usually triggered by preceding words or 714 00:40:46,143 --> 00:40:49,213 by the grammatical context in which the word is embedded. 715 00:40:50,381 --> 00:40:53,551 Welsh has three different types or patterns of mutation. 716 00:40:53,851 --> 00:40:56,220 Sindarin, like Welsh, is sister language. 717 00:40:56,220 --> 00:40:59,223 Cornish seems to have had five. 718 00:41:00,758 --> 00:41:02,660 Tolkien, by the way, seems to have changed his mind 719 00:41:02,660 --> 00:41:04,795 a lot in relation to the initial mutations. 720 00:41:04,795 --> 00:41:08,666 And this is one place, I think, in which Tolkien let Sindarin 721 00:41:08,666 --> 00:41:10,067 kind of get away from him, 722 00:41:10,067 --> 00:41:13,971 so that it became more and more complex on phonological grounds, more complex 723 00:41:13,971 --> 00:41:17,374 than is plausible for a language that would people would actually speak. 724 00:41:17,942 --> 00:41:18,876 At least I thought that. 725 00:41:18,876 --> 00:41:21,812 And then I suddenly realized that within the fiction, 726 00:41:21,812 --> 00:41:24,815 this language is being spoken by people who are immortal. 727 00:41:25,015 --> 00:41:27,418 So presumably they can remember 728 00:41:27,418 --> 00:41:30,421 what the correct grammatical rule was 2000 years ago, 729 00:41:30,621 --> 00:41:33,991 and so they would have a different relationship to time and language change. 730 00:41:35,926 --> 00:41:37,628 Going back to constant mutation, 731 00:41:37,628 --> 00:41:40,631 I'm only going to look at one type of the five. Now, 732 00:41:41,165 --> 00:41:42,366 and this is the most common. 733 00:41:42,366 --> 00:41:45,369 It's called soft mutation. 734 00:41:45,836 --> 00:41:48,739 And it occurs in Welsh and, and in, in the scene 735 00:41:48,739 --> 00:41:51,742 center in system is very similar to the Welsh one. 736 00:41:52,743 --> 00:41:54,078 And here is how it works. 737 00:41:54,078 --> 00:41:58,215 And remember we're talking about the first consonant of words, the first consonant. 738 00:41:58,883 --> 00:42:02,253 So in Welsh a word that begins in the first, 739 00:42:02,753 --> 00:42:06,290 when soft, we tend to listen for cut becomes good. 740 00:42:06,657 --> 00:42:11,161 Yeah becomes looking the double T good vanishes altogether. 741 00:42:12,663 --> 00:42:15,165 Isn't the first flap 742 00:42:15,165 --> 00:42:18,168 goes like that, goes the verb 743 00:42:18,802 --> 00:42:19,270 perfect. 744 00:42:19,270 --> 00:42:22,373 Most of the first s isn't 745 00:42:22,373 --> 00:42:25,376 affected to those today. 746 00:42:25,643 --> 00:42:28,646 That's the Welsh system. 747 00:42:29,146 --> 00:42:32,416 The ones that are not highlighted are against in situ, 748 00:42:32,683 --> 00:42:36,320 but because of the fact that both of us got this, 749 00:42:36,320 --> 00:42:40,991 it is not based on the purpose of the tongue goes to the. 750 00:42:43,294 --> 00:42:46,297 Because he had fluffed around with words 751 00:42:46,697 --> 00:42:50,200 with the sun and C and use actually different 752 00:42:50,200 --> 00:42:54,605 from which was necessary for words, so becomes slur 753 00:42:55,172 --> 00:42:58,142 which for the Welsh this will seem extremely odd. 754 00:42:58,943 --> 00:43:00,377 Okay, so that's where it differs. 755 00:43:00,377 --> 00:43:04,248 And that's because of his little patch with work around about 756 00:43:04,982 --> 00:43:07,451 the sound as in centering. 757 00:43:07,451 --> 00:43:10,487 There are a couple, that are completely alien 758 00:43:10,487 --> 00:43:13,490 to Welsh G 759 00:43:13,490 --> 00:43:14,692 you see there. 760 00:43:14,692 --> 00:43:19,363 So hope it's found in Irish, but not so much. 761 00:43:20,531 --> 00:43:23,534 Borrowed that one from Irish. 762 00:43:28,606 --> 00:43:31,108 What is the effect of all this? 763 00:43:31,108 --> 00:43:36,046 It's esthetically softening, like mist, like the weathering of rocks. 764 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:40,751 It obscures the contours of words, making roots difficult to discern. 765 00:43:41,185 --> 00:43:44,188 That's, in my view, rather a kind of mysterious effect. 766 00:43:44,455 --> 00:43:48,058 Tolkien at one point says that Sindarin developed because the elves speech 767 00:43:48,058 --> 00:43:52,262 changed with the change fulness of mortal lands, and constant mutation 768 00:43:52,262 --> 00:43:56,100 is a kind of phonological embodiment of that change fulness. 769 00:43:56,433 --> 00:44:01,005 The words themselves shift and change on a clause by clause basis. 770 00:44:02,072 --> 00:44:05,042 I'm going to give you examples of how this works. 771 00:44:05,042 --> 00:44:08,846 The use of soft mutation is triggered by different things in the two languages. 772 00:44:09,513 --> 00:44:12,516 In Welsh it occurs 773 00:44:13,651 --> 00:44:16,654 after the definite article if a noun is feminine. 774 00:44:16,787 --> 00:44:20,090 So kath is the word that means cat, and it's a feminine noun 775 00:44:20,591 --> 00:44:23,594 against the cat, because cup becomes good 776 00:44:24,662 --> 00:44:25,295 myth. 777 00:44:25,295 --> 00:44:28,132 It's the word that means daughter of bath. 778 00:44:28,132 --> 00:44:31,135 The daughter becomes the 779 00:44:31,335 --> 00:44:31,835 masculine. 780 00:44:31,835 --> 00:44:34,872 Nouns do not undergo soft mutation after that 781 00:44:34,872 --> 00:44:38,676 because he a dog, a key, the dog. 782 00:44:42,746 --> 00:44:43,747 Sindarin, like all 783 00:44:43,747 --> 00:44:46,750 the Elvish languages, has no grammatical gender, 784 00:44:46,984 --> 00:44:51,422 and in Sindarin all singular nouns undergo soft mutation. 785 00:44:51,422 --> 00:44:53,624 After the definite article. 786 00:44:53,624 --> 00:44:56,760 Cara's a moated fortress eagerness. 787 00:44:56,794 --> 00:44:59,897 The moated fortress Gallus a tree E 788 00:44:59,897 --> 00:45:03,901 Olaf the tree to Neuville the nightingale Edith. 789 00:45:03,901 --> 00:45:06,136 Inuvialuit the nightingale. 790 00:45:06,136 --> 00:45:09,139 Palladian A kingfisher. 791 00:45:09,173 --> 00:45:09,840 Lydian. 792 00:45:09,840 --> 00:45:14,411 The kingfisher said A blood headache, the blood. 793 00:45:18,916 --> 00:45:21,919 Here's a little example. 794 00:45:22,186 --> 00:45:23,821 Another picture. 795 00:45:23,821 --> 00:45:26,023 In Welsh, sometimes, 796 00:45:26,023 --> 00:45:29,026 the grammatical subject 797 00:45:29,193 --> 00:45:31,628 undergoes soft mutation. 798 00:45:31,628 --> 00:45:34,631 And I think in some, some, some medieval 799 00:45:35,265 --> 00:45:38,202 even, I guess, Western love castle life. 800 00:45:38,202 --> 00:45:40,471 That's why some did not want 801 00:45:40,471 --> 00:45:44,441 to work from the cut on the 29th becomes 802 00:45:45,509 --> 00:45:47,544 this is the 803 00:45:47,544 --> 00:45:49,480 reader response. Raven. 804 00:45:49,480 --> 00:45:52,483 There is no bridge over the River Pont, 805 00:45:52,516 --> 00:45:55,519 which becomes falls. 806 00:45:56,820 --> 00:45:57,888 Now in Sindarin, 807 00:45:57,888 --> 00:46:01,525 the direct object, not the subject, undergoes something. 808 00:46:02,226 --> 00:46:04,928 And I'm giving you this from the film. 809 00:46:04,928 --> 00:46:09,032 But, that poignancy which Elrond had when they're talking to each other, 810 00:46:09,466 --> 00:46:12,703 everyone says to Art when I'm wearing velveteen, 811 00:46:13,137 --> 00:46:16,974 and I myself do I have your menace now? 812 00:46:17,941 --> 00:46:20,911 Objects, dandelions, documentation to tell. 813 00:46:21,545 --> 00:46:24,481 And she says, daddy, that you know that 814 00:46:24,481 --> 00:46:27,785 you have my knowledge and that the concept 815 00:46:28,385 --> 00:46:31,355 and it's really lovely touch 816 00:46:31,355 --> 00:46:34,491 and that which is the short form of Adar father, 817 00:46:35,492 --> 00:46:38,495 that. 818 00:46:39,129 --> 00:46:41,732 I'm going to show shortly things that we've discovered since 819 00:46:41,732 --> 00:46:44,735 those films are made show that almost everything in that phrase is wrong. 820 00:46:45,803 --> 00:46:48,172 But this is a problem. 821 00:46:48,172 --> 00:46:51,175 Okay, so along with this kind of stuff, 822 00:46:51,275 --> 00:46:56,146 he devised prepositions, several hundred verbs, adjectives, adverbs, exclamations, 823 00:46:56,146 --> 00:47:00,450 conjunctions, forms, and his papers are marked carefully in a manner 824 00:47:00,684 --> 00:47:04,087 as poetic or archaic or dialectical, and so on. 825 00:47:04,388 --> 00:47:07,391 There are irregular verbs and analogical forms. 826 00:47:07,691 --> 00:47:10,627 There are lexical borrowings and a small handful 827 00:47:10,627 --> 00:47:13,630 of un analyzable and mysterious words. 828 00:47:14,231 --> 00:47:17,201 I'm just going to count to ten. 829 00:47:17,401 --> 00:47:20,404 That is not. 830 00:47:23,006 --> 00:47:26,009 It's actually died on the. 831 00:47:27,511 --> 00:47:30,480 And see if we can do it. 832 00:47:30,480 --> 00:47:32,082 Yeah, yeah. 833 00:47:32,082 --> 00:47:33,217 Okay. 834 00:47:33,217 --> 00:47:37,087 Just to give you a last taste of what they sound like, this is the the numerals. 835 00:47:37,421 --> 00:47:41,592 Counting was first in die three peddler complex website. 836 00:47:41,592 --> 00:47:45,529 We now dig and in Sindarin meaning partner 837 00:47:45,596 --> 00:47:49,499 that cannot 11 in order to make a pie. 838 00:47:51,535 --> 00:47:53,537 With apologies to the Welsh speakers in the room, 839 00:47:53,537 --> 00:47:55,906 I find hollow sticks in my mind. 840 00:47:55,906 --> 00:47:58,542 Much, much more is the word for out the noise. 841 00:47:58,542 --> 00:48:03,347 And I find it hard not to, count in dietary Petra pin quick 842 00:48:03,513 --> 00:48:06,516 site to cloth now Dec. 843 00:48:08,385 --> 00:48:10,988 So can you actually speak this? 844 00:48:10,988 --> 00:48:15,392 There's not a lot of text as opposed to reams of personal names and place names. 845 00:48:15,826 --> 00:48:19,897 You could put all the text that Tolkien wrote in Sindarin on a sheet of A4. 846 00:48:20,664 --> 00:48:23,100 There's a short letter from Aragorn to Sam Gamgee, 847 00:48:23,100 --> 00:48:26,103 which is meant to go into the appendices of the Lord of the rings. 848 00:48:26,169 --> 00:48:29,172 There's a version of the Lord's Prayer, 849 00:48:29,506 --> 00:48:32,509 and a few other, short sentences. 850 00:48:32,809 --> 00:48:36,413 Tolkien seems to have looked a little askance at the idea that people 851 00:48:36,413 --> 00:48:40,817 might want to take an interest in his, private hobby and speak Elvish. 852 00:48:41,485 --> 00:48:46,823 Themselves, so he never put the full it into a grammar, from which we could use. 853 00:48:46,990 --> 00:48:51,895 And he continued to tinker and vacillate about, quite important 854 00:48:51,895 --> 00:48:55,832 aspects of the grammar of the language into the last years of his life. 855 00:48:57,067 --> 00:48:59,703 These days, hitherto unpublished papers 856 00:48:59,703 --> 00:49:03,540 by Tolkien on his Elvish languages are gradually being put before the public 857 00:49:04,274 --> 00:49:06,543 under the control of a small group 858 00:49:06,543 --> 00:49:09,546 acting on behalf of the Tolkien estate. 859 00:49:10,247 --> 00:49:15,619 And this is, a highly technical and very, very, very tricky kind of thing to do. 860 00:49:15,619 --> 00:49:20,190 The journals are convenient for, and part of the Lamb Baron, 861 00:49:21,224 --> 00:49:24,227 newsletters and the book of Elven languages, 862 00:49:24,361 --> 00:49:27,331 and they put out new volumes every so often. 863 00:49:27,364 --> 00:49:29,800 The results can be radical 864 00:49:29,800 --> 00:49:32,803 in terms of our understanding of how the languages work. 865 00:49:33,036 --> 00:49:35,839 Over the last 20 years, since I first became interested 866 00:49:35,839 --> 00:49:38,842 in Sindarin, the following things have happened. 867 00:49:39,643 --> 00:49:42,713 There have been situations in which our best guesses 868 00:49:42,913 --> 00:49:45,716 have turned out to be completely wrong. 869 00:49:45,716 --> 00:49:48,452 On the Quenya side, the poor editors of Parliament, 870 00:49:48,452 --> 00:49:52,356 Elder Lamberton unfortunately found that there was an error in the title. 871 00:49:54,024 --> 00:49:55,125 It should have been 872 00:49:55,125 --> 00:49:58,795 Elder Lambie on, but there was no way to know that before 873 00:49:59,062 --> 00:50:02,265 the particular paper by Tolkien was edited and published. 874 00:50:03,300 --> 00:50:08,138 What we've seen in the verbal system, for example, turns out to be very much 875 00:50:08,138 --> 00:50:11,641 more complicated, and expressive than we thought. 876 00:50:11,641 --> 00:50:13,910 20 years ago. 877 00:50:13,910 --> 00:50:16,580 Some personal pronouns are pretty different 878 00:50:16,580 --> 00:50:19,816 to what we had imagined, including the endings on verbs. 879 00:50:20,283 --> 00:50:24,855 We thought, for example, that the second person singular ending the 880 00:50:24,855 --> 00:50:27,858 you that thou forme, was 881 00:50:28,158 --> 00:50:33,730 Which is why Arwen says Kerry fella's name. 882 00:50:33,764 --> 00:50:35,932 You have my love. 883 00:50:35,932 --> 00:50:38,468 It turns out it was girl 884 00:50:38,468 --> 00:50:40,270 we just didn't know. 885 00:50:40,270 --> 00:50:43,673 So every time someone says you something in, 886 00:50:44,441 --> 00:50:47,477 the Jackson trilogy, they're using the wrong form of the verb. 887 00:50:49,146 --> 00:50:52,215 Tolkien also changed his mind about certain features 888 00:50:52,215 --> 00:50:55,218 of Sindarin grammar, which seem to be long settled. 889 00:50:55,519 --> 00:50:59,656 Remember that no Sindarin apart from a few lines in the Lord of the rings 890 00:51:00,357 --> 00:51:03,727 had been published in his lifetime, so he was completely free 891 00:51:03,727 --> 00:51:06,897 to tinker with his private copy. 892 00:51:07,898 --> 00:51:08,432 I want to give you 893 00:51:08,432 --> 00:51:11,435 two maddening examples of Tolkien changing his mind. 894 00:51:12,235 --> 00:51:16,540 We thought that the word for not was settled. 895 00:51:16,773 --> 00:51:18,542 It was, okay. 896 00:51:18,542 --> 00:51:21,778 And Tolkien had put this in, the Lord of the rings. 897 00:51:22,646 --> 00:51:25,782 It's, there's an inscription on the tomb of Gil 898 00:51:25,782 --> 00:51:30,821 Ryan, whose Aragorn's mother, Nicene, and the extended version of the films, 899 00:51:31,822 --> 00:51:35,325 in which he has a little epitaph that says, only 18. 900 00:51:35,625 --> 00:51:39,796 Who had been unnamed, which means I gave the hope 901 00:51:40,230 --> 00:51:43,400 to the Dunedain to to men who have been. 902 00:51:43,400 --> 00:51:45,702 I do not keep 903 00:51:45,702 --> 00:51:49,639 hope for myself, being Aragorn's child name. 904 00:51:50,640 --> 00:51:53,643 Okay, so there's, the negative. 905 00:51:54,277 --> 00:51:56,246 For some reason, late in life, 906 00:51:56,246 --> 00:51:59,249 Tolkien decided that oo was wrong. 907 00:52:00,183 --> 00:52:00,917 He didn't like it 908 00:52:00,917 --> 00:52:04,287 because it was too close to the Greek negative, which is also 909 00:52:04,855 --> 00:52:09,359 and of course, is the issue that you get all the way back here 910 00:52:10,627 --> 00:52:13,630 in utopian 911 00:52:15,065 --> 00:52:17,234 utopia, no place. 912 00:52:17,234 --> 00:52:17,400 Okay. 913 00:52:17,400 --> 00:52:20,504 So he decided that it was too similar to the Greek word for not, 914 00:52:21,338 --> 00:52:24,341 and he had to replace it, 915 00:52:24,574 --> 00:52:27,077 because he had already published in the Lord of the rings 916 00:52:27,077 --> 00:52:30,080 a bit with, 917 00:52:31,081 --> 00:52:33,016 Ooh, he had to say that it was a, 918 00:52:33,016 --> 00:52:37,254 it became a root that meant difficult or impossible rather than just a negative. 919 00:52:37,320 --> 00:52:40,257 Okay, so I gave the hope to men. 920 00:52:40,257 --> 00:52:43,260 It was impossible for me to keep hope for myself. 921 00:52:43,360 --> 00:52:45,028 Another workaround. Okay. 922 00:52:45,028 --> 00:52:47,831 The actual negative, he decided, should be last 923 00:52:47,831 --> 00:52:50,834 or allow or law before a verb. 924 00:52:51,568 --> 00:52:52,769 I could strangle him for this. 925 00:52:52,769 --> 00:52:55,539 I could dig him up and strangle him because of course law 926 00:52:55,539 --> 00:52:57,641 is the Hebrew negative. 927 00:52:57,641 --> 00:53:02,312 If it's not okay to copy the Greek negative, why is it okay to copy 928 00:53:02,312 --> 00:53:03,079 the Hebrew one? 929 00:53:03,079 --> 00:53:05,549 And he actually says in the note, that is no objection. 930 00:53:06,850 --> 00:53:08,919 Book is 931 00:53:08,919 --> 00:53:09,553 okay. 932 00:53:09,553 --> 00:53:14,824 So anytime anyone in the films says not, it's wrong. 933 00:53:15,425 --> 00:53:18,195 And worse was to come. 934 00:53:18,195 --> 00:53:21,198 Since I started writing this lecture 935 00:53:22,265 --> 00:53:25,168 a month ago, it has come out that Tolkien 936 00:53:25,168 --> 00:53:28,171 infuriatingly decided to change the word for the. 937 00:53:30,073 --> 00:53:32,776 It went from being E, as you can see here, 938 00:53:32,776 --> 00:53:37,981 we so the hope to e or n before a vowel. 939 00:53:38,949 --> 00:53:43,887 So, this is it's more complicated than this, but this is a simple example. 940 00:53:44,087 --> 00:53:48,358 Tell me to sign in the old system E2 with Llanishen. 941 00:53:48,658 --> 00:53:52,796 So I should say it's this time he adopts the D 942 00:53:53,330 --> 00:53:58,168 and under the new system tale sign and the sign. 943 00:53:58,368 --> 00:54:01,104 And at us the dear. 944 00:54:01,104 --> 00:54:03,607 That, of course, means that, 945 00:54:03,607 --> 00:54:06,476 That's wrong in the Lord of the rings. 946 00:54:06,476 --> 00:54:10,647 And we don't know how he would have got around that, had he lived. 947 00:54:11,481 --> 00:54:15,151 So anyone who's ever got an Elvish tattoo, it's all wrong. 948 00:54:17,887 --> 00:54:20,523 Here is an example of how this should work. 949 00:54:20,523 --> 00:54:24,361 Going back to this lovely scene, do I not also have your love? 950 00:54:24,361 --> 00:54:25,962 You have my love, father. 951 00:54:25,962 --> 00:54:29,833 What they say is, I am very, very. 952 00:54:30,066 --> 00:54:34,037 If any other it should be, I am lost having never left Queen 953 00:54:34,437 --> 00:54:36,840 Sophie given an other. 954 00:54:36,840 --> 00:54:39,075 Okay, that's changed in 20 years. 955 00:54:39,075 --> 00:54:42,512 And it will continue to change as we discover more and more 956 00:54:42,612 --> 00:54:45,615 about Tolkien's intentions for his language. 957 00:54:45,615 --> 00:54:49,219 So the basic rule is, every time a new piece of Tolkien's own 958 00:54:49,219 --> 00:54:52,255 writing on his languages emerges, there's a surprise, 959 00:54:52,489 --> 00:54:55,492 whether welcome or unwelcome as the case may be. 960 00:54:55,492 --> 00:55:00,063 So moral of the story don't get attitude in Sindarin and I'll leave it there. 961 00:55:00,063 --> 00:55:00,497 Thanks.