great. So a crucial part of the texture of Tolkiens writings lies in the names, the names of people, places and things such as Aragorn, Galadriel, Minas Tirith and Parador and so on. And today we're going to be looking at language in middle earth and the Tolkien himself as a language creator. His harmless advice, as he called it in a famous essay. Tolkien was a philologist of astounding skill and created languages throughout his life. As his friend C.S. Lewis put it in an obituary.
It was as if he had been inside language. I'm using the word philologist rather than linguist. Philology is the rich discipline that involves tracing the historical development and interrelationship of languages, often with a broad, extended sense that encompasses textual and literary study. So it's perfectly possible to have an intricate philological knowledge of a given language, but be unable to speak it to any great degree. And this is true of Tolkien's Elvish languages.
By the time he had written the Lord of the Rings in the early to mid 1950s, two of his art languages, Quenya and Sindarin, had reached a vast level of order and complexity. It was easily enough for Tolkien to be able to compose texts in them. Though Tolkien also devised dwarvish and managed languages too.
It was the languages of his immortal beautiful elves which clearly preoccupied him most, and as he repeatedly explained to incredulous correspondence, the languages were the reason for the legendarium, not the other way round. The languages came first. So today I'm going to discuss one of those languages, Sindarin, in grammatical detail. But first I want to stretch sketch out the intellectual and historical background against which Tolkien's achievement as a language creator needs to be seen.
Tolkien was not the first person to have invented a language, although he took it far, far beyond what anyone else had done, and effectively spearheaded the modern vogue for constructed languages in fantasy settings. As a medievalist, Tolkien would have known the handful of medieval and early modern attempts at language construction, none of which approached anything like the scale on which he himself came to work.
It's as though a few people had grubbed around with Lego bricks, and then Tolkien came along and single handedly built the Tower of Babel to begin with. Two contrasting medieval examples. A language understood in heaven and a language known only in hell. Let's see if this works. In the early 12th century. The German abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen created the world's first known artificial language, which she called lingua, to the unknown language in modern linguistic jargon.
It's simply a reflex ification that means a substitution of devised words for familiar ones slotted into Latin grammar and sentences. And there must have been over a thousand words in her language. And she even devised this special, actually rather token resembling alphabet for it. Here is a little piece of text. In a mixture of Latin and her linguistic note. Her or his ecclesia arm is divine is pressed into it.
Hyacinth or nata to a domestic Martin loy folium it all of chiaro 002 is etam Santa in alto sono. It is Hausa. Gemma and one of the leading scholars of Hildegard of Bingen. Barbara Newman has attempted the translation. Don't know what these words mean? And that's what she suggests. They probably are. Hildegard did gloss some of her words. You can see some of them here. I can't, I can't God, I arrogance angel, devil.
It's devil. It's spirits. Spirits. And what you can see there, is that there's an effort at implying linguistic relationship, the word for God and the word for angel, which have something to do with each other, looks something like each other. And there's also refraction of familiar Latin words. The evidence looks like diabolo is, but it looks like spiritus. Now for a language of hell.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century, we come across Nimrod, great grandson of Noah, who is depicted as a giant. And Nimrod speaks in the poem and he has an incomprehensible line of gibberish, which is. I'll just read it for you, Rafael, mimic Xabi and me coming to agree to Lafayette a bocca quinones de convenient. You told me, Rafael, my own kids are beyond me, began to bellow that brute mouth for which no sweeter songs would be appropriate.
This is his only line in the poem, and Virgil, Dante's Guide to Hell in Purgatory, explains that every language is to him the same as his to others. No one knows his tongue. Nimrod is the builder of the Tower of Babel, after which human languages were confused and multiplied by God. He speaks a language of which the speech community is one. He's the only speaker. It's vaguely Hebrew sounding, but not translatable. It gives us the feel of a natural language, of antique strangeness.
And because it's untranslated, we can't guess at its vocabulary or semantics or grammar, presumably because there isn't one. A very different example comes from 1516, when Sir Thomas Moore published his famous Latin tract Utopia, which purported to be a traveler's account of the customs of an unknown land, in the far Atlantic. The name of the island is, of course, no place in Greek utopia.
More's text was prefaced with a few lines of verse, which purported to be in the utopian language, as well as the utopian alphabet, and you can see it there, on the side. And I'm just going to, read it out to you. We're gonna have a bobcat. Sarah. Come on, come on. Bottle hemoglobin back. Someone famous of, a grammar double, a novel called Barnabas and London called Valentin. I'm learning. A little hint or a little, embarrassed confession.
I filled this one out into a full language, as a kind of neurotic copy of my own token style. So it's weird. I could I can read it and understand it, too, so I it's, someone else's, is it's a real language. Very strange. If you look at the page on the right, you can see a Latin translation and the alphabet, it all adds up to a kind of intellectual puzzle and invitation. Can you figure it out? For humanist scholars of the period, it evokes how you had to begin learning Greek or Hebrew or Arabic.
Once you've got your Latin down. Now, Hildegard's linguistic igniter and Dante's language of Nimrod advanced a metaphysical claim. They seem to say there's a relationship between phonology and syntax and morphology, and the spiritual or ethical status of the beings who speak it. Hildegard's unknown language is mysterious, veiled, ecstatic. It's used in her hymns to break the singer out of the chains of earthly signification and take them to heaven.
Heaven, heavenly things make nonsense of human wisdom. Nimrods language, on the other hand, suggests the way that damnation is a state of infinite isolation. A kind of embargo upon the possibility of communication. What you have inside can never be brought out and conveyed to anyone else. So they bring up interesting things about the philosophy and theology of language. Most utopian, on the other hand, is the odd one out because it invites you to figure it out on a secular level.
The verse that you can see that is spoken by you topos the island of utopias. Legendary founder. He separated the island from the mainland by severing the isthmus that had connected it. And he says, so the Latin tells us out of a known island, I made an island, and we can pick out a word for island and something that looks like case marking eye endings, indicating the role of a word within its close. So, You look at that, you can see how, which must be, hum.
Which must be a foreign same word with an ending indicating a different grammatical row. It's also possible to spot what must be the negative here. Nakama unknown island. Not live on the wrong border. Not unwilling. Okay. Now, as it happens, that's very close to the Arabic negative la Hebrew law. So this fragment of utopian is something new. It holds out the promise that on some level, this constructed language all makes sense.
It gives the illusion that a complete language lies behind the fragment. It's much more realistic as a fragment of the language of a society. It's deployed for verisimilitude within the fiction. And so this is much, much more, like the fragments of Elvish language that appear in the Lord of the rings, like Galadriel. Great lament in Quenya, in lost, Laura and I, Lori Lanter. Lastly, Serena and Yanni, you know, time away from their own, like gold for the leaves and the wind.
Long years numberless as the wings of trees. The translation invites linguistically curious readers to do exactly what most utopian fragment invites us do to believe that a real language underlies the text we are reading, and by looking for repeated words and changes of form, to try our luck at figuring out the grammar. And of course, in Tolkiens case, that grammar actually existed, albeit only in his own notes.
I would love to know whether, more and his collaborator had a more elaborate version of utopian necessarily to write that fragment. Tolkien style. We don't know. It's important to note something that none of these medieval and early modern texts, they are not attempts at a priori philosophical languages. So lots of people, after Thomas More tried inventing languages, it became a bit of an intellectual fad in the 17th and 18th centuries.
But all of them, designed from first principles to iron out the kinds of ambiguity, that are inherent in human speech. They aim to create an intrinsically transparent medium of communication, that would render thought clear. And the results, in most cases are hilarious, hugely unwieldy and impractical, edifices which don't render anything transparent. That's not at all what Tolkien was trying to do. None of his languages are philosophical languages in that way.
So at this point, I want to suggest that we need special terminology to take the measure of Tolkien's achievement. And here are three portmanteau terms. And these are drawn from, the kind of language creation community that they're commonly, drawn terms are not clang or natural language of the real world is something that exists in the present or past, like English or Latin or Navajo.
An orc slang or an auxiliary language is one that's designed as an aid to communication between people who do not share a natural language. Esperanto is the most famous orc slang But of course, because some Esperanto enthusiasts have brought up their children to be native speakers of Esperanto, a few a few hundred people. Esperanto is a nutmeg as well as an orc. Slang.
Conlang is the final one, a constructed language meaning an artificially created language, often but not always, designed for use in a work of fiction or to express some ideological or cultural point. My favorite example of a conlang is La Arden created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 as a language which would intrinsically, by virtue of its grammar and structure, center women's experience. The implication is that natural language is, patriarchal and sent to male experience.
So La Arden has a grammar designed to necessitate the expression of shades of feeling, of bodily experience and evidentiary meaning. How sure a speaker is that? What they're saying is the truth. So Arden has, a grammatical way of saying, stating that, you know, a fact because you saw it in a dream. It's full of delightful things like that. It all seems a little bit old fashioned 40 years of gender politics later. But, it is a beautiful thing.
These three terms nat, lang, Oaks, Lang, and conlang are widely used within the language creation community today and are very helpful. What then of tokens languages? What are Quenya or Sindarin? According to this terminology, it might seem obvious to say that they are conlang constructed languages, but in fact this is a bit problematic. And this brings me to the key point.
Quenya and Sindarin, the two most complex of Tolkien's art languages, form part of a family of languages descending from an ancestral language, which we might call Primitive Quentin or proto Elvish. Quenya and Sindarin are thus related, but rather distantly, having developed amongst two very widely dispersed groups of elves.
According to the backstory of Tolkien's legendarium, Tolkien carefully elaborated and orchestrated their vocabulary, tracing the two languages transformations in their descent from a common ancestor to a common series of roots. This is, of course, what real languages do for real language families do, which is why we can trace how English is related to German or Dutch or Icelandic, for example, going all the way back to the common ancestor language we call Common Germanic.
And this was Tolkien's day job. Amongst other things. Now he did this, and this is the crucial point with such skill and verisimilitude, that his art languages can be analyzed with the technical tools of historical linguistics. They are, in effect, not conlang, but simulated, not Lang's. The realism has chronological depth. Only a philologist of great skill could have done it.
It's worth remembering that within the fiction, within the imaginary world, there are philologists, elven lore masters, who reflect on language and its transformation. Pangalos out of Gondolin. Is that the supposed source within the fiction that the texts that become included in The Silmarillion? The name means scholar guy, in Elvish, and he's a kind of mouthpiece for Tolkien to him. Tolkien ascribes the mysterious aphorism, quote, the making of a lumber.
The lumber is the chief character of an Incan. Linked lumber is the Quenya word for language or tunnel. So the drive to express oneself in words is the essential characteristic of all beings, in which a spirit and a physical body are fuzed together, which includes both elves and men, making languages spontaneous and natural to them, and lore masters like Pangalos delight, as Tolkien himself did in tracing the twists and turns of the natural development of language.
What no one within the legendarium, with one exception, does, is make a commonly constructed language. There is only one being in the world of middle earth, who makes an artificial language to suit his own ends, and that being is Sauron, the dark Lord. We are told that orcs speak a degraded set of jargons of their own, but Sauron desired to impose a language of his own devising upon Mordor.
The language of the ring ring versus the hideous Black Speech, which causes the Elves and Rivendell to cover their ears. But remember that, according to Tolkien's politics, central planning of any kind, he was a small c conservative is a bad thing. So language, planning, imposing an orc slang upon people, as is bad can. So the Black Speech is a conlang, which was intended by silent to function as an orc. Slang.
At this point I need to introduce the languages themselves, and as mentioned, I'm mainly going to talk about Quenya and Sindarin. So the earliest root of Quenya, she's kind of elven Latin, is that it's designed to echo, the delight that Tolkien took in discovering the grammar of the Finnish language as an undergraduate. He has a wonderful description, of finding Finnish grammar. It's like a cellar full of bottles of wonderful wine. Of a completely unique and unknown flavor to him.
And then, I've giving you a quotation here. The archaic flavor of law is meant to be a kind of elven Latin. So Quenya is used, within the world of the text for high, ritual and solemn purposes. It's spoken in the blessed realm in man, and is brought to middle earth by nodal exile, such as Galadriel. Quenya is Galadriel's native language. I don't want to discuss its grammar too much, but we might notice things about it that it's vowel rich. It doesn't have a lot of consonant clusters.
And it has a very restrictive phonology that the way that sounds can can be combined is quite limited. So it has a very distinctive sound on the ear. It's also highly inflected, meaning that it has lots of cases. 9 or 10 Finnish has 14 and cases are used to indicate things that in English we do with prepositions normally. So, I've given you a quotation from a lindell's famous oath, the beginning of it, which is sung by Aragorn at his coronation in the film. That's in the third of the trilogy.
At a r l low end or end to end. A real low means out of the sea. The l ending is a case called the ablative end or end to middle earth. The end is the case called the additive. The going to case. It's also what's called a gluten ative a gluten native, which means that there are multiple endings can be tacked onto one root meaning different things in each case, so that a single word can express a quite complex idea.
Here is a phrase for you nitrogen tense nigh is a particle that's used to indicate a wish. To prove a is the future of the verb, meaning to keep them to means they means it. Night rant is all one word. Okay, that's a gluten ative. And that's how finish works. That's a Hungarian works, amongst other things. So Quenya has a kind of lofty, beautiful complexity, a lovely open structure combined with the capacity for dense expression of ideas.
As with the image of finish as a cellar filled with bottles of mysterious and wonderful wine talking, as we've seen with that, Tolkien was very fond of talking about languages having a flavor, and the flavor of Welsh was particularly to his taste as a boy. He never lived near a railway station in Birmingham, and first saw Welsh written on the side of vehicles. Okay, this is a quote that those of you that, I know at least some of you in the room speak Welsh. We'll get the joke with this one.
I heard it coming out of the West. It struck me in the names on coal trucks and drawing nearer, it flickered past on station signs, a flash of strange spelling, but a hint of a language old and yet alive. It pierced my linguistic heart. The joke, by the way, is that the English and the Welsh in that sign don't match. The Welsh says I'm not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated. This quotation gives a hint of how unusual Tolkien was.
What kind of young, youngish adolescent has a linguistic heart and is able to articulate it? It's a kind of question I should ask. Interview. So, he was possessed of an extreme, inborn kind of sensitivity to language.
That esthetic response, that piercing of the heart is the root of the undergirding idea behind Tolkiens art languages, that phonology and grammar can themselves be the medium of exquisite artistic expression, as oil and canvas are for the painter, Sindarin or gray elven amounts to a linguist lifelong and passionate homage to the Welsh language.
If you seen the Peter Jackson films, almost all the conversation in Elvish is in this language, and much of the Elvish dialog in season two of Rings of Power, is also in Sindarin. People moan on about the Rings of Power. Sorry, sorry, I really like it and I love hearing more of it. Clark, who's a native Welsh speaker speaking Sindarin because she gets it exactly right. Exactly right. And here I want to give you, a practical demonstration.
My favorite bit, in the two towers, in the Jackson trilogy, in The Two Towers is a poignant scene in which Elrond speaks to Arwen and prophesies her future. It's the most haunting and emotionally plangent part of that film. For me. And he says, but you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as night fall in winter, which comes without a star. Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading trees. Until all the world is changed.
In the long years of your life, utterly spent. And I've translated this into high register, faintly biblical Welsh. And I want you to look at this and listen with your linguistic heart, like the young Tolkien looking at the cold shocks. Now identify for Mark to Baha man to what look like man poetry. Stir that. But you can also look I have I thou have Saturn and the rocket and heart of the other identical season poly he nested all feed Kiley no wheat archival.
Another item yon devoted gaily gaily dsb and slew it. Here is the same passage translated into center in Aki. Yeah, lean, but any other folk means the wealth, I may add witness. So he will lend me three with old Ellen. See that the guanine and mini again doing new light video. Nardini, Jonathan Bank. We stand then Arthelene and Ethan. I'm a gilded and here I would like to thank my student Jasmine Ashworth. Jasmine, wave your hand. Who checked and corrected my senior in with great expertise,
so thank you very much. Jasmine. It should be apparent that in sound and texture, these are very close chefs talk about the mouthfeel of a dish. By analogy, we might talk of the airfield, of these two languages, if you didn't speak either, it might be quite hard to tell them apart. What do they have in common? There are no medial or final voiced stops. That is no purpose to occur inside or at the end of words. Instead, you have but does and Gus. There are clear vowels in the continental manner.
The diphthongs are I, o, and oin. An egg there are rolled R's are. The Welsh translation has the very distinctive Welsh double l sound, as in fluid. The last word complete, utter. This is the sound you get in phonetically or somebodies. Whilst it didn't occur in the Sindarin passage as I've translated it there, thanks to Jasmine, it did occur in the language just much more rarely than in Welsh. You get it in words like squeak, which means a single ear.
Great elven is designed, as Tolkien specifically said, to be distinctively European in style and structure, but not in detail. Now Tolkien you medieval Welsh very well purchasing John Morris Jones, a Welsh grammar when he was an undergraduate, and his Sir John Morris Jones. This was the great grammar of the language by one of the greatest Welsh scholars of Tolkien's day.
Here's a portrait of him looking very dignified in his doctoral robes, so it's worth imagining the young Tolkien poring over the pages of a grammar and absorbing the detail, of, the language, looking under the bonnet of Welsh, as it were. In order to transmute all this detail into something, it became part of, his world. I just want to draw attention to this hilarious phrase, annoying, less inclined. So you have to make. I know your wife wouldn't do that. And for a lot.
There's just happened to be the first page that I photographed when I opened the ground. I think the most important thing to get over about centering is the fun esthetic element behind its creation. It's designed to be supreme, beautiful to the ear. Tolkien found Welsh extraordinarily lovely, a judgment which I wholeheartedly share. And his artificial language has something of the subjective feel of Welsh as well as its own distinctive quality.
At this point, we need to think about what Welsh is. I need to try and go back here. Welsh is descended from the British language, part of the Celtic language family. This is why Tolkien admiringly used to call Welsh the elder language of the men of Britain, because, at least in its roots, it's been here longer than English has. The word British in this sense may be unfamiliar. It means the Celtic language of the ancient Britons, those squabbling, squabbling, woad painted guys.
Where are they in the picture? There they are. The squabbling, woad painted people that the Romans encountered in the conquest of the island, and who themselves became romanized in due course. In Tolkien's day, the preferred term for this language was. But these days we say British.
Between roughly 500 A.D. and 700 A.D., the British language transformed into Welsh by a complicated and concatenating series of sound changes in exactly the same way that Latin turned into Italian or Spanish or French or Romanian, as well as their other siblings. Any given language changes over time via the operation of changes in pronunciation, which we call sound changes, and these sound changes follow sound laws, as they're called, and these are regular and scientific.
They happen to all the words in a given language. This may seem a bit unexpected if you haven't encountered before as an idea, but the point is, linguistic change is scientific because ultimately it's rooted in the biological apparatus of our lips, tongues, mouths, throats, and so on. So when a language changes, and all spoken languages are changing all the time. The ways in which they can change are very large, but not infinite.
And philologists can reconstruct a kind of body of algorithms which show, predictably and in great detail, how a parent language transformed over time into its daughter languages. We work out what changed and when. Now, speaking in an extremely broad brush way, slides are out of order. Tolkien took the sound laws with the sound changes that had changed Welsh British into Welsh, which were very well understood by his day, and he applied them to his common elder in series of roots.
And the result was Sindarin, with its Welsh. If you. I want to look at how these changes work. In the case of British being transformed into Welsh. So on the left hand side you can see some names in British, and on the right hand side you can see the Welsh descendants, some Anglo Cronus, a sixth century king becomes Welsh male gone Moana, the ancient name of Anglesey becomes Mon. Sabrina. The ancient name for the Severn becomes Hafren Water. Gurney's water gun. Bad man. Let's in the Saxons.
Sorry. Anglo-Saxon colleagues. Sorry, sorry. Becomes Goodsir. Regan Turner. Divine Queen becomes the character Rhiannon and back to Noss becomes a myth on another mythological figure from medieval Welsh texts. What's happened here? One really obvious thing is that final syllables have been dropped. Consonant clusters have got similar. I've got more simple. So if you look at GLA in Mangalore has become a diphthong mile. Okay. Stops have been voiced and cut inside.
Words have become. But the and guh. Now we can see the same process, the absolutely identical set of sound changes happening in situ in his and more by the way. And from British into Welsh. Yep. Test becomes Danette, PA becomes Gwyneth, Matt Potts becomes Mab, pathos becomes Tod, mama becomes mum. Okay, now from some Sindarin examples.
Ara. When they became Arwen, Minas Tirith became Minas Tirith, another regal maiden with a crown of light becomes Galadriel like a fresh or green becomes like an silvan Elvish. Tolkien Don Ashley noted that became leg, which is why it's Legolas, not Legolas. Green leaves Mukta to fight, becomes Mitha. The sound changes are identical.
In some places, Tolkien introduced deliberate fine tunings of the phonological developments in order to give a more esthetically pleasing outcome in his own eyes, and I'll give you two examples. Welsh words have had since around the year 900, a strong stress on the penultimate syllable. It's one of the things that gives the work the language, its distinctive cadence. Before 900 or so, Welsh words were stressed on the final syllable, as in Modern Hebrew.
Tolkien tweaked the algorithm that determined the stress patterns of Sindarin words so that the stress in words of three syllables will always fall on the first syllable and not on the second syllable. So we say Aragorn, Legolas, and Thor, not Aragorn, Legolas, and then Thor. Compare Welsh and my son Cherwell in stress on the penultimate syllable. For Tolkien, there was apparently such a thing as sounding too Welsh.
Rather similar is the problem of the distribution at the sound as in center, in which I mentioned earlier when Tolkien was composing the Lord of the rings. The language which he would later call Sindarin actually had a different name, altering, and its speakers had a slightly different historical backstory. Within the legendarium. In altering historical phonology, any word that had begun with a look back in common altering would begin with a Fleur.
In altering this was a directly, A sound change was directly borrowed from British into Welsh. So, the word the root lamp gave, you know, durin some the root lass gave you an altering sound. Is. So the sound, as in altering was as frequent as it is in Welsh. So northern sounded very Welsh indeed. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, Tolkien decided that this had been an error, so Orlando Bloom would have been playing Legolas. If you haven't changed his mind.
Ancient LA, at the start of words he decided had stayed as LA, not turned into S, and he set about mechanically changing the ordering into Sindarin. So Lum now yielded the root, some language right? But he had a problem in one place in the Lord of the rings. He'd already published a name with the sound as on. So the hill of is to. After leaving the falls of Rose.
Sam and Frodo paddled over the river and reached I'm on South, At the time Tolkien wrote the novel, he'd been thinking in terms of Noldor in, the route for hearing had been lost in common Elden Ring. And that gave you the form. How is it? Through the various sound changes? But now, in order to get around the problem, he decided that the route had to have been slash with a sun on the front, and that when there had been an original slur sound that would give you the in Sindarin.
So that meant that he could keep an eye on slough as hill of ears, and it would give the correct form. The form that he'd already fixed in the text. So he must have felt the satisfaction that one feels when getting away with a very nifty bit of microsurgery on one's language. All of this is to stress the fact that nothing is. By chance, Tolkien didn't hand wave any of these sound changes away in the Elvish languages as we have them.
We're dealing with an unfinished body of material, but it's superbly intricate and of staggering precision and patches and workarounds that this sort are actually quite rare. Sindarin, it should be stressed, isn't called Welsh or any kind of knockoff. Almost no words are actually the same in form and meaning in the two languages, although because the phonology are almost identical, there are lots of times in which the same sounds a word with the same sound has a different meaning.
So this is actually a really good example of how he is considering things that in Welsh, the same sequence of sounds. There were a few reminiscent words or means from in both languages, means and in both languages, but these are pretty uncommon. The level of design is astonishing. By his death, Tolkien had elaborated more than 12,000 words, 12,000 and indeed, Sindarin and Elvish in general is particularly full of words.
As far as I'm concerned. The feel appropriate, the taste in the mind, like the thing that they denote. This is subjective, but here's some examples. Think sudden move. Netherland. Sound of bells. Paladin a kingfisher, literally a fish chair. Gwyneth. Virginity. Gorgo. Wrath. Extreme horror. Which is the name of the plane in Mordor through winter, reminiscent of Welsh trail frost glower. Sunlight, not ness. Mother.
We know that elf children called their mothers Nanna. Mum Mithril Gray Canada to play the harp to new Violet Nightingale, or daughter of Twilights, literally analogous to Storm of Wind died a canopy. And I love this one guy. Lilith butterfly. This brings me to the grammar. Sindarin grammar is in many ways a close recreation of Welsh grammar, just close enough to be horribly confusing to me as a specialist. And I want to talk about two examples here.
The first of which is pluralization patterns, and the second is something called initial consonant mutation. So, when you want to make a word plural in Welsh, there are lots of actually ways to do it. But a big chunk of nouns do it this way. If you change the vowels inside the word, and this derives from a lost final e sound in the plural. So one koru idea two crew did one a staff a chamber to Estévez chambers, one taller, a bore, two tier fours.
We have a class of nouns which do this in English as well. Man, men, goose, geese, mouse, mice, house. In Sindarin. This is the way you make all words plural. So add an 18 man, one man, two men. Balrog, Bell reek. Demons of might. 1 or 2 in. In Sindarin as well. Adjectives also pluralize in the way that nouns do with sound with I affection inside the words. So Adam a gladder means a glorious man. Glorious men. Is Edin a glory with vowel changes.
This only occurs in a small number of adjectives in Welsh, but it is there. Marrow is the adjective that means dead. Metal is the plural form of that adjective. The dead. And it gets a bit more complicated as. With this we come to a notorious feature of all the modern Celtic languages. We're familiar with the idea probably that, according to changes in grammar, the endings of words will change. In the Celtic languages, the beginnings of words change as well.
Okay, according to set patterns, these changes encode grammatical information, and they're usually triggered by preceding words or by the grammatical context in which the word is embedded. Welsh has three different types or patterns of mutation. Sindarin, like Welsh, is sister language. Cornish seems to have had five. Tolkien, by the way, seems to have changed his mind a lot in relation to the initial mutations.
And this is one place, I think, in which Tolkien let Sindarin kind of get away from him, so that it became more and more complex on phonological grounds, more complex than is plausible for a language that would people would actually speak. At least I thought that. And then I suddenly realized that within the fiction, this language is being spoken by people who are immortal.
So presumably they can remember what the correct grammatical rule was 2000 years ago, and so they would have a different relationship to time and language change. Going back to constant mutation, I'm only going to look at one type of the five. Now, and this is the most common. It's called soft mutation. And it occurs in Welsh and, and in, in the scene center in system is very similar to the Welsh one. And here is how it works.
And remember we're talking about the first consonant of words, the first consonant. So in Welsh a word that begins in the first, when soft, we tend to listen for cut becomes good. Yeah becomes looking the double T good vanishes altogether. Isn't the first flap goes like that, goes the verb perfect. Most of the first s isn't affected to those today. That's the Welsh system.
The ones that are not highlighted are against in situ, but because of the fact that both of us got this, it is not based on the purpose of the tongue goes to the. Because he had fluffed around with words with the sun and C and use actually different from which was necessary for words, so becomes slur which for the Welsh this will seem extremely odd. Okay, so that's where it differs. And that's because of his little patch with work around about the sound as in centering.
There are a couple, that are completely alien to Welsh G you see there. So hope it's found in Irish, but not so much. Borrowed that one from Irish. What is the effect of all this? It's esthetically softening, like mist, like the weathering of rocks. It obscures the contours of words, making roots difficult to discern. That's, in my view, rather a kind of mysterious effect.
Tolkien at one point says that Sindarin developed because the elves speech changed with the change fulness of mortal lands, and constant mutation is a kind of phonological embodiment of that change fulness. The words themselves shift and change on a clause by clause basis. I'm going to give you examples of how this works. The use of soft mutation is triggered by different things in the two languages. In Welsh it occurs after the definite article if a noun is feminine.
So kath is the word that means cat, and it's a feminine noun against the cat, because cup becomes good myth. It's the word that means daughter of bath. The daughter becomes the masculine. Nouns do not undergo soft mutation after that because he a dog, a key, the dog. Sindarin, like all the Elvish languages, has no grammatical gender, and in Sindarin all singular nouns undergo soft mutation. After the definite article. Cara's a moated fortress eagerness.
The moated fortress Gallus a tree E Olaf the tree to Neuville the nightingale Edith. Inuvialuit the nightingale. Palladian A kingfisher. Lydian. The kingfisher said A blood headache, the blood. Here's a little example. Another picture. In Welsh, sometimes, the grammatical subject undergoes soft mutation. And I think in some, some, some medieval even, I guess, Western love castle life. That's why some did not want to work from the cut on the 29th becomes this is the reader response. Raven.
There is no bridge over the River Pont, which becomes falls. Now in Sindarin, the direct object, not the subject, undergoes something. And I'm giving you this from the film. But, that poignancy which Elrond had when they're talking to each other, everyone says to Art when I'm wearing velveteen, and I myself do I have your menace now? Objects, dandelions, documentation to tell.
And she says, daddy, that you know that you have my knowledge and that the concept and it's really lovely touch and that which is the short form of Adar father, that. I'm going to show shortly things that we've discovered since those films are made show that almost everything in that phrase is wrong. But this is a problem.
Okay, so along with this kind of stuff, he devised prepositions, several hundred verbs, adjectives, adverbs, exclamations, conjunctions, forms, and his papers are marked carefully in a manner as poetic or archaic or dialectical, and so on. There are irregular verbs and analogical forms. There are lexical borrowings and a small handful of un analyzable and mysterious words. I'm just going to count to ten. That is not. It's actually died on the. And see if we can do it. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Just to give you a last taste of what they sound like, this is the the numerals. Counting was first in die three peddler complex website. We now dig and in Sindarin meaning partner that cannot 11 in order to make a pie. With apologies to the Welsh speakers in the room, I find hollow sticks in my mind. Much, much more is the word for out the noise. And I find it hard not to, count in dietary Petra pin quick site to cloth now Dec. So can you actually speak this?
There's not a lot of text as opposed to reams of personal names and place names. You could put all the text that Tolkien wrote in Sindarin on a sheet of A4. There's a short letter from Aragorn to Sam Gamgee, which is meant to go into the appendices of the Lord of the rings. There's a version of the Lord's Prayer, and a few other, short sentences. Tolkien seems to have looked a little askance at the idea that people might want to take an interest in his, private hobby and speak Elvish.
Themselves, so he never put the full it into a grammar, from which we could use. And he continued to tinker and vacillate about, quite important aspects of the grammar of the language into the last years of his life. These days, hitherto unpublished papers by Tolkien on his Elvish languages are gradually being put before the public under the control of a small group acting on behalf of the Tolkien estate. And this is, a highly technical and very, very, very tricky kind of thing to do.
The journals are convenient for, and part of the Lamb Baron, newsletters and the book of Elven languages, and they put out new volumes every so often. The results can be radical in terms of our understanding of how the languages work. Over the last 20 years, since I first became interested in Sindarin, the following things have happened. There have been situations in which our best guesses have turned out to be completely wrong.
On the Quenya side, the poor editors of Parliament, Elder Lamberton unfortunately found that there was an error in the title. It should have been Elder Lambie on, but there was no way to know that before the particular paper by Tolkien was edited and published. What we've seen in the verbal system, for example, turns out to be very much more complicated, and expressive than we thought. 20 years ago.
Some personal pronouns are pretty different to what we had imagined, including the endings on verbs. We thought, for example, that the second person singular ending the you that thou forme, was Which is why Arwen says Kerry fella's name. You have my love. It turns out it was girl we just didn't know. So every time someone says you something in, the Jackson trilogy, they're using the wrong form of the verb.
Tolkien also changed his mind about certain features of Sindarin grammar, which seem to be long settled. Remember that no Sindarin apart from a few lines in the Lord of the rings had been published in his lifetime, so he was completely free to tinker with his private copy. I want to give you two maddening examples of Tolkien changing his mind. We thought that the word for not was settled. It was, okay. And Tolkien had put this in, the Lord of the rings.
It's, there's an inscription on the tomb of Gil Ryan, whose Aragorn's mother, Nicene, and the extended version of the films, in which he has a little epitaph that says, only 18. Who had been unnamed, which means I gave the hope to the Dunedain to to men who have been. I do not keep hope for myself, being Aragorn's child name. Okay, so there's, the negative. For some reason, late in life, Tolkien decided that oo was wrong.
He didn't like it because it was too close to the Greek negative, which is also and of course, is the issue that you get all the way back here in utopian utopia, no place. Okay. So he decided that it was too similar to the Greek word for not, and he had to replace it, because he had already published in the Lord of the rings a bit with, Ooh, he had to say that it was a, it became a root that meant difficult or impossible rather than just a negative. Okay, so I gave the hope to men.
It was impossible for me to keep hope for myself. Another workaround. Okay. The actual negative, he decided, should be last or allow or law before a verb. I could strangle him for this. I could dig him up and strangle him because of course law is the Hebrew negative. If it's not okay to copy the Greek negative, why is it okay to copy the Hebrew one? And he actually says in the note, that is no objection. Book is okay. So anytime anyone in the films says not, it's wrong. And worse was to come.
Since I started writing this lecture a month ago, it has come out that Tolkien infuriatingly decided to change the word for the. It went from being E, as you can see here, we so the hope to e or n before a vowel. So, this is it's more complicated than this, but this is a simple example. Tell me to sign in the old system E2 with Llanishen. So I should say it's this time he adopts the D and under the new system tale sign and the sign. And at us the dear.
That, of course, means that, That's wrong in the Lord of the rings. And we don't know how he would have got around that, had he lived. So anyone who's ever got an Elvish tattoo, it's all wrong. Here is an example of how this should work. Going back to this lovely scene, do I not also have your love? You have my love, father. What they say is, I am very, very. If any other it should be, I am lost having never left Queen Sophie given an other. Okay, that's changed in 20 years.
And it will continue to change as we discover more and more about Tolkien's intentions for his language. So the basic rule is, every time a new piece of Tolkien's own writing on his languages emerges, there's a surprise, whether welcome or unwelcome as the case may be. So moral of the story don't get attitude in Sindarin and I'll leave it there. Thanks.