Submitted by PianoCharged t3_11c604h in todayilearned
Yeah he invented a language, but he also knew language can't exist without culture/history/mythology so he started working on that.
He realised that language is so closely related to those things he basically developed his own Norse/Celtic epic to carry his invented language!
It was the ONLY LOGICAL thing for him to have done really
And to make up for the fact there wasn’t much in the way of surviving Anglo myths since the saxons introduced themselves on the island.
That dingus went about it all backwards, what was he thinking?
"I need to do something SERIOUSLY escapist if I'm going to stay sane in the trenches of Flanders."
For a certain value of sane.
Granted, it took a certain pre-existing level of obsessive nerdiness to set out to create an elvish language from scratch in a bomb shelter.
Well, I think That's far from sane
Interesting to look at a map of Iceland and some of the place names look like they belong in his books. Tolkien was a big fan of Old Norse and Icelandic.
I mean pretty famously the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are just straight up ripped from the poetic edda.
But do they beat Bagginswood?
No no, bagginswood was the actor who played frodo
Tolkien was also deeply interested in mythology and fairy tales, it's not just linguistics
He started working on the silmarillion as early as during WWI
The OG "World Builder". Dude literally invented a mythology just to satisfy his linguistic interests.
This is the first thing I've ever read that makes me want to read all his LOTR books now!! That's so cool!
*canon
whoops
The elephant is in the room
The truth is in your face when you hear the British canon go boom!
The Neal Stephenson book Reamde centers around a MMOG that was invented then had an entire 100% realistic planetary geology created. The players having realistic mining, water flows & mountain ranges were important to the development team.
Even the creation story of Tolkienverse is testament to that. Arda was sung into existence. Music was first, then song, and the song was given shape as the physical universe.
Philology not linguistics i think
>what a lot of people don't realize
I mean that's fairly well known.
Fairly well known among fans of Tolkien, but not so much among the general public
Always assumed it was from words meaning “whale horse”, but I’ve never looked up the etymology…
Yep, in German it's Walross which literally means whale horse.
(Wal is whale and Ross is horse, even though the more common word for it is "Pferd")
Wal means strange or odd iirc. Hence the areas of wallonia, wallachia, wales etc on the borders of germanic peoples and also walnut which came from the mediterranean area and was strange to germanic peoples
The meaning could be related, but I learned it as meaning strange as in foreign, more specifically. The irony of the Anglo-Saxons calling the Welsh what amounts to “foreigners” is astounding lol
Those damn foreigners that already lived here!
But the English word for Germany means kin... oops looked it up on Wikipedia and they say that's probably Bullsh**.
It likely derives from a name of a Celtic tribe and was generalized first to Celtic Latin speaker and then to foreigner.
The Koreans will still do it - call you a foreigner even in your own country.
‘Walmart’
From the last name Walton, which may come from foreign town per wikipedia: Walton (surname)
Walmart = Strange Mart
Hmmm.... is Nominative determinism or Aptronym a better fit?
that's funny. so then their name for the whale is also just their word for "strange or odd", as in "that animal is so weird, let's just call it weird"
Oh interesting! This would explain "uberwald" in Terry Pratchett as a shoutout to Transylvania but also "super weird".
Wald means forest in german.
Yup, probably from Dutch for whale-horse. The native English word was, well, horsewhale (horshƿæl).
Walvis-paard -> walrus?
Dunno ... sound s fishy.
Een 'ros' is een paard ;).
(In Dutch, one word for a horse or steed today is 'ros')
Bicycle is a "stalen ros" or steel horse
Funnily enough in German it is "Drahtesel" which literally reads "Wire donkey".
Witzig
And for Flanders: het Ros Beiaard.
Let's be honest here. The animal basically is just a whale horse.
Walrus is a fun word. I like walrus
I am the Walrus
Shut up, Donny
I am the Walrus
Great episode.
The Walrus was Paul
Kinky wall russs
Having Wargs in the Hobbit suddenly makes more sense - the word is an old one, but he revived it in this particular spelling. I wonder if he felt a secret smugness in knowing he was putting something into his slice of the dictionary.
He did that with a lot of words. His work as an etymologist didn't stop at a dictionary.
Baldrick : I'm quite pleased with "dog." Blackadder : Yes, and your definition of "dog" is? Baldrick : "Not a cat."
Funny because obviously it’s nonsensical yet if someone gave that definition I would know it’s referring to a dog (even without having watched blackadder).
My God, I love that show!
He also had a transcript rejected because the plural of dwarf was dwarfs, and not dwarves, according to the oxford English dictionary. He told the editor that he wrote the oxford English dictionary, and to quit correcting him.
The other thing to note is the entire concept of language is that it evolves over times. Words like "doghouse" and the name "Vanessa" were outright invented by Shakespeare. They just became words and were accepted. Thus, while Tolkein is correct, at the same time, if enough people wrote and accepted "dwarves," it's also valid.
A good example would be "virus." Both "viruses" and "virii" are accepted as words, depending largely on the context.
> name "Vanessa" were outright invented by Shakespeare
Google tells me it was made by Jonathan Swift.
You might be thinking of Jessica.
Etymology? Wonder where that came from?
Etumos in ancient Greek means "truth", and etymology was looking for the true meaning of words. A little underwhelming now that I've looked it up I can't lie.
> etumos
Prostagma?
Ne.
Voulomé
Kalos.
But what about the etymology of the word "etumos"?
Ultimately, we can reconstruct that there was a Proto-Indo-European root *h₁es- that meant something like "to be" (also the root of the English word was) that came into Greek as eteos and its closely related or derived cousin etumos.
nice! Proto-indo-european is fascinating how a random language that was one of thousands in Eurasia ended up basically being the root of 95% of language spoken across Europe.
Especially considering the fact that humans were already living on the continent during the period when PIE would have been spoken. Basque alone stands as the only pre-PIE language still widely spoken in Europe.
Uralic languages too - Finnish, Hungarian etc.
But Basque is the only language that has no surviving relatives.
No, uralic languages came later.
Derived from "Entymology, which is, of course, the study of Ents.
Not to be confused with entomology, which is the study of insects. I imagine there's a potential for some awkward moments in confusing the two.
Shine on Bend1310, you crazy bastard, shine on!
If I've learned anything during my time on the internet, it's that there's always a relevant XKCD. Bless you.
It’s a vicious cycle
"Etym" meaning "I have no freaking idea" and "ology" meaning "love of," which secretly means "study of" in Ancient Greek.
It's funny that this used to be a job a person could have. These days all the words are already in the dictionary, even the ones towards the end of the alphabet.
Research into words never stops, whether ancient or brand new, so it's still a job people do have.
Someone definitely got paid by the Oxford University Press to spend a few months researching the etymology of "fleek"
'Sebastian, why do you seem so morose?'
'Because of "Rizz", Jeffrey! From which vestibule of hades did this monstrosity materialise? Mother was right, I should've been a lapidiarist.'
'I thought you never took a shining took that?'
'Get out, Jeffrey'.
It's amazing how many words have been discovered nowadays. Like, pretty much all of the W's- heck, even into the Z's!!
I'm not out-and-out saying "you're wrong" (because I know it's ... correct) but it highlights the problem I have with books and "edition number" type publications. First edition OED existed nearly a decade before Tolkien was born and lasted until 15 years after his death. Second edition is to be superseded in ~2037.
Although the first edition started appearing in 1884, that was only the section A-Ant. The whole thing was done only in 1928.
Tolkien worked on parts of the first edition in 1919-1920.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#History
What can I say, I’m just spreading the word from what the article said and what I found surprising/interesting. I figured the information was relatively accurate, coming from OED’s official site
People seem to forget his day job was as a philologist.
I wonder how he'd feel about that semicolon.
Probably felt it rhymed with the elvish word for friend.
My take on this is to be surprised that the OED isn't nearly as old of a publication as I assumed. I was thinking it was several hundreds of years old, at least, given how long Oxford University has been around.
I think the first edition took a long time to assemble. I seem to recall one of the articles I was reading last night mention that the project started in the 1890’s
"Work began on the dictionary in 1857..."
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An amazing wordsmith who I thank profusely for providing access to such an incredible world called Middle Earth.
Tolkien also worked on a bible translation, the Jerusalem Bible of 1970 or so, where he translated the book of Jonah, and Salvador frikking Dali did the illustrations!
Reminds me of the word "timshel" in East of Eden.
I worked for a place that had the entire 26 volumes of the OED. There was nothing like sitting down at lunch, opening a volume at random, and just getting lost.
😎
Saying this title outloud pleases me.
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Nixon4Prez t1_ja23j2z wrote
JRR Tolkien was primarily interested in linguistics - what a lot of people don't realize is that the entire world of the Lord of the Rings and the entire Tolkien canon originated as a setting for his invented languages. Elvish came first, the whole Tolkienverse came about as a setting for it.