~ What drew you to Tolkien in the first place? And furthermore, what made you decide to start studying the languages?
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- I read the Hobbit around the age of six or seven. It had a lot of what I liked in books: strange alphabets, maps, heroic adventure, and a feeling of deep history and time-distance. From there I moved on to The Lord of the Rings, and then other books as they were published.
- I suppose I began studying the languages because I have always felt the lure of the undeciphered and unanalyzed: I enjoy the feeling of discovery and of learning something new. But that goes for not only Tolkien's languages, but any languages, especially those which are not very well known or understood.
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~ Studying the structure of an incomplete, unused set of languages can be no easy task. What have you had to do in order to reach the point you’re at now?
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~~ I've had to sift through thousands of words and names, analyzing their structure and sorting them into groups and word-families, looking for repeating patterns; I've had to reconstruct the entire history of some of the languages. The Appendices to A Gateway to Sindarin, which reproduce several of my data files, give a good idea of what kind of work I had to do.
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~ For the films, how did you derive the less common languages? (i.e. Khuzdul, or Black Speech)
~~ I started with the words that were known from these languages, and looked for existing patterns; then I created new words that matched the existing words in sound and structure. Then I filled in gaps by making things up, usually by analogy with real-world languages. Thus Neo-Khuzdul acquired a verbal morphology similar to that of Arabic or Hebrew, which is appropriate since Khuzdul was intended by Tolkien to be Semitic in structure (though not in sound).
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~ Again, for the films, which of the actors you worked with seemed to be the most comfortable with the languages? The best pronunciation?
~~ I did not work directly with the actors, but my explanations and examples of pronunciation were used by the language coaches who did work with them. I was generally pleased with the way the pronunciation came out. I am especially fond of Liv Tyler's handling of Sindarin.
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~ What is the extent of the usage regarding Tolkien's languages, usage meaning writing, speaking, etc.? This especially turns to the Elvish tongues, as those are the most well-known and developed, to my knowledge.
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- There are quite a few people out there composing in Quenya or Sindarin: the quality of these efforts varies a bit, but the degree of variation has probably narrowed a bit in recent years. I don't know how many people there are, but I am sure that more Quenya and Sindarin has been written over the past five years than Tolkien ever wrote in his lifetime.
- I don't know of any communities where people are trying to speak one of Tolkien's languages -- it would require a fair bit of innovation with regard to grammar and vocabulary to be successful in doing so.
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~ Are there any particular patterns in the grammar/structure of Tolkien's language? Is there any obvious resemblance to the structure of a living language?
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~~ Of course! If there is structure, there are of course patterns. In general, I would say that the Elvish languages resemble Indo-European languages more than any others, with a dash of influence from Finno-Ugric and Semitic languages, and nothing from farther afield -- no Turkic or Sino-Tibetan or Bantu, for instance, unless the last-named group influenced Tolkien's decisions to allow initial nasalized stops like nd and mb in proto-Elvish! Quenya resembles a fairly archaic Indo-European language, like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit -- particularly the latter in term of the complexity and richness of it morphology. Sindarin resembles a more 'developed' I-E language typical of medieval and modern times, with simplified morphology but an elaborate set of morphophonological rules. It is actually particularly intended to resemble modern Welsh in sound and structure, though there are still considerable differences.
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~ As far as I know, Tolkien has created some fourteen languages. Out of those (and my count may well be off), how many have you studied?
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~~ I've studied (as far as there was material to be studied) Sindarin, Quenya, Telerin, Silvan/Nandorin/Ilkorin, "Danian", "Leikvian" (only a couple of words) and other nameless Elvish tongues for which we have only a word, or maybe just a few sound-correspondences. I've also studied Khuzdul, Adunaic, Westron (Sôval Phârë), the small bits we have of Rohirric, Black Speech and its Orkish variants, and the handful of words we have in the speech of the Druedain. Um, I think that would be all of them.
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~ Do you have any further plans regarding Tolkien's languages?
~~ I'll keep studying them. I think I might turn back to studying Quenya soon, though I'll continue working with Sindarin.
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~ The pronunciation of words in Elvish ending in "e" appears to have some controversy over it. Is there really any difference between the pronunciation of e and ë? It's said that, for example, in the case of "Namarie", it is phonetically "nuh-mah-ree-ay", but the guides say that the ending "e" (and "e" in general) should be pronounced as the "e" in "bed", so to speak. Is this actually true?
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~~ There's no difference between e and ë, and both are similar to the e in "bet" or "bed". The use of the ë is to remind English-speakers that it is actually pronounced, so they know for instance that karë is two syllables and is not pronounced like "care"! Namárië should be pronounced, approximately, nah-MAAH-ree-eh.
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~ What effect do the accents have over letters? A double-accented "u" versus a single-accented or plain "u", for example, or a plain "i" versus one with a circumflex over it. Or, for that matter, is there a difference?
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- I do not know what you mean by "a double-accented u". ú (accented u) differs from u by being pronounced for a longer period of time: two beats of a metronome instead of one. u (circumflex-u), in Sindarin would be pronounced for even longer: two-and-a-half beats or even three. But in non-Elvish languages Tolkien used the circumflex simply to mark ordinary long vowels.
- In Quenya there is also a distinction of quality between é (accented e) and ó (accented o) and their short variants. e and o are (approximately) the e and au in bet and caught (Midwestern American pronunciation). é and ó correspond to the sounds ai, oa in bait and coat but *without* the "i" and "u" sounds which come at the end of them. That is, in Quenya "bait" and "coat" might be transcribed béit and cóut; if you can get rid of the i and u part of these diphthongs, while still keeping the vowel pronounced for a longer time, you will have approximately the sound of Quenya é and ó.
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~ Your book, A Gateway to Sindarin, has now been published. Could you tell a little of what is actually within the context?
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A Gateway to Sindarin is a comprehensive grammar of Sindarin: it covers the history of the language, the sounds of the language, how it can be written, the historical development of the sounds of Sindarin, mutations that occur in consonants and vowels, the formation of plurals, the use of adjectives, pronouns, and preposition, the morphology of verbs; how words are put together, how one creates compounds, and the syntax of sentences. It also goes over the texts that we know exist in Sindarin and analyzes them; has what I think is the most complete existing glossary of Sindarin (Sindarin-English and English-Sindarin), with the Sindarin-English part containing grammatical and etymological information as well as sources; a listing of Eldarin roots found in Sindarin and the words derived from them; a list of Sindarin names of people, things and places; and a few miscellaneous discussions of the Sindarin names for the Valar and Maiar, the Sindarin number system, and Sindarin calendar names. There is also a glossary of linguistic terms used in the book, and an annotated bibliography of sources that the Sindarin student can use.
