[Wikipedia-l] Quenya language request

[Mark Williamson]

Interesingly enough, Tolkien's words echo those words of people
speaking of minority languages.

According to them, Sardinian is like monkeys mimicking Latin,
Penobscot is just primitive babbling resembling the cries of an ape,
Welsh is horrendously primitive-sounding, Manx is filled with hatred
and contempt...

Mark

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 22:42:56 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 22:21:18 -0500, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> 
> > If we were going to create a(nother) Middle Earth language Wikipedia, it
> > wouldn't be Quenya that I'd want.  I'd want Orcish, personally.
> >
> > Of course, I realize how ludicrous that is.  There isn't even a recorded
> > Orcish language, as far as I'm aware.
> 
> As I recall, there was no one language: Orcs just grabbed random
> fragments of nearby human languages and used them.  The exception
> would be Sauron's Black Speech, a consistency 'imposed from above',
> the language of the famous "One ring..." poem.
> 
> > Orcish would just be too cool, though. . . .
> 
> Funny enough, I was just reading the Appendices just last week, and
> was moved enough by the following fragment to transcribe it from the
> printed copy.  (Apologies in advance for the frivolity of posting this
> here.)
> 
> "But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or
> things; and their language was actually more degraded than I have
> shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering,
> though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still
> be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and
> contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour,
> save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." —
> J. R. R. Tolkien, Appendix F, The Lord of the Rings
> 
> Steve
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