J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginary languages - by Edward Vajda, WWU Linguistics Program director

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Woah. This was my Linguistics professor and mentor from University, Edward Vajda. I was at this lecture, what a crazy coincidence to see it here!

Fun Fact, he's known in linguistic circles for his work on the Ket language of Siberia, and connecting Siberian languages of Asia to Indigenous North American languages.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 6 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/SausserTausser ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Oct 07 2015 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Wow, this was really cool! Thanks for posting man.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 2 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/[deleted] ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Oct 07 2015 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Does anyone know where this was filmed/what college this is?

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 2 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/Jumpingoffthewalls ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Oct 08 2015 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies
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EDWARD VAJDA: Well, today I'm going to talk about literature as well as language. And the reason is that two of the most famous works of literature in history, the most sold works of literature in history, The Lord of the Rings, which is also an extremely popular movie, three movies, in fact, and The Hobbit, which is going to be a movie this December. So everyone is waiting for this very much. These books and these movies are some of the most popular works of literature of all time, but what people don't often know is they're also works of linguistics. And so studying them, and appreciating them, takes an appreciation of linguistic science, which is often not understood to be as interesting as it actually is. So as the director of the Western Linguistics program and the helper of the linguistics club, one of the things that I want to do in this lecture is to show why linguistics is important for literature, and in particular, for understanding the works of JRR Tolkien, because JRR Tolkien had a unique method of creating literature. He borrowed all sorts of things from the real world, both past as well as present, ancient modern, and he created a rich fantasy world that was as believable as the real world, even though you knew it was fantasy from the very beginning. This is a special talent, a special method that he perfected, and a lot of people have followed in his path ever since. The Hobbit was published in the mid 1930s. The Lord of the Rings finally came out in the early 1950s, and since then there have been a lot of other people who have been trying to do the same kind of deep fantasy literature as Tolkien, but maybe they don't know quite how Tolkien did it, and that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about that mixture of fantasy, reality, and also the ascetics of sound. All works of literature, even realistic literature, has elements of fantasy. It has elements of reality that the author has put into it. And it also is a work of art in the art of sound because otherwise, people wouldn't be interested in reading. You could just read a newspaper. You wouldn't need to read literature if you wanted to find things out about the real world. So these factors are involved in all literature, but for Tolkien there's some special combination of them that I want to discuss. Tolkien was different than almost all modern linguists. All of us modern linguists, Chomsky, and others are interested in language from the communicative approach. What language communicates. That's how we study language. In linguistics, that's the main focus of studying language. Tolkien is completely different. He was interested in language as an art form. The sound of language as an end in itself and not just the meaning as the end in itself. And this was one of the fundamental characteristics of all of his literary creations. One of the other things we'll be talking about in this lecture as we explore Tolkien's method are three very distinct ways of appreciating and understanding literature. And all of these ways are valid. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they contrast with one another. First of all, when you study any work of literature, you want to try to understand the intentions of the author. And second, you want to look at the real world context in history in which the work was written. Where did this work come out of in the greater world? And finally, and a lot of times this is forgotten, the reader is also recreating the work when he or she reads it. And that means the reader is, in a sense, the re-author of the work. The appreciation the reader gets out of it means that the reader can get a message out of the work that's different than that the author put into it. The reader can apply that message of the work to the modern world in which it's being read, and it's a very different world than the one that it was written in, and it was portrayed in. So all these things are very, very important to understand in the appreciation of Tolkien, as well as in the appreciation of literature. When I was a fifth grader, and we were studying literature in elementary school, I was so turned off by studying literature. In fact, I got so tuned off I became a linguist. That's how serious. And the reason it turned me off was the teacher would always say, what do you think of this short story we just read? And so we would start to say what we thought of it, and she would say no, no, no. The intended this, and that, and that. In other words, the teacher would mix up these different levels, and I think if you pay attention to the fact that they're all valid, different, sometimes contrasting levels, it's a beginning of the understanding of literature and it's analysis. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and especially The Lord of the Rings during a period of human history that had some of the most awesome and terrifying events in the last 10,000 years of history. We had two world wars. We had the fate of human civilization hanging in the balance and Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings when these events were going on. These events had to influence him. They had to give him ideas, and I am going to argue that some of the plot line of The Lord of the Rings, and even some of the features of the characters do, in fact, have echoes in what was going on at the time. But Tolkien himself claimed that there was no allegory in Lord of the Rings. Any kind of similarity of the countries, or of the characters, or of the events in the plot line that was in Lord of the Rings, and in the 20th century real world, was actually just partly coincidental. It was not really key to the meaning of the work. In other words, Tolkien did not make Sauron as a symbol for Stalin, or Saruman as a symbol to say something about Hitler. He may have gotten ideas from what was going on for the work, but that was not his purpose in writing it, and that's not what he was trying to convey. And because the work is such pure fantasy, because it doesn't have specific meaning that connects it to the real world, it really makes the work very good for the reader to recreate it. The reader can inject whatever is really the meaning for the reader into this work As a result of the way that Tolkien wrote it. Based on the ascetics of sound rather than the actual meaning of the symbols in real world. How did Tolkien get you inside of this work? How does it work? A work of fantasy, no matter what it is, can only be engaging to the reader if the reader buys into the fantasy as a substitute for reality. And the only way to do that, if you're looking at a world that's beyond time, you have to find some thing in the work that the reader identifies with, subconsciously. And in this work, Middle Earth is alien, alien languages, alien lands, alien species of beings, but we find ourselves involved as if we are really living in this imaginary world because we see it through the eyes of hobbits, who are just as confused about it as we are when we start the book. So before we're on page two of The Hobbit, we're into it, but not because it means something about what's in the news, it's because we have subconsciously become hobbits. That's the secret and every successful work of high fantasy does this. There's something in it that you as the listener, and the viewer, and the reader identify with. That is the secret of creating fantasy as an interesting story. And that world that we come into Middle Earth in is, of course, the Shire. And the Shire in some ways is very familiar. Even if we are not having as much green thumbs as hobbits, somehow it seems like a cool countryside in England, if you're an English speaker. So the hobbit is the in, the most familiar somehow part of Middle Earth that gets us to feel like we're inside of the story, even though it's fantasy. And the farther you get from the Shire, the more things become strange. The more the words and the names of the places on the map are not sounding like country English. When you get to Bree, the words sounds like, guess what? Welsh. The word Bree in Welsh means hill, in fact. That's not a coincidence. Tolkien is constructing with layers of his words and his language, increasing lack of familiarity and strangeness as you go from the Shire out with the hobbits into this adventure. And so what Tolkien does is he harnesses, for English speakers, the coined "exoticness" of the Celtic fringe, the Welsh, and the Scottish, and the Irish Celtic fringe with their very distinct languages, and very distinct pronunciations of place names. This is put around the Shire to make the Shire seem more familiar, and what is around it, less familiar. And this continues onward because other groups that are part of the West, that the Shire belongs to, the Rohirrim of Rohan, the people of Gondor, the ancient lore that is associated with those groups. Those are also borrowed from these concentric rings around the Shire in Northwestern Europe. They're borrowed from old English, they're borrowed from Scandinavia, and this makes Tolkien's Middle Earth feel very familiar and real, as if he's plotted it on a map. And this idea of the East, all the hordes coming out of the East. This is something that is also somehow unconsciously familiar, with all of the invasions of the Huns, and all of these other groups in the history of Europe from the east. And in the 20th century, the invasions from Germany, the threat from Russia. All of these things are in the back of our minds and this makes the storyline seem realistic to us. But Tolkien was not saying anything about real Russia, real Germany, real Scandinavia, or real Wales, and if you pay attention to the way that he mapped things out, you will find that these are just convenient sound symbolic methods to make his fantasy world realistic. They are not real symbols of the real world. Because if you map where Wales is to England, it's all the opposite of where things should be. Going past Bree and southward to Mordor is in the opposite direction of where you would go to get to Russia, or to get to parts of Eastern Europe. So the map in the story did not follow the map in reality. The pieces of reality that are borrowed are all mixed up together in this fantasy world to make it realistic, but it's not really a symbol of that real world. So we can ask an important question. Is Tolkien using fantasy to portray reality and get a point across between the lines that he doesn't feel comfortable saying out loud for political repressive reasons? Or is he borrowing lots of reality from the past, from mythology, from the real world events, and just using it-- conveniently sound symbolically to make a very deeply layered, believable fantasy. From what I've said so far, it's obvious that it's the second thing that Tolkien is doing, but almost every other writer, basically every classical writer, does exactly the opposite of Tolkien. They're doing the first thing. They're really using fiction and fantasy to talk about reality in symbolic terms. The meaning is what is important in most of these other works, not the sound as the artistry. Let's talk about Russian literature because who can talk about literature without talking about Russian literature? Almost no one. The great father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, was also the father of Russian encrypted literature. Every fairy tale that Pushkin wrote, every short story that Pushkin wrote with its romantic settings, it was all encoded, encrypted, editorials on the world that he lived in, in repressive czarist Russia. And this is the point of what he is writing. So for instance, in his famous prologue of a very long fairy tale called Ruslan and Ludmila, he has a cat that is chained to a big oak tree, and this is one of the most famous dances in Russian literature. [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] And you might think, boy, this is a fairy tale, for sure. There's a cat that talks and sings. It's on a chain, it's on a big oak tree. Wow, this is a fairy tale. It's way more than a fairy tale because for Pushkin, the oak tree was Mother Russia, the cat was the artist and the writer who was chained by the golden chain of Russia's culture to that oak tree, and could not go very many steps from that oak tree. Could only sing a song or tell a tale. He was writing about the plight of himself and all writers in Russia. This is the meaning of that fairy tale. The communication was what was important. Also it was beautiful, and the sound was beautiful, the images were beautiful, the fantasy was beautiful, but the purpose was communication of reality. My other favorite writer, Nikolai Gogol, wrote a famous short story called "The Nose", in which the nose got away from its owner, who woke up with just an empty spot, a flat spot on the middle of his face, and then nose was parading around as a personage. The owner of the nose was a flirtatious person and be couldn't flirt any more with no nose. [INAUDIBLE] flirt. So he found his nose, and the nose was going into a cathedral, and he wanted to go up to claim the nose, but he had realized the nose was of a higher rank than he was, and he couldn't really go up to the nose. He felt ashamed so he couldn't do it. And so many people have written, what does this work mean? What fantasy is in this work and if there's all kinds of symbols in it. Of course there's symbols, but the reality of it is probably a lot more simple. Gogol himself had a very long nose. He sometimes himself was called the nose. Alexander Pushkin was his great friend, who brought him to St. Petersburg, and helped him get famous. Pushkin fell into disfavor. Had lots of problems. Gogol got to be write number one, and was flaunted around, and he and Pushkin had a falling out as a result of those things. And so what Gogol was doing was making fun of Pushkin in this poem because Pushkin had lost his nose. Pushkin was the person in "The Nose" who had lost it, and his name was Kovalyov, and Kovalyov, [RUSSIAN] means to forge. Pushkin means a cannon. So it's a play on words of Pushkin's last name. And at the end of the story, the nose somehow magically gets back on Kovalyov's face, and all is wonderful. It's a happy ever after. And at the end of this real life incident, Gogol and Pushkin made up, and became friends again. And Gogol was just making fun of this episode in their lives. So once again, he was using what looked like crazy fantasy, for a very, very communicative purpose that was almost a joke between the writers. My other favorite writer, Dostoevsky, was also in all of his works talking about deadly serious reality. He wrote the novel, The Demons, [RUSSIAN], and it was really a takeoff a criticism of some of the revolutionary groups that were in Russia at the time, and his condemnation of their methods, and of their goals. The demons were very much symbols of real forces in his society. And his Notes From the Underground, a very, very anti-hero who lives underground, was very bitter about life. It was a answer to Chernyshevsky's story, What is to be Done, which is a utopia that claimed that human intellect and reason can make a paradise on earth. Dostoevsky said that it is impossible, that humans are flawed, and that you cannot have this kind of paradise from just humans. You have to have faith. You have to have something beyond. And Dostoevsky's character was a proof that you could not have paradise from just human reason and human planning. And his character was a very negative, self-destructive character. This all had very, very serious meaning in his day and in his age. He was writing about things that he couldn't write about in the newspaper because of the political situation, just like Pushkin. And in the Soviet times, things got even tougher for writers. There's a famous fantasy work of 20th century Soviet literature, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It was such a sensitive work, he could not have it published in his lifetime. It was written in the 1930s. He died in 1940. It was hidden in a drawer. It was found and published in 1967 for the first time. This story talks about the devil coming to Moscow in the 1920s, and with a retinue of all kinds of funny demons, and so forth like this. And they take up residence in this apartment, which is 302 Encore, is the name of the apartment. And this is deadly serious allegory about Stalin and his Pollock bureau, taking over the Soviet Union. Every single one of these devils, and their names, and what they do, and who they kill, and all of the events, it all has a double meaning about what really happened, but couldn't be said out loud in the 20s and 30s in Bulgakov's time. This great fantasy, where cats walk around with guns, and shoot people, and drink liquor, but it is really about politics. It is an editorial about the real politics of the day. This kind of encrypted literature is not just in Soviet Union. We had it in the United States. During the 1950s, there was a push by some politicians to attack writers, other politicians, because they're supposedly communists, and they were pushed out of jobs, and threatened, and their lives were ruined. The American writer, Arthur Miller at this time, wrote a story about the Salem witch trials called The Crucible. But it was really about the McCarthy age that he was writing. Once again, he was using literature to write in code about reality. Even ancient, pre-writing phases of literature, like Aesop's Fables, these are all fantasy designed to talk about reality. That's their purpose. Tolkien was different than all of this. For Tolkien, it was the aesthetics of language. It was the fitness of exactly what word you should use to name this villain or that villain. Not because it hints at that person in the real world this is supposed to be. There was no person in the real world that any of the characters in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were supposed to be. None whatsoever. It just made it seem cooler and more realistic. And I think when Tolkien at first wrote these things, no one understood what he was doing. It was just weird, but people got interested in it. He got a cult following. People even come to a lecture about Tolkien in large crowds given by someone like me, he's so interesting. So Tolkien hit on a new way of using language and in using fantasy in literature for the aesthetics of sound. So pure fantasy constructed from deeply layered versions of past and present reality. This is Tolkien's method and it worked. Why does it seem so real? I've already told you a little bit about this. Tolkien, when he was a teenager, there were no Game Boys at this time. He entertained himself by inventing languages, made up languages. He even invented a word for inventing languages, Glossopoeia. And he made, eventually, for The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, and The Hobbit, parts of at least 14 languages. Several of which I'll tell you in detail later in the lecture. This was something that he did before you had any intention of ever writing any work of literature. The works of literature followed this interest in creating language for the love of the sound of the language, rather than the symbolic-- within the actual meaning behind. And just what? The most interesting writing of the 20th century was a professor of linguistics. [LAUGHTER] I know. Get on your cellphones, call the Bellingham Herald. This is news, but it's true, and you can verify it even on Wikipedia on the web. He was a professor of medieval literature and also of historical linguistics. How cool is that? And Tolkien as a teenager got the idea of language for language sake. It was very much not in keeping with the rest of 20th century linguistics, which is the communicate approach, which we linguists are all interested. Tolkien was interested in Indo-European languages. How languages can descend from a common ancestor to time, how mother languages could create daughter languages, and the diversity of this is studied by comparing the languages in something called historical comparative linguistics. Tolkien actually became an expert at this and taught it at the University. And one of the things he was expert in was the Germanic language, to which English belongs. There are three branches of the Germanic family. One of the branches has become extinct hundreds of years before Tolkien studied it. Tolkien wasn't satisfied with this. He wanted to create a fourth imaginary branch of the Germanic language family that had, in fact, never existed as far as we know in history, and he called it Gautish. And he even made it up and made up sound rules by which it had evolved from the really existing proto-Germanic languages. And this was just him getting started because he also as a teenager who got interested in ancient literature. In classics of Christian, and pre-Christian, West and Northwest European literature, like Beowulf. And a lot of names that come into his works, like Gandalf, and other names, are actually words that are somehow used in some of these ancient literatures. He liked the sound of them and he fit the sound of them to the story that he was later writing. He also became an expert in the Norse myths and in the ancient Midgard, which is really Middle Earth. And so this was part of what got him interested, the combination of folklore and language sound symbolism as a teenager, was what set him on the path to begin to construct his imaginary Middle Earth. The turning point for him was discovering and falling in love with Finnish, and the Finnish epic, Kalevala, which is part of Northwestern Europe, the Finns, but it's completely different. It's actually historically-- this language and this group of people are from Central Asia, completely unrelated to the rest of Europe, and yet it's part of Western Europe. Tolkien became fascinated with this and it caused him to use it as part of his Western world. It became the basis of his elves and his Elvish in its sound symbolism. This lingual-mythic synthesis, once he added the Finnish in, was beginning to take shape. Quenya, the High Elvish, was based especially on real world language of Finnish. And in both of these languages, Finnish and Quenya, you have a large number of sounds that you can sing or hum. Those are called sonorants. [HUMMING] OK, and you don't have lots of sounds that are called obstruents, which you can't hum, you can only yell at people using them. [GRUNTING] All right, those kinds of sounds have a different effect and I'm proving it. There's also no initial clusters. There's no words in Finnish that sound like [GIBBERISH] OK, and there's not even any double consonants. And so these things were brought into the elvish to make it sound mellifluous And the word mellifluous doesn't have any of those "buh-guh" sounds in it either. But there's a real Finnish language that belongs to a real language family called Uralic languages. There's almost 30 of these, and they stretch all the way from Norway, all the way to central Siberia. Tolkien realized that all these languages had a history and came from a proto-language, proto-Uralic. Tolkien realized that they are all spoken by all these people, some of which became part of Europe, even though they had a completely different origin than the rest of the people's of Europe. Tolkien incorporated lots of this to make his elvish and his elves so exotic, and yet part of the West. This is one of the magic ingredients he used. But when he did this, he was not saying anything about the Finnish language. He was not saying anything about Finns or Uralic peoples whatsoever. It was convenient for his lingual mythic synthesis and also for his sound symbolic aesthetic. That's why he chose these languages. So if you look at Finnish, you have a real Finnish word that means "in the wind". It really means "wind-in," "tuuli-ssa." And in Quenya elvish, you have completely different meaningful pieces of the word, which is called morphemes, but it's built on the same principle. You've got the noun, you've got the locational marker that comes after the noun, not before the noun. That's called the post-position. And "tuuli-ssa," and "suri-nen," which is a completely made up word, it's sort of has the same feel and sound to, and this is what elvish got it's characteristic feel, and sound, and structure from. And this is called, if you're a real linguist buff, suffixal agglutination. And Tolkien realized that just like there's different versions of modern Finnish and modern Uralic languages, why not have different versions of modern elvish like Sindarin, and Quenya, and have them descend from a proto-Elvish, another language to invent with sound laws of change that he can invent as well. So in Sindarin, the word that means west is dun, and in Quenya it's numen, and these words have a similarity too. Dwelling is bar, and in Quenya it's mar. So the "buh and the "muh" are really similar sounds. On this side, in Sindarin, the "duh," "buh," "guh" is pronounced without any sound going out of your nose. In Quenya, those same sounds are pronounced-- "duh" becomes "nuh," "buh" becomes "muh," "guh" becomes "nguh" just by lowering the back of your mouth and letting the sound come out of your nose. So there's a systematic sound correspondence between these two forms of Elvish, just like in the different types of Germanic languages, just like in the different types of Finnic languages. Exactly what we have in real world, we had in the Tolkien imaginary language. And there's even a big grammar of Sindarin that you can learn and read. This is one of Elvin languages that you can devote yourselves to. And when you look at Sindarin, he made it different than Quenya by incorporating features of Welsh inside of it. Another very exotic language, but that is next door, and part of the Northwestern Europe. So for instance, if you look at the way the Sindarin Elvish works, you can have a consonant at the beginning of the word, and then when you have what is called a clitic, a function particle at the beginning of that, it causes that initial consonant to mutate to a similar sound. So periain means halfling, but i pherian, means "the halflings." Gaur means a werewolf, and i ingaur is "the werewolf". And so he's using real sound symbolisms, real word formation techniques that exist in Welsh, that don't exist in English, to make this version of Elvish different than Finnish, and also different, very much exotically so, from English, and it worked. And you can even reconstruct proto-Elvish if you got an afternoon because you can look at the modern Sindarin, and the modern Quenya, and you can find the sound correspondences, and you can figure out what the sound must have been like eons before, in the time of the trees or something deep into the Silmarillion. So you even have proto-Elvish and sound laws. OK, that's pretty cool, and it's exactly what you have in real languages. It's exactly what you have in proto-Uralic. You can reconstruct proto-Uralic from looking at Finnish and Hungarian. Real modern languages that show what the ancient language must have looked like. Tolkien was inventing not only artificial languages, but artificial histories of artificial languages, and artificial mother languages of artificial languages. As far as I know, no one has ever done that before. There hasn't even been a proto-Klingon yet made. And if you go out at it deeper, you find there's a whole family of Elven languages, just like there's a whole family of Finno-Uralic languages, and there's a historical diversification of them that is reflected in his literary works. Now, I think some of you are starting to freak out, and you might just want to stick with one single type of this, and my advise is to just study the Sindarin because in Lord of the Rings, all of the happening figures are speaking Sindarin. So I think, not to scare you off, just go with the Sindarin, and it will get you far at parties. And the other really interesting thing about the Elvish words that are used throughout The Lord of the Rings, especially The of the Rings, but also The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, is that they have a meaning that goes back to those Elven languages. Like Orod means mountain, ruin means burning, and not just in this combination that means Mount Doom, but in other combinations. Mor means black, Dor means land, not just in this world, but in other combinations. So we have a whole bunch of other words that have dor-- Eriador and other names of places. So this works as versions of Elvish, but it also works subconsciously sound symbolically from you, the speakers of English, because the word ruin has a subconscious connotation of destruction. It's a great name for a mountain that is Mount Doom. And Mordor sounds like the word murder in English. I don't think it's going to have a nice connotation no matter what. You're never going to have a bank named The Bank of Mordor. [LAUGHTER] So Tolkien is not only making these words work in his Elvish, and his historical reconstruction of these languages, and language families, he's making them work on the most basic gut level of English native speakers reading, and thinking that sounds creepy, and it does. We go farther. The Balrog, "bal" in Christian tradition, is this evil pagan god. It has a feel of that. "Rog" has all of those sounds that are kind of scary. [GRUFF BARKING] You can't really sing them, but also "rog" is the Russian word in real modern Russian that means horn, if you study Russian. This is not a coincidence. Tolkien is borrowing from languages of the east to put into the scary things that are in his stories to make it more realistic, this scenario that he is creating. And when we get to the black speech of Mordor that is on the ring, we find a completely different speech. It's written in Elven characters, but it is a completely and utterly different invented language. We don't have a lot of it, but we do have what is written-- well, it got melted, but we do have what was written in this ring. And so it sounds something like this. [SPEAKING BLACK SPEECH OF MORDOR] [APPLAUSE] That always happens, I'm sorry. I apologize, but as a linguist, we have to go further, and take another look. Any good linguist takes an inscription and creates interlinear morpheme glossing. In other words, in English you right what each of them are meaningful pieces of the foreign language means, and then you have the grammatical symbols too. And what you can see from interlinear morpheme glossing, is this language is not unlike Finnish in the sense that you've got the basic meaning at the beginning, and then you've got some suffixes at the end. So this is also a type of suffix or agglutination, but the sounds are all raspy. Lots of [GRUNTING] sounds and it has a completely different effect in the English aesthetic of how words sound or don't sound in English, then we do with the Finnish. And that gives this speech a really scary quality, even if you don't lose electricity in the Council of Elron when it's uttered. And guess what? It extremely closely mirrors the real phonological and morphological structure of a whole group of real languages, that Turkic and Mongolian languages that are in-- guess where? The east, from the place the historical invasions come into Europe from. Turkic languages do have these features, and so does Mongolic, and a whole group that is sometimes called Altaic languages. Not Korean and Japanese, they don't have these features. All of these features are there and they were borrowed, and incorporated into what we know of the black speech of Mordor, and it goes pretty interestingly deep. The word that the Orcs use for fire, [INAUDIBLE] it sounds a lot like the modern-- actually, I said it in Mongolian, sorry. "Gat" is fire in Mongolian and it sounds an awful lot like this Orc speech, "ghash," that means fire as well. And I don't think this is a coincidence. Tolkien studied all of these languages. He knew all of these languages and he borrowed the feel of them. He didn't want to say anything about Turks, or Mongols, or Finnish people, or Welsh people, but he wanted to create a real sound symbolic reality that the English speaking people would accidentally feel at home in, and could identify with, and he succeeded. And it's very interesting that The Lord of the Rings has been translated into dozens of languages. One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to read The Hobbit in that language, and then you already know what it is in English, and you just can learn the language that way. It works. OK, so if you look in modern Hungarian at what is written in the inside of the ring, it's very similar in Hungarian translation. And when you read in Hungarian, The Lord of the Rings, all those Orc words don't sound so unfamiliar because Hungarian is a Uralic language, is heavily influenced by Turkic and other language. And I'm afraid to read the Hungarian because of the electricity situation. My great grandparents spoke Hungarian. My last name is Hungarian, but I better not do it just in case. Because the sound symbolic fell of these languages is going to not quite work in translations. Just like any poetry, it won't quite be as perfect in the translation as you have it in the native language in which it was written. Let's talk about two more of the many languages that Tolkien created. The Dwarves are part of the West. There is a Dwarvish language that's kind of kept secret. Not too much of it goes into The Lord of the Rings, but there's enough of it there for us to say something about the origins of it. And what we know about the Dwarvish language is exactly parallel to what we know about a major language family that is at the root of Western civilization, and that is the Afro-Asiatic language family to which Hebrew and Arabic belong. The very unique features of structure of this language are exactly what we find in Dwarvish, as much as we know of Dwarvish. Semitic, which is the branch of Afro-Asiatic to which the language of Arabic and Hebrew belongs, has a unique structure in which that consonants, three consonants in the word, are what convey the basic core meaning of the word. And whether the word is a noun, or a verb, or past tense, or future tense, or plural, those all depend on what vowels are inserted inside of the word, and sometimes a prefix or a suffix. This is a unique feature with very few vowels, but you shuffle them in and out of these kinds of basically templates. This is how modern Arabic and Hebrew works. So "suh, luh, muh" means peace and salaam in many languages means peace. In Hebrew, with the sound correspondence, it's Shalom, and Islam is religion of submission, and peace with God. Muslim is adherent to that. And we have the same "suh, luh, muh." Very, very different way of making words than we do in English, where we have a root that looks like a word, and then we add things after it. We never mix what's inside of that root up very much. But this is exactly what happens in Dwarvish. They have a tri-consonantal root. So the word that means dwarves is [DWARVISH], and the Dwarvish language is [DWARVISH]. It's the same [DWARVISH], but you're playing around with the vowels, just like you are in Hebrew and Arabic. And this kind of a way of making words is so alien to English that we borrow Arabic words and don't even know what we're doing. For instance, we borrowed the Arabic word from Malaysian that means good bye, and in Malaysian it's Salaam. What did we borrow it to in English? So long because it's such a different way of making words up. Now, the Dwarves had a script, and one letter in the script is called [DWARVISH], but more of them is called Cirth. You change the vowel in the middle of it and that's very much like modern Arabic. Modern Arabic borrows the Western world like bank, and you make a plural bunuuk, by that same pattern that I showed you before. This is very, very, very different from West European languages. It's very much like Dwarvish, as far as we can tell. So that's cool. [GASPING] [INAUDIBLE] also Old Entish and it takes a very long time to say anything in Old Entish. But I'm starting to run out of time, so I better be quick. I just have sad news for you. Very little was recorded of Old Entish. And there's little I can tell you, except to say that in the real world, many of the world's languages are also disappearing without linguists recording them. Just like Old Entish, they're not going to be known by future generations. So you should get out in the field, like I do in Siberia, without the mosquitoes, if possible, and record them yourself. All right, so I gave you a little bit of information about how all the sounds, and the words, and the place names get into this huge story, and why it makes the story seem like a real world that you've lived in for your whole life, and even earlier. But how does the story line, the plot line work? How did Tolkien succeed in making a story where you really care about what happens to those Hobbits? Not that you just feel like one. That you really feel that this is world changing history that's about to happen. He did this because he lived through the 20th century and he borrowed ideas from that 20th century that made his work real, even though it was fantasy, and was not a symbol of that 20th century. How did Tolkien know what it felt like to run away from home and leave everything you knew with your faithful friend who belongs to a different class than you do? It's because he himself had to go off to war when he was still a teenager in World War I, and in the trenches, and most of his friends were killed there. And he was thrown together with people of different classes than he was, and they became friends and buddies, just like the Hobbits in the story. He knew all of that because he had lived through it, and that's why he could put that into his work to make it so real, but he wasn't writing about the first World War. He just had ammunition from having been a human being who lived through it. Same about The Lord of the Rings. He wrote the main plot line of The Lord of the Rings when Hitler and Stalin were making a secret pact, just like Saruman and Sauron. I almost said Stalin. This had to have influenced the cool idea of part of his storyline. OK, the union of the two towers. That seemed invincible at the time. And Helm's Deep, he was writing this at the time when England was having the Battle of Britain. England stood alone against all of the union of those two towers and it managed to fend off that attack. And this had to have given him the idea that made his battle of Helm's Deep so realistic. But was he really talking about World War II? No, he was not. He just was using pieces of his real life, and his real time to make his fantasy more deep, and believable, and he got ammunition as a writer from that. So what we have-- and moving a little towards the conclusion of what I've been saying today, is that The Lord of the Rings is an amazing work. And you could throw The Hobbit in there too because it's, in a sense, the world's most ancient and far removed from the modern time, and yet the most plausible work of fiction in a certain sense. In a sense of you buying into it and feeling like you're really there. Feeling like it's real when you know it never was. It's very successful. I would say it's the most successful because of all these layers of languages that he used. It's also one of the first modern 20th century works of fiction, and that is not usually appreciated by people who want to talk about the Silmarillion, and ancient times in Middle Earth. How come it's so modern? What did Tolkien do? Tolkien was one of the first writers to really portray, accurately, the modern problem of addiction. He did that in The Lord of the Rings first and better than anyone else up to that point. Modern ideas of mental illness is in his work, very clearly before it became so popular to get onto the Yahoo, and find all these kinds of articles. He was portraying this very realistically in a modern way. It is also one of the first, if not really the first, modern work on environmentalism. It goes through his whole work from The Hobbit, all the way to the end of The Lord of the Rings. "The old world will burn in the fires of industry." And everything that is green and good in this world will be no more. This is real environmentalism, modernly stated environmentalism, and Tolkien was afraid of the loss of the beautiful world to all of the changes that were happening in his time. He cared about that. That's a modern idea. He put it into his ancient fantasy work and I think he was one of the most salient people to do this. Maybe people have become environmentalists having read this without even knowing that that happened. So one of the main reasons why this work of fantasy is so much more successful than all other works of fantasy-- there's two reasons. The fantasy was constructed with such an artistic and multi-layered use of different pieces of historical and modern reality. That's the first reason. The second reason is it wasn't tied to real communicative function of the symbols having a real meaning. They were things that can touch your heart in any way they want. That ring can be anything you want. It can be any evil that you feel and see in the world yourself. From any direction of the political spectrum, you can put what is really the ring a symbol of. Whether it is secular or religious, you can put that in, and you have the right to do it as the reader because you can rewrite it. When you read The Lord of the Rings, you rewrite it as the reader, and you can do it because it's not tied to any particular meaning. All of these things that subconsciously make this work so rich, and so meaningful, and so epic. Those are not the things that you as the reader are obligated to see in the work. They're only what makes it so sound symbolically realistic. That is amazing. And so the ring is a perfect allegory because it really doesn't mean anything at all. It's meaning what you, as finishing the work, means. And in order to understand all of this, you really have to go back to Tolkien, the professor. Tolkien the teenager, who's inventing artificial languages. You really have to take linguistics to understand this great work of literature. Especially historical [INAUDIBLE]. This is a fact. And with that, I can end the lecture. But I will say, as a linguist and someone also my whole life interested in folklore, interested in how languages work, I want to make a summer course out of this whole thing that I introduced today. So that hopefully will be next summer. An upper level course if you're really looking for something multi-disciplinary to broaden your mind. So I hope I will see some of you in that course. So thank you very much for your attention-- [APPLAUSE] I really appreciate this big crowed. So if you want to give any kind of donation on the way out to linguistics club, not to me, just feel free to do so, but it's completely not necessary. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. [SIDE CONVERSATION]
Info
Channel: Western Washington University
Views: 62,663
Rating: 4.9391356 out of 5
Keywords: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Hobbit (Book), The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Education, Western Washington University, Ed Vajda, linguistics, language
Id: 5NKlr0vRX34
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)
Published: Fri Nov 23 2012
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