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Lhammas
The Lhammas (/ˈɬɑ.mɑs/; Noldorin for 'Account of Tongues') is a work of fictional sociolinguistics, written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings, volume five of The History of Middle-earth series.
Tolkien, a philologist, became fascinated by constructed languages, and invented stories to provide his languages with a suitable world, Middle-earth. This resulted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. He peopled Middle-earth with Elves and other races, and in the Lhammas presented the theory that all Middle-earth's languages had a shared origin. In the document, he diagrammed the resulting "Tree of Tongues" and described the fictional history of the evolution of some 30 Elvish languages.
Scholars have noted the realism of Tolkien's family of Elvish languages, analogous to the Indo-European family, as well as his changing views of their linguistic history, which he shifted radically soon after creating the Lhammas. The result was that the Noldorin language described in the document and in the contemporaneous The Etymologies, soon became the Sindarin found in The Lord of the Rings, while the new Noldorin became just a dialect of Quenya; Tolkien redrew his "Tree of Tongues" accordingly.
From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology". Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was:
all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.
The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that
it is important to remember that all of Tolkien's studies, the focus of his profession, was a concentration on the importance of the word. His profession as philologist and his vocation as writer of fantasy/theology overlapped and mutually supported one another".
In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work." This expertise was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development."
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Lhammas
The Lhammas (/ˈɬɑ.mɑs/; Noldorin for 'Account of Tongues') is a work of fictional sociolinguistics, written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings, volume five of The History of Middle-earth series.
Tolkien, a philologist, became fascinated by constructed languages, and invented stories to provide his languages with a suitable world, Middle-earth. This resulted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. He peopled Middle-earth with Elves and other races, and in the Lhammas presented the theory that all Middle-earth's languages had a shared origin. In the document, he diagrammed the resulting "Tree of Tongues" and described the fictional history of the evolution of some 30 Elvish languages.
Scholars have noted the realism of Tolkien's family of Elvish languages, analogous to the Indo-European family, as well as his changing views of their linguistic history, which he shifted radically soon after creating the Lhammas. The result was that the Noldorin language described in the document and in the contemporaneous The Etymologies, soon became the Sindarin found in The Lord of the Rings, while the new Noldorin became just a dialect of Quenya; Tolkien redrew his "Tree of Tongues" accordingly.
From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology". Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was:
all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.
The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that
it is important to remember that all of Tolkien's studies, the focus of his profession, was a concentration on the importance of the word. His profession as philologist and his vocation as writer of fantasy/theology overlapped and mutually supported one another".
In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work." This expertise was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development."