Tolkien

Tolkien was a philologist. He was also an expert on Old and Middle English, and on Old Norse (with a working knowledge of many other languages). Although specimens of his invented languages did not appear in print until the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954–5, he had been working on many of them for at least four decades by then.

Following the Indo-European model of a “tree of languages”, all originating from the same proto-language, and branching off to form language families and then individual languages, Tolkien started by inventing base-roots and modifying them to show how his fictional languages developed over time. His two main elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, are supposed to have originated from a common “proto-Eldarin”, and then modified on phonetic models based on Finnish and Welsh respectively. For example, the root GALAD- (“tree”) in Primitive Eldarin becomes alda in Quenya and galadh in Sindarin (the dh pronounced as a voiced dental fricative like the Welsh dd, or like “th” in the English words “these”, “there”).


Related words are formed to show phonetic and syntactic links. For example, the Quenya name of the Númenórean King Aldarion translates as “Son of the Trees”, while the people over whom Galadriel and Celeborn rule over are the Galadhrim, the “Tree-people” (a Sindarin name). The reason why Quenya and Sindarin diverged from their common root is part of the internal history of Middle-earth. Thousands of years before the Third Age (when The Lord of the Rings is set) some Elves journeyed to Valinor and later returned to Middle-earth as exiles, e.g. Glorfindel and his company in The Fellowship of the Ring. They are the speakers of Quenya. Other Elves stayed behind in Middle-earth – the Elves of Mirkwood we see in The Hobbit, for examples, and speak Sindarin.


Tolkien displays a remarkable attention to consistency and philological verisimilitude in his invented languages. Most readers will not pick up on the phonological and syntactical minutiae of his different languages and their interrelationships, but relations such as that between Moria (“Black Chasm”) and Mordor (“Land of Darkness”), both deriving from the root MORO-, (“darkness”), do register, if only subconsciously.
(from a recent article by Dimitra Fimi)