yersturday was one of those rare occasions when i got my mum to read to me ( a nice throwback to tweenage years) and she read the Return of the King where Sam had rescued frodo and they are attempting to get away from The Watchers.
All my family have straight London accents and so, for a bit of variety, she read it with a heavy Welsh accent. It was hilarious and we were all in stitches! (no offence meant to the Welsh among you), but it set me thinking; Tolkien loved the welsh language and most of the names of places and people in Middle earth are derived from Welsh language!
Cool! 8)

Not just Welsh, actually--a lot of it came from Finnish and Old English. Which is (I think) pretty similar to Welsh.

High Elvish (Quenya) was inspired by Finnish.

_________________

really...? I had no idea high elvish was inspired by Finnish! cool! i jst knew he liked welsh...thanks for the info!

i feel the need to point out here that none of those three languages are very much alike. welsh and OE are from different branches of the indo-european family of languages (welsh is celtic and OE is germanic) and finnish is from a different family altogether (the finnic branch of the uralic family, to be precise). this means they are all naturally very different, although i don't know enough about the individual languages to tell you exactly how they are different.

_________________
<center>

**MY BOOK**

~ proud to be a shieldmaiden for christ ~</center>

Right. Well, I know he at least used a lot of Old English (that's where alot of the Rohirric he uses comes from, and the Rohirric names). He also developed Quenya out of Finnish (I think it technically would be "Old Finnish," but I'm not sure on that point). And Nessmister says that a lot of the names in LotR are from Welsh, so apparently it's got some Welsh roots, too (what names, exactly, Nessmister? Can you give us some examples?).

_________________

yeah, you're right about those being the languages tolkien used, it's just that they're not similar to each other, which is what your previous post seemed to say.

with regards to welsh, it was the basis for sindarin. i couldn't give you any examples of sindarin words that came from welsh, but i do know that the two languages are phonologically similar (basically, they use the same pronunciation) and both use the verb-subject-object sentence structure (whereas english, for example, uses subject-verb-object).

_________________
<center>

**MY BOOK**

~ proud to be a shieldmaiden for christ ~</center>

Ah, okay.

Anyways, I was just saying I thought they were similar--it was open to correction, which you did. Thank's, btw. Now I know they aren't similar.

_________________

Yes...i would have thought that the most of it derrived from Finnish and/or oOld Englsh. In fact did Tolkien use much Latin?

_________________
<center><font size="0">'Before you came along we bagginses were <i>very</i> well thought of...never had any adventures or did anything unexpected!''</font></br><a href="http://www.frodoforever.com/"><img src="http://www.hufflepuffpride.com/frodo/claim2.gif" border="0" width="200" height="120"></a>

No. Tolkien did not use much, if any Latin. I can't think of any that he used. Which I am very happy about. Latin would detract from the book--it's just too different from Finnish and Old English, etc.

_________________

i can just imagine the gondorians reciting their latin verbs actually. *has vision of little faramir and boromir sat chanting 'amo, amas, amat' under the gaze of a stern latin master* ooo, that was random!

_________________
<center>

**MY BOOK**

~ proud to be a shieldmaiden for christ ~</center>

Lol--it might have been random, but it was really, really funny.

_________________

ive got the hail mary in quenya.a few words from latin got in.istari,a word for wizards comes from a rank of monseignor,ad istar.no longer exists in the novus order church.

_________________
proud to be a pipe smoker like JJRT

haha... ha...ha...

*laugh*
that's nice...
"Boromir, recite verse..." etc.

_________________

- married fingon fingolfinion 6/4/13 -
~art credit~

Clarification--Quenya was heavily influenced by Finnish, Sindarin was heavily influenced by Welsh.

_________________

[+~^$]

My blog
My graphics journal

totally off-topic, but i love your sig, firiel. richard armitage is the sexiest man on the planet. *sighs* i want a guy like him.

anyway, enough of the day dreaming. anybody know what dwarvish was based on? it sounds like it might be russian or something similar.

_________________
<center>

**MY BOOK**

~ proud to be a shieldmaiden for christ ~</center>

....what needed to be clarified? I think it was said pretty clearly further up the page.

eowyn of ithilien, I personally don't think Dwarvish looks/sounds like Russian. The Dwarvish Runes (which actually are Daeron's runes, so they're elvish) are modelled after Norse Runes and such, not the Cyrillic alphabet. It doesn't sound much like Russian, either, at least to me (and yes, I know a bunch of people who speak Russian/are Russian).

As to what it really was modelled after, I have no idea, but it wasn't a Slavic language.

_________________