*** Welcome to piglix ***

Elvish languages (Middle-earth)


J. R. R. Tolkien constructed many Elvish languages. These were the languages spoken by the tribes of his Elves. Tolkien was a philologist by profession, and spent much time on his constructed languages. The Elvish languages were the first thing he imagined for his secondary world. Tolkien said that his stories grew out of his languages. Tolkien also created scripts for his Elvish languages, of which the best known are the Sarati, the Tengwar, and the Cirth.

J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first Elvin tongue c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham and which he later named Quenya (c. 1915). At that time, Tolkien was already familiar with Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and several ancient Germanic languages, Gothic, Old Norse and Old English. He had invented several cryptographic codes (one called Animalic), and two or three constructed languages (one called Naffarin). He then discovered Finnish, which he described many years later as "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." He had started his study of the Finnish language to be able to read the Kalevala epic.

The ingredients in Quenya are various, but worked out into a self-consistent character not precisely like any language that I know. Finnish, which I came across when I first begun to construct a 'mythology' was a dominant influence, but that has been much reduced [now in late Quenya]. It survives in some features: such as the absence of any consonant combinations initially, the absence of the voiced stops b, d, g (except in mb, nd, ng, ld, rd, which are favoured) and the fondness for the ending -inen, -ainen, -oinen, also in some points of grammar, such as the inflexional endings -sse (rest at or in), -nna (movement to, towards), and -llo (movement from); the personal possessives are also expressed by suffixes; there is no gender.


...
Wikipedia

...