Entish
| Entish | |
|---|---|
| Created by | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| Setting and usage | Forests within the fictional world of Middle-earth |
| Purpose | |
| Dialects |
|
| Sources | a priori language, fictionally developed from Common Eldarin and later influenced by Quenya and Sindarin. |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
Entish is a constructed language from the fictional works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is the language spoken by the Ents in Middle-earth.
Ents are not hasty creatures; they take their time. Even their language is "unhasty". In fact, their language appears to be based on an ancient form of Common Eldarin, later enriched by Quenya and Sindarin, although it includes many unique 'tree-ish' additions. There are actually two different languages: Old Entish and "New Entish".
Originally, the Ents had no "language" of their own. However the first Elves encountered the first Ents in the primeval forests of Middle-earth, not long after the dawn of both of their races. Apparently recognizing the sentience of Ents and the more "awake" trees, the Elves taught them the concept of communicating using sounds ("They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did" as Treebeard noted of the event).
Having been cured of their "dumbness" by the Elves, the Ents developed a language of their own, described as long and sonorous, somewhat like a woodwind instrument; it was a tonal language. It is unknown if a non-Ent could even pronounce Old Entish correctly: it was filled with many subtle vowel shades and was very longwinded. Only Ents spoke Old Entish; not because they kept their language a secret, as the Dwarves did with Khuzdul, but because no others could master it. It was quite an alien language to all others. The Huorns and trees of Fangorn forest could understand Old Entish and converse with the Ents and each other with it. The only extant sample, a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme, the word for hill (or rather a very minute part of a particular hill's name, as Treebeard alludes to something's Entish "name" as including its entire history), was described as a very inaccurate sampling. Even the Elves, master linguists, could not learn Old Entish, nor did they attempt to record it because of its complex sound structure:
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