Fëanor & Linguistics

[atlantablack]

Woke up this morning and quite literally the first thing I did, half-asleep, before even getting out of my bed, was google “can you combine two languages linguistics” because I woke up thinking about Fëanor and what kind of nonsense he might get up to in 4th Age Aman and was like damn I wonder if he would improve Sindarin just to annoy Thingol or combine it with Quenya or - anyway apparently that’s not a thing and I read an interesting article on what happens when two communities with different native languages combine but still - what a way to start the day.

Comments

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I've had mornings like that. :D

>> “can you combine two languages linguistics” <<

Yep. It's a pidgin at first. Once kids get ahold of it and become native speakers, they add in all the stuff that adults left out while trying to trade without a common language, and then it matures into a creole.

>> I wonder if he would improve Sindarin just to annoy Thingol or combine it with Quenya <<

I would read the hell out of that.

There actually is an easy way to do it, but you have to know a bit about linguistics to pull the trick. It's been done at least once here, in the revival of Hebrew. What you do is hand a bunch of new words to the kids and send them out to use those. So if you wanted to punk someone with language, that would be the way to go. Now getting at elflings isn't easy ... but getting at young humans is a lot easier, and some humans like learning other languages. Anywhere that has a bit of a scholarly bent will have nerdlings underfoot. And we have a solid foundation for it because Middle Earth has plentiful languages, which evolve over time, and a few characters noted for studying them.

Not to mention the amount of fuckery one could get into with dwarves.

Re: Yes ...

[atlantablack]

Yeah! That's what the article I was reading was talking about - pidgin and creole - which was actually super informative since I've always just automatically associated creole with Louisiana creole and didn't realize it had an actual broader meaning!

I sadly don't have any grasp of linguistics or would I absolutely write the fic haha instead I am simply going to make vague references to the idea that Fëanor is being an asshole via linguistics and just avoid any and all details!

[desecrets]

Pidgins and creoles (what I assume you read about!) are one way of doing it! But pidgins and creoles are maybe not fully what you had in mind by "combining two languages", for a couple reasons: First, even after a pidgin has become a creole, it still relies more heavily on the grammatical framework or vocabulary of one language over the other. (So often you will see creoles and pidgins described as "English based," "French based," etc.) And secondly, the vocabulary of a creole language is not the same size as the full vocabulary of both of the original languages combined -- it's generally much smaller. They also tend to be grammatically simplified compared to the original languages (for obvious reasons; ease of learning and use).

HOWEVER. This all happens because the reason pidgins and creoles originate in the first place is that the languages are not mutually intelligible at all. They have completely unrelated vocabulary and grammar, most of the time. (Or it's something like English and French where sure, they're both Indo-European languages, but the commonalities are still pretty slim.) But with Sindarin and Quenya, those are directly related languages. The one is the descendant of the other (as far as I've understood anyway!) and they share the same vocabulary, just changed over time. It would be much easier to 'combine' those two because they probably already have the same grammar, so it'd be more like trying to find a middle ground between 21st century English and Chaucer. The result would look something much more similar to Esperanto than to a pidgin or a creole, I think!

(Sorry for this unholy wall of a comment, I just thought this was fascinating! Disclaimer: I studied linguistics and language change in uni, but it has been a while!)

[atlantablack]

No wait that's so interesting! The page I read was about Pidgin and creole and I was half-asleep and gave up on comprehending it half-way through haha but yeah! I would assume Sindarin and Quenya are directly related since the people who speak them used to be one group of people!

I had kind of already decided to just let Fëanor do it anyway because like he is himself and if anyone can do it he would be the one lol but I love knowing that it's actually possible!

Also I am so impressed by anyone who studied linguistics, it sounds like such an incomprehensible subject to me whenever I read anything about it