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Lord of the Rings: Mythology

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Elric
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« Reply #15 on: April 15, 2007, 07:56:08 pm »

Grammar Comparison

The similarities of sound structure are often mentioned when discussing Quenya's relationship with Finnish, but that is not the only area where connections can be found. "The grammatical structure [of Quenya]," writes Fauskanger, "involving a large number of cases and other inflections, is clearly inspired by Latin and Finnish" (Ancient Tongue).

Finnish and Quenya are thus both synthetic languages: they express things by adding endings to words rather than using prepositions and other separate little words. As a simple example, 'in a house' is talossa in Finnish and apparently coasse in Quenya.

If the endings and words can be "glued" together without changing them, a language is called agglutinative. Quenya and Finnish are both like this in principle, but neither is a pure agglutinative language. An example in Quenya is casar + the partitive plural ending -li, producing casalli instead of casarli (Fauskanger, Ancient Tongue). In Finnish hauki + genitive -n gives hauen, not haukin.

The number of noun cases in Finnish is usually said to be fifteen, while mature Quenya had nine or ten. The cases themselves are fairly different in the two languages, but their amount suggests that the two languages are closer to each other than to most Indo-European languages. The only cases that would seem related are the Quenya locative -sse and Finnish inessive -ssa/-ssä, which I used in the 'in a house' example above.

In Quenya, pronouns usually appear only as endings: for example, in hiruvalye 'thou shalt find', the part meaning 'thou' is -lye. Finnish verbs are inflected according to the subject of the sentence, and a pronoun can often be omitted, but I think there are other languages that are closer to Quenya in this respect.

At least one of the pronominal endings is apparently a Finnish loan: the first person plural is marked by -mme in both languages (actually Quenya has another 1.p. plural, too). In Quenya it also exists as a separate pronoun, me 'we'. This is also identical to Finnish. A more uncertain case is the 1. person singular: in Quenya it can be either -nye or -n. The latter happens to be the same ending as in Finnish, but this might be just a coincidence, since nasals are common in 1.p. pronouns in languages all around the world.

However, Quenya seems to have a simpler structure than its Finno-Ugrian model. For example, there are lots of endings in Finnish, like -ko/-kö, -kaan/-kään and -han/-hän that are used to express questions, emphasis and such (toimiikohan tämäkään means 'I wonder if this will work either'). These probably have no equivalents in the published samples of Quenya. It is likely that a large number of complicated forms did not fit Tolkien's image of a beautiful language.

http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm
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Elric
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« Reply #16 on: April 15, 2007, 07:57:39 pm »

The Sounds of Quenya and Finnish

Let us first look at the consonants of the two languages (the lines correspond roughly to different types of sounds) [2]:

Quenya Finnish

t, p, c t, p, k
d, b, g d
s, f, h, hw, hy s, h
v v
n, ng, m n, ng, m
l, hl l
r, hr r
w, y j
Quenya c and Finnish k are the same sound spelled differently, as are y and j. With ng I mean the sound in king, not as in finger. hw, hl and hr are the unvoiced counterparts of w, l and r, and hy is like the ch in German ich. Finnish also has b, g, f and sh, but they only appear in loanwords and are not proper phonemes.

As the comparison shows, Finnish has quite few consonants, especially voiced ones. Even d, the only voiced stop, is a relatively new phoneme created by the written language.

One of the characteristic features of Finnish is the phenomenon called consonant gradation. In means the weakening of t, p, k in certain positions. For example, if we add the genitive ending -n to the word lappu, the doubled consonant is reduced to a single one, and we get lapun. In a similar situation, a single p becomes v, so the genitive of tapa is tavan. Quenya does not have a similar system.

Vowels are very frequent in Finnish. Approximately every other sound in Finnish is a vowel, and words usually end in vowels. Both features are present in Quenya as well. The richness of vowels must have been one of the features of Finnish that made the greatest impression on Tolkien.

Quenya has five vowels, a e i o u, while Finnish has eight, a e i o u y ä ö. Since Quenya lacks the front vowels y, ä, ö, it could not have vowel harmony, another characteristic feature of Finnish. In Finnish, these vowels cannot appear in the same word with the back vowels a, o, u (e, i are neutral in this respect).

Both languages avoid consonant clusters, Finnish perhaps even more than Quenya. This, together with the frequency of vowels, gives the languages a similar "style". However, because of the many differences listed above (and the differences in spelling), Quenya usually doesn't look very familiar to a Finn. Spoken Quenya is also likely to sound unfamiliar because of its different placement of stress: it follows a rule similar to that of Latin, while Finnish always has stress on the first syllable.

http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm
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Elric
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« Reply #17 on: April 15, 2007, 08:00:17 pm »

The Etymologies

The etymological dictionary known simply as the Etymologies, published in The Lost Road, is arranged around "primitive stems" from which all words are derived. It was written just before The Lord of the Rings, which means its Q(u)enya isn't quite "mature" yet, but very close. It is in any case the most important single source of Elvish vocabulary. There are (a rough estimate) a little less than 600 stems and about 1000 words of Quenya.

Rautala has examined the Etymologies, finding recognizably Finnish words under fifteen stems. These words have both a similar meaning in both languages and an identical or nearly identical pronunciation. She has taken into account the Quenya words, their early (primitive Elvish) forms and even the stems. Using this method, it could be said that a few percents of Quenya's vocabulary are influenced by Finnish.

However, I would like to limit this examination to the actual Quenya words that can be identified as Finnish. This would leave us about eleven words out of a thousand; in other words, about one percent of the Quenya words in the Etymologies come directly from Finnish. These are the words in the Etymologies that seem like direct loans to me:
Quenya Finnish
anta- 'give' antaa 'give'
et- prefix 'forth, out' eteen 'forward, to the front', etu- prefix 'front-'
hala 'small fish' kala 'fish'
kulda 'flame-coloured, golden-red' and other forms kulta 'gold'
lapse 'babe' lapsi 'child'
nasta 'spear-head, point, gore, triangle' nasta 'thumbtack, pin'
panya- 'fix, set' panna 'put, place, set, lay'
rauta 'copper', changed to 'metal' rauta 'iron'
tie 'path, course, line, direction, way' tie 'road, path, way'
tereva 'fine, acute' (from an older form meaning 'piercing, keen') terävä 'sharp'
tul- 'come' tulla 'come'


To know exactly how significant these amounts are, it would be necessary to know how much of Quenya's vocabulary is borrowed from existing languages and how much of it is pure invention. Unfortunately, I am unable to make any guesses about it. Tolkien certainly took words from various languages beside Finnish, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Greek and Scandinavian languages.

In addition to the actual loans, the Etymologies contains Quenya words that exist in Finnish in a completely different meaning. Tolkien probably knew enough Finnish to recognize many of these words, but I think some of them are just a result of the phonological similarity rather than actual loans. I would say there are over eighty of these words in the Etymologies. Quite many of them seem to be of the form CVC-CV (C=consonant, V=vowel). Some examples: Quenya Finnish
amme 'mother' amme 'bathtub'
arka 'narrow' arka 'shy, timid'
harya- 'to possess' harja 'a brush'
kúma 'the Void' kuuma 'hot'
lanta- 'to fall' lanta 'dung'
poika 'clean, pure' poika 'boy, son'
ráka 'wolf' raaka 'raw, rough; cruel'
Vala 'Power, God' vala 'oath'


Closely related to the previous group are the words that could well be Finnish, although they are not. These words (for example morko, lepse, lauka) often differ very slightly from an existing Finnish word, or they just have a phonetic appearance suitable for Finnish. This group of words is larger than the group of actual Finnish words in Quenya. However, about one third of Quenya's vocabulary in the Etymologies is incompatible with Finnish [3]. Much of this is due to the differences in consonants noted earlier.

Other Sources
From Fauskanger's Quenya Corpus Wordlist we can get a good idea of Quenya's vocabulary outside the Etymologies. The words are mostly from later texts, and probably represent Tolkien's final image of his language fairly well.

Studying this wordlist gives mostly the same results as with the Etymologies. Again, about one third of the words would clearly not fit Finnish phonology; among the rest, there are some Finnish words in different meanings, although they are not as frequent as before.

Perhaps the most notable thing is that Tolkien seems to have given up taking Finnish loans after the Etymologies: I found none in this wordlist.

http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm
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Elric
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« Reply #18 on: April 15, 2007, 08:01:07 pm »

Bradfield, Julian. "Elvish Pronunciation Guide." http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/misc/local/TolkLang/pronguide.html

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: elämäkerta. [Finnish translation of J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography.]

De Anna, Luigi. "The Magic of Words: J. R. R. Tolkien and Finland." Scholarship & Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon. Ed. K. J. Battarbee. [Available, at least, at the library of Turku, Finland.]

Fauskanger, Helge.

"Tolkien's Not-So-Secret Vice." http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/vice.htm.
"Quenya Corpus Wordlist." http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/qlist.htm.
"Quenya - the Ancient Tongue." http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/quenya.htm.
Hakulinen, Lauri. Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehitys. [A book on the structure and development of Finnish.]

Rautala, Helena. "Familiarity and distance: Quenya's relation to Finnish." Scholarship & Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon. Ed. K. J. Battarbee.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lost Road and Other Writings. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. The History of Middle-earth vol. 5.

Notes
[1]
The dh in raudha is pronounced like the th in English this.
[2]
The listing of Quenya's consonants is based on Fauskanger, Ancient Tongue. For a slightly different way of presenting them (which makes the system seem even less similar to Finnish), see Bradfield.
[3]
The amount depends greatly on how it is calculated. I decided to count words with a d as incompatible with Finnish, although d appears in Finnish as a weak grade of t in some inflected forms (and in recent loanwords).
Harri Perälä, <harri.perala@iki.fi>
This version of the text was published 8 Jan 2000. Latest minor changes were made 7 May 2005 (misspelling "gradiation" corrected to "gradation").
Studies on the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien


http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm
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« Reply #19 on: May 08, 2007, 04:45:08 pm »

It is telling the story ofcoming of Semitic hamitic people to near east...before that there was Only Hurrians there..Semitic Hamitic andJaphetidic people came fromNorth Africa..And This is the story of the Old europe..before japhetidics came(Aryans are japhetidic people.) And this was the pre Aryan europe..
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