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    Words of Westernesse: Tolkien's languages of Men and Hobbits
    Words of Westernesse: Tolkien's languages of Men and Hobbits
    Words of Westernesse: Tolkien's languages of Men and Hobbits
    Ebook161 pages2 hours

    Words of Westernesse: Tolkien's languages of Men and Hobbits

    By Codex Regius

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    About this ebook

    This book compiles the updated and illustrated essays on grammar and vocabulary of Adûnaic and Westron previously published on Lalaith's Middle-earth Science Pages.

    Lovers of J.R.R.Tolkien's invented languages have mostly disregarded the tongues spoken by the men of Númenor and Middle-earth. The known vocabulary is small in comparison to the much better documented languages of the Elves, the grammar is only rudimentary described and relationships between words are difficult to identify.Yet it is possible to enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien's creativity in the ‘lesser’ languages of Middle-earth as well. This book takes a light-hearted view on the grammar, analyses the ‘Lament of Atalantë’, the only poem Tolkien has written in the language of the sunken island of Númenor, and tries to reconstruct the development of the words used by men (and hobbits!) of Middle-earth from the Second to the Third Age under the sun.

    3nd and updated edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXinXii
    Release dateDec 30, 2021
    ISBN9783957038296
    Words of Westernesse: Tolkien's languages of Men and Hobbits

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      Book preview

      Words of Westernesse - Codex Regius

      Adûnaic grammar according to Lowdham's treatise

      The three stages of Adûnaic

      Beyond a few preliminary scraps that are represented only by a couple of personal names in the various versions of ‘The Drowning of Anadûne’, the evolution of Adûnaic is marked by three important stages of development with different grammar and changing vocabulary. The actual corpus is small, but it seems noteworthy that each stage has a different word for ‘earth’: kamât, daira and *aban, respectively (which does not necessarily mean that one replaced the other). For the sake of convenience, we will use these words as a kind a ‘key fossil’ and reference the stages in the evolution of Adûnaic in the following by their initials: k-Adûnaic, d-Adûnaic, and a-Adûnaic. (Arundel Lowdham, the fictitious editor of the treatise in NC, frequently writes Adunaic but we agree with the translator of the Red Book and prefer the spelling Adûnaic.)

      k-Adûnaic is represented only in the early drafts of NC: It is a strongly inflecting, ‘indo-european’ language.

      (Inflecting means that much of the vocabulary changes its appearance according to number, gender, case, tense or other symptoms. Latin, Russian and German are good examples of inflecting languages).

      d-Adûnaic is the stage that Arundel Lowdham described in his treatise in RA, with much altered vocabulary and a different grammar. Other than its predecessor, it is an agglutinating language to which Lowdham attributes ‘a faintly semitic flavour’ (NC), though actual similarities to Hebrew grammar seem to be at least superficial.

      (Agglutinating means that any word may accumulate lots and lots of affixes in front, behind or even inside to express relationships that inflecting languages would use prepositions for. Turkish and Finnish are examples of agglutinating languages. This type has for learners the disadvantage that you cannot simply look up an unknown word in the dictionary: You have to know first how to eliminate the affixes and to detect the actual basic word.)

      a-Adûnaic is the ‘official version’ of the language used in the LR Appendices and in LE. The vocabulary seems to be generally identical to d-Adûnaic, but it is safely attested only in a few royal names and a handful of other words such as adûn ‘west’, pharaz ‘gold’, Akallabêth ‘the Downfallen’. We do not know anything about its grammar but may conclude that some of its known vocabulary was not actually constructed with the grammar of d-Adûnaic in mind.

      Mr Lowdham in his treatises focusses on the grammar of a mode that he calls ‘Classical Adûnaic’, which seems to be the variety spoken in Númenor at the time of its downfall. In the following we will first examine what Arundel Lowdham tells us – in sometimes convoluted manner - about the grammar of both k- and d-Adûnaic. Then we will apply the results to the poem that was unofficially named ‘The Lament of Atalante’, fragments of which are found among the Notion Club Papers. And finally we will have a look on how a-Adûnaic might have changed the context that we know.

      The Noun

      Lowdham gives many tables of nouns and how they are affected by the various cases, numbers etc. There is nothing to add to them and, hence, no need to repeat them here. It shall be sufficient to compile the general rules and trends.

      A sexy language

      The good news first: A couple of features that many European languages love to bother us with are absent from Adûnaic of any stage. For example, as Mr Lowdham nicely put it: Adûnaic has no gender, but it has sex (’there is not strictly speaking any 'gender' in Adunaic’) - by which it quite neatly corresponds to the English language. What he wants to express is that lifeless or, more technically, inanimate objects are generally devoid of gender and teachers of Adûnaic do not need to bother with useless students' questions like, ‘Why is a table female in France (la table) and male in Germany (der

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