we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
Not many jnſtances of Punctuation – but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly – ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie – and the long S – ſ – vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes – & the short “s” vſed only at the end – as with the U and V, and the I and J – but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” – Y may be vſed in the place of TH – but only ſparingly – and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences – ſeeminglie without end – a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
The existence of English itself is because this exact thing happened. That’s why English can easily meld words from other languages into their own and why it’s such a stupidly hard language to learn for non native speakers. It’s why we use German, Greek, Latin and Celtic roots and syntaxes together without realizing it.
So I completely agree with this, common would be an even larger mess than what we speak now because it would be a combination of the main human language, Elven, Orcish ,Dwarven words and syntaxes mixed together. The written language would be even worse because there would be Orcish consonants used in place of Elvish sounds because the letters are easier and faster to write, letters in places they don’t belong because of some old Dwarven writing habit three centuries ago that’s just become the norm. Short hand a long hand versions of the language because fuck why not. The dropping of the informal tense because most of the language is spoken in a formal setting anyway.
It would be a lot of fun to work that out, but also a ton of work and world building. You could write an entire book on just this subject.
congratulations you are literally the first person in almost 44 thousand notes to compare this concept to english and not be INCREDIBLY boring about it
Note here, as someone with a linguistics BA: imperialism is not actually the only way for a language to spread surprisingly far! For a real world example, you only have to look at Proto-Indo-European, a language that managed to spread so far that its descendants are as far dispersed geographically as Hindi, English, Farsi, and Greek.
The original speakers of that language don’t appear to have been imperialists… but instead, the trade superpowers of their time.
They were among the first to domesticate horses, and also figured out wheels and carts pretty early on, and so they could travel *massively* longer distances than pretty much any of their contemporaries, and if that meant bringing Siberian firs to northern India or anotolia or even close to China (they’ve long died out, but there are records of ancient Indo-European languages in like, *mongolia*)—then, well, you have a certain amount of cultural dominance, even if you’re not doing a lot of marrying into these other societies, or colonizing them, or any of that. You’re still become an *important language for everyone else to speak*.
And so they uh… did, I guess? I’m sure the politics around choosing to adopt it at the time we’re fascinating, but most of these languages weren’t written, soooo, we’ll never know exactly how it went down.
But anyway, that could absolutely be an origin point for Common.
And heck, even if humans only speak it, it might not have initially been a human language! Almost all European languages today are Indo-European, but the initial speakers of Proto-Indo-European were from the western steppe—that’s way off in southern Russia, pretty far from places like Scandinavia and England.
So you could even interpret humans as having been comparatively “weak” to an encroaching trade language, and therefore only speaking it >_o
(**side Tolkien note: Tolkien’s Common actually doesn’t work as OP decries. Not all humans speak it (eg the rohirrim), some but not all non-humans speak it (many elves do not), and some humans even speak non-human languages (eg the higher echelons of Gondorian society speak Sindarin as a first language))
WRITTEN BY Nikhil Sonnad for Quartz, January 11, 2018
With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.
Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming “chay” (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even it made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian.
But that doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, 茶, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The key word here is “coastal.”
The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thé, the German tee, and the English tea.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.
The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millenia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China, and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet. (X)
Remember yourself reading all things Tolkien for the first time? Surely, all the distant “magical” lands, Elves and dragons took your breath away (or failed to do so). But there always were these parts where you could not restrain yourself from laughing out loud because of the very way the words you were reading sound.
Those names!
In case English is not your mother tongue, chances are that you’ve had a feeling (once, at the very least) Tolkien was purposedly trolling you and all of your fellow Finnish/German/Italian/(choose for yourself) speakers. In case English is your native language, you’ve probably had this feeling as well.
Here goes a list being compiled with the help of people mentioned at the end of the post. If you wish to contribute, please don’t hesitate and send me a note (or two, for the sake of double-checking); I’ll update this very post.
If you bother going back to Hobbit for a minute DALE can get transcribed as DAL out of necessity, which is kinda oldie for “distance” or “far away” in Polish.
The City of Far Away under The Lonely Mountain kinda makes it feel even more like you are reading something for five-year-olds.
Gonna add some more on the Finnish-sounding words, because why not. I highly doubt some of these are the supposed inspiration, but I still find them rather amusing.
Ainu( r) – ainut/ainoa in Finnish, meaning ‘the only one’ Annatar – is already listed, but I thought I’d elaborate a little. Anna is a common Finnish girls’ name, and derives from the word antaa, ‘to give’. However, the form ‘anna’ is an imperative, and actually means ‘give me’. Which is rather fitting in this context. Ancalimë / Ancalimon: most certainly not related, but the finnish word for ‘duck’ is ankka, and I always found this rather amusing. Calacirya/Kalacirya: close to the pronunciation of kalakirja, which would technically mean ‘fish book’ or ‘fishing book’. Calavénë/Kalavéntë: kala means fish, vene means boat. In the early drafts, there was very much a boat shape involved. Calma/Calmatéma- : kalma means death Cuiviénen: In the early drafts, the name of the elven haven was Koivië-néni, which sounds suspiciously close to Koivuniemi, a common Finnish place name meaning ‘birch cove’. Dúnedain/Dúnadan: this is honestly just crack theory at this point, but the word is very similar to the old stadi slang term ‘duunata’ (derives from Swedish ‘done’). Duunari is a manual laborer. Halla: ‘frost’ (halla literally means frost), but Tolkien chose it to mean tall/long in quenya. Harma: harmaa is ‘grey’ in Finnish. Helcar: another complete crack theory, but helkkari is an old slang curse that one might use in the same way as ‘bloody’ in ‘bloody cold’ etc. One of the most popular contexts for the word is to exclaim how incredibly cold it is outside, on helkkarin kylmä. Huor: huora, ‘a whore’. I rather doubt this is what Tolkien was inspired by lmao. Maia( r): Maija is another common Finnish name, but also an old slang term for the police. Melkor: another one I’m very doubtful about, but melko means ‘quite’. Náin: literal translations would be either ‘I marry’ or ‘I fuck’. Pick your favorite. Ori: my sweet summer child, your name actually means stallion (or a beefy handsome man, oldish slang term) Saeros: very close to the pronunciation of ‘sick’ and/or ‘twisted’. Timpinen / Tinfang Warble: Timpinen is just a legit Finnish surname. Vala( r): an oath (to swear an oath: vannoa vala), but also meaning ‘to mold/to create’ when in verb form. (to cast iron: valaa rautaa, to create the world, valaa maailma, archaic) Valarauka: see above. Raukka means ‘poor’ or ‘wretched’ in Finnish. Voronwë: voro means ‘thief’
And my favorite, which is the Quenya numbers, as there’s a whole lot of interesting little easter eggs:
Third (ordinal): nelya (neljä = four) Fifth (ordinal): lempëa (lempeä = gentle) Seven (cardinal): otso (otso = old word for ‘bear’, but also similar to Spanish and Italian 8) twenty-three: leminkainen (Lemminkäinen = one of the heroes in Kalevala)
Don’t even get me started on Tolkien’s names and how they sound in Russian.
Ibun (the dwarf) – “fucker”. Not really an insult, just… idk, someone who fucks. Durin.Duren’ means “stupid man”. Gondolin.Gondon is a slang word for a condom. A particulary common word her (lord, master, ruler) literally means “dick”. Ar-Adûnakhôr (a king of Numenor) sounds close to “Ar-I’m-going-to-fuck-off”. Angamando. The same as Mandos. “Mando” means prison in Quenya; and “manda” is… yes, a vulgar word for women’s genitalia. Erebor. This one is not obscene, tho.Perebormeans“too much, overflow”.
I don’t even notice it anymore, but my non-Tolkien friends lose their shit every time I mention somebody with a particulary funny name. Makes serious conversations harder.
Húrin also sounds a bit too similar to “Huren”, German word for “whores”. And to “urine”.
me—an intellectual: excessive and incorrect use of m dashes
me, a pseudo-intellectual: both, if at all possible—and it’s always possible
me, a showoff: both of those – but, and this is important; it is never the wrong time to use a semicolon
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.
“Where is the horse? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the heroic warrior! Alas for the splendor of the king! How they have passed away, Dark under night-cover, As if they never were.” – The Wanderer, An Anglo-Saxon poem of lamentation, which was the inspiration for Tolkien’s Lament of the Rohirrim. (via currentboat)
If not already noticed, “maþþumgyfa”
includes the root of the Hobbit word “mathom” (the thing that nobody wants but won’t throw away so it ends up being handed on (and on, and on) as a gift with no other purpose than being given…)
Here’s the LotR version:
“Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
*UPDATED* Here is a masterpost of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are available, archived, or starting soon. Some are short, some are very interactive, some are very in-depth. I think they will help those that like to learn with a teacher or with videos. I checked each link to make sure they are functioning.
I’m not studying any Greek or Roman this coming year (I sacrificed intro classical languages for gender & history), but I will be doing a Roman history module and engaging with the language is always useful. I know a few people who have been looking for Greek/Latin learning resources, which is how this list came about. It includes MOOCs, youtube videos and websites. Not really knowing much Latin or Greek I can’t vouch for them 100% but my googling skills are pretty on point, so they should be okay. Feel free to correct me or add to this.
This free course, Getting started on classical Latin, has been developed in response to requests from learners who had had no contact with Latin before and who felt they would like to spend a little time preparing for the kind of learning that studying a classical language involves. The course will give you a taster of what is involved in the very early stages of learning Latin and will offer you the opportunity to put in some early practice.
Welcome to the beginners’ Latin tutorials. These lessons cover the type of Latin used in official documents written in England between 1086 and 1733. This can be quite different from classical Latin, as used by the Ancient Romans.
Here are two dozen short lessons on learning Latin designed for “mountain men” (and women: montani montanaeque), engineers, philosophers, and anyone else looking for entertainment and with lots of free time by the campfire. My course is quite different from Peter Jones’ Learn Latin (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997), but it is just as devoted to interesting you in Latin.
I would like to welcome you to the Latin lessons. I’m here to help you learn Latin, by going step by step. All the lessons contain audio and are all offered for free.
Learn Latin from the ground up. This is a serial course, structured to bring you to a high level of Latin fluency. The pace is slow and unhurried. This course is suitable for all ability levels. Restored Classical Pronunciation.
Latin is probably the easiest of the older languages for speakers of English to learn, both because of their earlier relationship and because of the long use of Latin as the language of educational, ecclesiastical, legal and political affairs in western culture.
Welcome to UVic’s practice exercises for Wheelock’s Latin (6th edition). There are 40 units comprising many hundreds of exercises to help you consolidate your progress in the classroom and with the textbook.
Greek has been important in the intellectual life of western civilization, but not to the extent of Latin except for ecclesiastical matters. In years past, Latin was introduced in the first year of High School, followed by Greek in the third year.
This site was designed to be a learning environment for students as well as a reading room for scholars. The large print Greek is easy on the eyes. The Internet has returned us to the scrolling method of reading texts, which lends itself particularly well to the project at hand.
Including pronunciation tips. I haven’t personally watched this and there’s no real description, but it looks pretty comprehensive from what I can see.
How do we learn about the world of the ancient Romans and Greeks? This free course, Introducing the Classical world, will provide you with an insight into the Classical world by introducing you to the various sources of information used by scholars to draw together an image of this fascinating period of history.
The free course, Discovering Ancient Greek and Latin, gives a taste of what it is like to learn two ancient languages. It is for those who have encountered the classical world through translations of Greek and Latin texts and wish to know more about the languages in which these works were composed.
Textkit began in late 2001 as a project to develop free of charge downloads of Greek and Latin grammars, readers and answer keys. We offer a large library of over 180 of the very best Greek and Latin textbooks.
I just did a quick perusal of the Coptic resources on this site, and it has all the resources I’ve personally found worthwhile and then some. These are resources that took me months, if not years, to discover and compile. I am thoroughly impressed. The other languages featured on the site are:
Akkadian
Arabic
Aramaic
Church Slavonic
Egyptian (hieroglyphics and Demotic)
Elamite
Ethiopic (Ge’ez)
Etruscan
Gaulish
Georgian
Gothic
Greek
Hebrew
Hittite
Latin
Mayan (various related languages/dialects)
Old Chinese
Old English
Old French
Old Frisian
Old High German
Old Irish
Old Norse
Old Persian
Old Turkic
Sanskrit
Sumerian
Syriac
Ugaritic
For the love of all the gods, if you ever wanted to learn any of these languages, use this site.
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