Translation

[Galahad]

You forgot Narn. There is text and a few words in the series.

I've got that font in full canon too

As well as vorlon among a couple of others.

 

[Chilli]

I don't know if it is still available, but back when the first LOTR film came out, I posted a link to an anthropology website, with an article about how Tolkein had created Elvish, with very little change, from some ancient variant of Finnish, that he had studied.

Thing with Finnish (and Estonian - will come back to that later )is, there were no written documents whatsoever before the middle ages when the Swedes brought the Finns the Latin alphabet and the Germans brought it to the Estonians. (Finnish and Estonian share the same proto-language, which was spoken around this time, so both languages must be interesting for the scholars of either) So the only guesses as of what truely ancient Finnish would have looked like can only be made by checking paralells with other languages of the same language family that still exist today, checking them for similiarities. Whereas I could see the definite ties to Hungarian, a language split from the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages several millenia ago .. I could see the inspiration in Quenya, not though how it could possibly be a just somewhat altered version of Finnish. It lacks grammatical cases that Hungarian and Finnish share .. and in a long list of vocabulary I found exactly one word that seemed finnish-based to me, the list having included most of the few dozen words that Hungarian and Finnish share.

My suspicion is that the idea that Elvish is nothing but bastardised Finnish is an urban legend held up by scholars that haven't really studied Uralic languages .. though I could be wrong. I just can't see more than an inspirational relation between Elvish and even the most ancient forms of Finnish that I've seen, aside from parts of the phonetical structure - though even there only partially. Elvish lacks the "Umlaut-sounds" Ä, Ö and Y/Ü, that are essential to finnish and the harmony between these and the sounds A, O and U .. a characteristic that ancient finnic languages all held, the trend has been away from that. Some finnic languages like Estonian don't have that harmony at all anymore .. but did in the old days.

 

[Flounder]

I think the Finnish poems Kalyvalla (sp?) was more of an inspiration .... for Tom Bombadil.

 

[KoshFan]

Tolkien was never limited to the eastern Baltic languages. He was an Anglo-Saxon expert, after all, the first scholar to point out Beowulf could be appreciated as literature rather than just a socio-historical artifact. In fact, for the language of Rohan, look no further than Anglo-Saxon. Theoden's Hall is almost certainly inspired by Heorot from Beowulf. And most of the names of the Dwarves, not to mention the name "Gandalf," are lifted from ancient Germanic legends.

I suspect that if you want the real "source" of the Elvish languages, you'd have to look at half the ancient tongues of northern Europe, and then blend them beyond recognition in a very fertile imagination.

 

[Galahad]

Tolkien was never limited to the eastern Baltic languages. He was an Anglo-Saxon expert, after all, the first scholar to point out Beowulf could be appreciated as literature rather than just a socio-historical artifact. In fact, for the language of Rohan, look no further than Anglo-Saxon. Theoden's Hall is almost certainly inspired by Heorot from Beowulf. And most of the names of the Dwarves, not to mention the name "Gandalf," are lifted from ancient Germanic legends.

I suspect that if you want the real "source" of the Elvish languages, you'd have to look at half the ancient tongues of northern Europe, and then blend them beyond recognition in a very fertile imagination.

heh heh what was it you guys were saying to me earlier? Oh yeah, that was it... need to get out more!

 

[Chilli]

Tolkien was never limited to the eastern Baltic languages.

Minor correction .. as far as I know, Tolkien never studied Baltic languages - those being Lithuanian, Latvian and the now extinct Prussian - a branch within the Indo-European langage family spanning all languages in Europe except for Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque and Turkish. Finnish is part of the so called Uralic language family, which is not related to Indo-European languages like the Baltic languages at all.

 

[Flounder]

heh heh what was it you guys were saying to me earlier? Oh yeah, that was it... need to get out more!

We're perfectly capabable of
- reading Tolkien while reclining on a lawn chair and getting a tan. *
- discussing Tolkien with friends over some alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks out on the town.

... so that has both meanings of "out" covered.

*: (Nice weather here in Trondheim today. I was out shopping though.)

 

[B5Suomi]

Can you venture a quess what this means?
" Yksi sormus löytää heidät, se heitä hallitsee,
se yksi heidät yöhön syöksee ja pimeyteen kahlitsee. "

I can tell you it's finnish, but what does it mean? Pretty easy actually.

There are a few similarities between finnish and quenya. For example(english - quenya - finnish):
lord - -her - herra
I have come - utuline - olen tullut
baby - lapsë - lapsi
bread - lembas - leipä
small fish - hala - kala

Well these we easy one for me, but I'm no expert on accient finnish so there might be alot more that I haven't found.

Oh, and you're right! The finnnish languege has lost some of it's harmony, since we're mixing english and other languages with it. Shame...

"If you're falling off a mountain, you might as well try to fly"

 

[Chilli]

Hmpf .. can't believe I didn't notice hala/kala .. lembas and her I ignored, since both Finnish words there aren't really Finnish .. herra is from the germanic(swedish) "herr", leipä from the germanic(swedish) "leib" - which english has as "loaf"

Though it is very possible I've just missed a lot of the similarities .. considering it took me twenty years to notice most similarities between English and German I've noticed .. and I didn't notice till I was told that the Hungarian word "fej" is equivalent to the Finnish "pää" and the Estonian "pea" .. Finnish and Estonian not having F aside from loan words but it being a natural sound in Hungarian, there are shifts between the sounds there, so a hungarian F is mostly equivalent to a Finnic P .. or something .

As for vocal harmony .. I didn't know how strong away from it the trend in Finnish was, just know it has been very strong in close languages .. Estonian has lost it over the last few centuries. Southern Estonian dialects - that are in general much closer to Finnish than norhtern Estonian - still have it for example. As for vocal harmony in finnish .. I was once told by a Finn that every time the olympics come up, there are petitions to rename "Olympialaiset" into either "Ölympialaiset" or "Olumpialaiset" .. though she could have been telling tales .. or could have been exagerating the problems some elderly Finns have with words that lack vocal harmony like it and psykologia .. which she claimed lots of Finns pronounce "sikologia"

 

[Chilli]

As for the quote ..
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. .. in a somewhat rearranged order

Wow, I actually remember some things

 

[Flounder]

That was my first guess too. Based on seeing the word "Yksi" (one) and the context of this discussion.

 

[B5Suomi]

.. which she claimed lots of Finns pronounce "sikologia"

Sikologia? In english piglogy or something like that...
Could have some of her tales again.