Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s
Literally canon
TIL Tumblr can out-language-geek Tolkein and honestly that’s why I love this site so much.
Swedish: German: Turkish: English: WTF, you have relatives? Finnish: That’s my brother!
Hungarian: And now the plural forms.
Újra itt
😀
Many of the things in Finno-Ugric that Indo-European grammarians thought were cases (on the model of their own languages) are actually postposition suffixes. It’s probably better to think of them in terms of productive word-formation rules rather than declension paradigms.
Hm. Looks like there are a lot of people who study this stuff for a living who disagree with your assessment that it’s “bad English.” I guess you better get reading … . asshole.
If y’all want to read more on this, also look up professor Smitherman from MSU.
Fun story: I worked as a research assistant for John Rickford, a sociolinguistics professor (and native Guyanese Creole speaker) at Stanford, 10 years ago on his project investigating the Creole Hypothesis of the origins of AAVE. He favors (or did at the time) the theory that it’s a “decreolized” creole. A creole (as it explains under the PBS link) is a language that develops after a generation of children have a pidgin – a mixed language formed in a situation of contact between speakers of different languages – as their primary linguistic input. The creoles we know about, mostly formed in colonial situations where enslaved or low-paid laborers with a variety of native languages were brought in to work on European-owned plantations, have a lexifier language – the European language spoken by the people in power, which provides most of the vocabulary, or lexicon, of the creole – and substrate languages, the languages originally spoken by the laborers, which provide various grammatical structures, function words, and phonological rules. A creole “decreolizes” when it becomes more similar to the lexifier language due to continuing contact with native speakers of the lexifier. AAVE is much more similar to Southern American English than most creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Haitian, etc.) are to their lexifiers, which is why it’s still a matter of controversy whether it was ever a creole or was just a dialect that spun off due to the relative social insularity of the community of speakers.
So, what was I doing on this project? Rickford’s team of research minions, which included me, three other college students, and a PhD student supervisor (all women, interestingly), were responsible for going through transcripts and listening to tapes of interviews with speakers of AAVE and a few English-based Caribbean creoles (Jamaican, Barbadian, Guyanese) and cataloguing their use of various grammatical features: plural marking on nouns (present/absent), question inversion (“Who is she?” vs. “Who she is?”), relative clause construction, and probably some other stuff I don’t remember now. The idea was to find out whether AAVE patterned more like the creoles or more like some British dialects, such as Northern Irish English, from which AAVE might have gotten some of its “nonstandard” features. No conclusions were reached after three months, obviously; our job was to collect and systematize data in such a way that it could be quantitatively analyzed. Which is very cool in theory but incredibly boring in practice. I never wanted to see another Excel spreadsheet in my life.
If you argue that language is weaker and the outlook for English is bleaker, consider the source of your silent discourse. Are you judging the speech, or the speaker?
it means exactly what i think it means its just some stupid word that literally has two definitions that mean the opposite thing
what the hell
This makes me really chuffed
This post is quite egregious
Well I’m nonplussed by this whole post.
goddamnit.
all of you go to hell
And you wonder why i am boggled at times
These are called contronyms! A word that is its own opposite.
Why the fuck do these exist
They exist because they start out meaning one thing, people confuse them with another similar word or get confused about non-literal uses or uses in certain ambiguous contexts and start thinking they mean the opposite, then if enough people use and understand it in the new way the word really has that meaning, because use is the only authority on language. But if people are also still using and understanding the word in the original way, it still has that meaning, too.
They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
So we get gems like
The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)
The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton that clothing is made of)
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)
We painted the wall with cracks. (The cracked wall is the one that was pained.)
truly a strange language
The T-shirt I got for declaring a linguistics major in college says on the front “The horse raced past the barn fell.” (I..e, the horse which was raced past the barn fell. The optional omission of relative pronoun + copula is known as “wh-is deletion,” pronounced “whiz.”)
On the back, there’s a picture of an upside-down horse in front of a barn with the words “You got garden-path’d,” in the “Punk’d” font.
“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.
ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.
no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.
no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.
because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.
point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.
not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.
not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.
not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.
no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.
so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.
Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.
this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.
and
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the
basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real
ramifications
(Also, most of what people loudly defend as “proper English” is nothing more than an adherence to one particular style guide over another–it was what they were taught, therefore it is the only way. Heh, nope. Learn some more. Linguistic descriptivism for all.)
most of what is taught isn’t even based on English but the rules for teaching latin
yes, you can split the infinitive because in English it’s two words, but in latin it’s one
so it is based on a structure designed by a very small educated elite to remind others of their place, and that place was as subhuman, the educated gentlemen who made these rules generally considered anyone who lacked in some way – no matter what it was – as subhuman and that they should be kept down by any means necessary and so created a labyrinth of traps to reveal them- including language
Lingustic prescriptivism is outdated and can be used far too easily as a tool for perpetuating classism, racism, and misogyny.
Loki is the Philosopher King 