I tried this one on Patrick (currently manning the Tor booth at the comics convention) and got back "Good grief. Try a hard one, why dontcha."

(I can't remember more than that one bit, anyway.)

Well, sort of; I correctly intuited the author, but not the text.

In my defense, I'm not running on all cylinders due to a head cold.

(I kept looking at it, and muttering to myself, "no, Doyle, it can't possibly be that; you're just being faked out by the meter." Lord knows, there wasn't any one specific thing I recognized, and while I'll cop to being a language geek, I've never been that particular variety of language geek.)

I personally couldn't tell you how I knew, I just did.

The exclamation point at first line put you on the track?

Once that idea was in my head, it just felt like a piece by, well, you know, and my tired brain just couldn't come up with which particular piece.

(Now to read the rest of the comments here ...)

But I bow to those who are geekier than I, and have actually Gone That Far with the translation.

I guess it says something for the powers of a person whom I shall not name that I could so easily confuse his work with a real language.

Must be this +3 Hat of Forgettery or something.

Last year when we were helping my mom move out of the home she'd lived in for 45 years (and the home I grew up in),my husband was appalled to discover a small journal I kept,writing in Elvish of course. He was even more shocked by my cache of Paul Williams albums. Somehow we weathered the storm.

Now I will go look at the answer and come back and say whether I was right.

Skwid @ 38: Ah yes, that's the passage which means "lf bt gt sl! lf grls lk t rck'n'rll!" (Are we still disemvowelling after everyone's spilled the beans?)

punkrockhockeymom: Nice to see you posting here again!

It's a thing of beauty in its way.

P.

If I may ask, why disemvowelment rather than rot-13ing?

And if you give me a moment I can dig out the book that has the words in English.

Also, wow.

I think I got it from the metre and the punctuation in the first line. I didn't spot the word at the end of line 4 until afterwards. Actually I wasn't quite right, because the closest thing I could remember was th smlr vrs nr th nd f th bk wth th lst thr lns n nglsh. t ls ddn't ccr t m tht t hd bn trnsltd nt nthr nvntd lngg, lthgh dd wndr wht ws th pnt f trnsltng t nt nthr rl-wrld n.

Then I checked the link, and wished that I had been more sure, because if it had been my guess it would have been correct.

Not my brand of geekiness anymore, I guess. Twenty years ago, maybe.

Could I nail down the exact language or remember the poem itself? Not a chance. But I'd put a bet on the species.

Which scares me a little.

---L.

Also, I like that definition of 'Spanoioglossen'!

Not actually what I think of when I hear the word "geek"--which goes to show something, I expect.

Twenty years ago, maybe.

Mmm. Well, I've been assigning names to foals by a horse called "Gevybtl" the last few years, which may have served as a refresher course.

Weirdly, this afternoon I was just thinking about the musical setting I wrote of the original text...

Come to think of it, it also counts as a sort of Hail Mary, doesn't it?

Though it should have come as a warning that I'm a geek when I started translating Latin poetry into English. ;)

For me, the most telling line is the last one -- an oddity I appear to share only with P J Evans -- though most of them recall the originals.

Connie (73), it's that or Salve Regina.

A couple of the words are dead giveaways. "palan-tirala" and the last line were what did it for me.

The funny thing is, I can't tell what language that it has been translated into. Now to go find out whether I'm right or not.

Heh. I heart you, Teresa. That must leave so many different kinds of geek I can be.

MKK

I tried to read it, but my brain kept imposing a Gilbert and Sullivan tempo...

I find it interesting that here - in this company - I don't even budge the needle on the Geek-O-Meter.

I haven't looked at the linked page yet but the URL confirmed it for me.

(Mind you, finding it on ML is a hint in itself.)

Without that, trying to read the Smrlln is just pointless - I just don't care about the world. By all rights I should care: I like Germanic languages, or think I do; I read fantasy regularly for enjoyment; I have no objection to obsessive geekery about a constructed world. However, I just can't bring myself to care about this particular constructed world. This even extends to the movies - I watched them once, but have no desire to see them again.

All of which is to say that following the link was not enlightening for me either, and I had to go back to googling the original for a while to find out what was going on.

A pity. I'd been psyching myself up to go read the trilogy again (for the first time in thirty years), as preparation for watching the movies ... but being reminded of the poetry and the linguistic stuff put me right off it again.

I am not that kind of geek.

Still don't know what's been done to it, alas, as the link to the answer appears to be broken...

(I have more to say on how and how much, but I observe the injunction to stick to a simple yes for now.)

For me it was the first line -- but then that's the only part of the original I sort of remember.

A few other words were pretty suggestive, though "Spanoioglossen" threw me off; sounds like some kind of mock-German. (After I went to the site, I kicked myself for missing "palan-tīrala", which would have made me more confident in my guess.)

(Mind you, finding it on ML is a hint in itself.)

Oh, yes -- that plus "Geek test" narrowed the possible field a lot. (Without the "Geek test," I would have worried about all sorts of English poetry being plausible sources...)

*Aided by my allergy meds, no doubt.

(Recognized source text immediately, couldn't place target language... followed link... brain explodey. Note to self, go back and read historical linguistics textbook, then try again.)

(After breakfast.)

Regarding my half-yes: I recognized the who and the what but couldn't remember the original text. What tipped me off was, to be terrifically imprecise, the flow.

Sasha says he might not have got it if he'd seen it written down rather than hearing me reading it aloud in my reading that aloud voice. I didn't know I had a special reading that aloud voice!

I never studied consonant changes. Is there a rule whereby Spanoioglossen linduban is a reasonable transformation of Fanuilos, le linnathon? My hindbrain thinks it's logical, but I can't say why.

I'm several other kinds of geek, so I don't feel *too* bad.

Some of us read those books before the flood of imitations taught fantasy readers that invented words are arbitrary strings of phonemes -- which was appropriate, because in Tlkn's case they weren't arbitrary.

Yep. Mostly by rythmic structure and a couple of the words.

And yes, this will figure in a discussion of fundamental images and development at some point. Just another kind of geekiness.

Remember also that they could have drifted apart grammatically too. English and German use commas very differently, and adjectives function differently. While 'grün' means "green," 'Grün' can only be translated as "green one" (German capitalizes all nouns). So one word in one language...you don't need to be told this. I momentarily forgot who I was talking to; please forgive me!

For the phrase you cite, try saying each of them aloud with only the vowels. They're almost identical.

But for me, the cue was the last line—remember, my task was "identify this short poem," not "do a historical sound change analysis with this poem and its original as corpus." (Thank gods for that; it's not nearly enough data.) The last line of the subject text is 'Nib gaiar, sī nib gaiaran'. Compare 'nef aear, sí nef aearon'.

Let's call the problem text (and its language) P, and the original text and language S. (Yes, I intend the pun.) I would phonemically spell the last line of P /nib gayar si: nib gayaran/ and the corresponding S line /nev ayar si: nev ayaron/ (remember that the creator of S specified it was much like Latin, my reason for phonemicizing 'ae' as /ay/; and that he states that in S 'f' is pronounced /v/ in final position). The /si:/ with the long e sound is identical, as is the structure and pattern all around it.

The remaining differences are:

1. The final vowel, which is different but close.
2. The first vowel, again different but close (this time so close that many of the people I grew up around don't distinguish them at all, leading to phrases like 'ink pen', which strike me as redundant).
3. The final consonant of the first and fourth word, which is /b/ in P and /v/ in S. Those two consonants are both voiced labials, one a stop and the other a fricative. Fricatives and stops change back and forth all the time in language evolution.
4. The presence of the /g/ in the second and fifth words in P, which is absent in both places in S. This is the hard one, though not as hard as if it were in one place but not the other! I could make a case for a /g/ appearing historically, but I'd rather postulate that in the common ancestor of P and S the /g/ was there, and it was preserved in P but lost in S.

But oh, before I go, let me return the favor: try putting "doo-dah, doo-dah!" between the lines.

I didn't know there was anyone else whose head worked like that.

I am not the kind of geek who creates things like this. But I know the world-class experts in this particular line, intimately. You should see the translations they've made into these languages of popular song lyrics.

Some of the negative reactions to T posted above intrigued me. Like C.Stross, so put off by the poetry and the language that it interferes with his reading of the book. I'm sorry that he finds he can't just ignore or overlook the aspects he dislikes. On my first reading I found them uninteresting or bewildering: I just skimmed. But not everybody can do that.

And D.Martin saying he gets stuck in the place where, he says, the characters sit around discussing the plot for several pages. I've described that scene that way myself, but I was kidding. What always strikes me about that scene is how very differently it reads from any such scene in any other fantasy novel. And that, I've decided, is because they're not actually discussing the plot: they're discussing morality and ethics. But perhaps that is not how it reads to this particular person.

Each to their own. I'm intrigued by these differences in taste, but differences in taste is all they are and not a matter for disputation.

But... "Neo-Telerin"? I thought Tlkn only produced a handful of supposed Telerin words here and there in his unpublished papers. So where does Neo-Telerin come from? (I tried looking for relevant links on that site's wiki, but almost everything "Telerin" is a stub.)

Not that this will help you at all, but T. was apparently more inspired by Finnish than by any Germanic languages in his main language creation. (The main Anglo-Saxon references come in the second book of the trilogy, in Rohan.)

There's a wonderful description by T. himself here:

He had been studying for exams in the Exeter College library at Oxford when he first encountered Finnish. Years later, he compared the experience to tasting a fine wine: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an unrecorded Germanic language, and my own language -- or series of invented languages -- became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure." This was to become Quenya, his principal Elvish language, but elves had not yet entered the picture.

By the way, every example of this language that I paste into the Language Identification tool at http://complingone.georgetown.edu/~langid/ comes back as Lithuanian. I keep hoping it will say Finnish.

DBratman 133: All the experts in this particular line...

Thanks, but I think you flatter me somewhat. I'm a language geek, but I wouldn't call myself an expert.

This is just my own pet theory, ever since I saw some Georgian script in my late teens. I have no idea if linguists or Tolkein enthusiasts have considered and endorsed or rejected it.

Julie L...that's two. (Kidding.)

Aged, ahem, 14 I suppose, I found the Silmarillion a real slog after I prised it from the hands of the sibling who prised it from the hands of the sibling who prised it from the hands of the sibling who bought it in hardback on sight, back in about 1978.

More recently I found it a very easy read: it's short and to the point, with thousands of years of plot compressed into a single volume as opposed to a couple of years of LotR plot stretched over three volumes.

If you try it and find some section tedious, you can just skip to another chunk a thousand years later as it's a compilation of discrete stories, not a continuous narrative.

Dangit, now I'm going to be wondering how to score the trifecta. (Though if the "Hello Kali" linkage from a while back still counts...)

Recently I tried re-reading LOTR for the first time after seeing the movies, and it's a very strange experience. In many cases, the actors' voices are now firmly fixed in my brain, and yet the songs are still soundtracked to the melodies that spontaneously flowed around them when I was an urchin. (This is why the "Doo-dah" trick doesn't work on me, despite the goatherd song-- the latter is closer to the rather bouncy tune that defaults to those lyrics for me, perhaps influenced by the music from Rankin-Bass's prequel and entirely different from the canon melody that was presented to Donald Swann.)

As an aside, I asked my boyfriend in high school to write in my yearbook in Quechua, spelled in Qny. He did so, and I still don't know what he wrote. Dan's been dead for 30 years, so I can't ask him, and who else do I know with a penchant for both Peru and Tlkn?

Niall @ 145: I had much the same reaction to the Silmarillion. I never made it all the way through it as a teenager; I read it a few years back when the movies started to come out and was startled at what easy going it was.

Julie @ 148: You had your own melodies too? I had my own for this, and for 'The Road Goes Ever On' - I think they got somewhat modified when I heard the Swann melodies but are still distinct. I really wished, as a kid, that I was musical enough to write them down or play them.

Teresa: I hope it's OK to stop disembowelling words in the general subject area now? Enough has gone by up-thread that it seems pointless.

A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
silivren penna miriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-di'riel
o galadhremmin ennorath
Fanuilos, le linnathon
nef aear, si' nef aeron!
(Where "i'" is to be an i with a grave accent over it.)

At the risk of dis-emvowelment, the source is
'The Road goes Ever On, a song cycle', music by Donald Swan, Poems by you-know-who, published 1967, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,first printing.

But I, like others here, wrote for myself (and notes to friends) in Tngwr.

Julie @ 148 and Clifton @ 152--I'm so glad to know I was in good company! My brain put Galadriel's song ("I dreamt of leaves..." and not the farewell song) and the song for Boromir's funeral to tunes. It may be admitting to too much, but I still sometimes find myself singing them to myself.

Not knowing much about the languages in question, though, I can only work for guesses. It's clear that the words in the second language have undergone some phonetic simplification. Where the first has "sp", the second has "f". Where the first has "gl", the second has "l". Where the first has "nd", the second has "nn".

Take /sp/ ?~ /f/. /s/ has a tendency to disappear over time. /s/ often changes to /h/ (Latin "super" vs. Greek "hyper") and then disappears altogether (as "h" did in the Romance Languages). /s/ was also intermittently lost before consonants in many Indo-European languages (ex: English "steer" vs. Latin "taurus"). Finally, /p/ to /f/ is a common "lenition" (consonant-softening) pattern. Put together, you have the reasonable progression of /(s)p/ -> /p/ -> /f/ or /sp/ -> /sf/ -> /f/.

/g/ often alternates with /y/ (as in Old English). So we have something like /oiogl/ -> /oioyl/ -> /oil/ -> /uil/ (vowels approximate). The change /oioy/ to /oi/ is called "hapology" and is common in English (ex: "Anglaland" -> "England").

/nd/ or /nt/ to /nn/ or /n/ is another common change called "assimilation", where neighboring sounds come to sound more like each other. You hear this when people pronounce "winter" like "winner" in fast speech.

Another interpretation of this is that the proto-root is actually *linnod- or *linnodh (/d/ tends to alternate with /th/ or /dh/, as in Spanish). It's then easy for one branch to undergo lenition to "linnath" while the other undergoes "metathesis" (place-switching) to become "linndo". This is the same process that gave us "three" and "thirty".

A grammatical difference would explain the loss or addition of the "(s)en" on the end of "Spanoioglossen". Endings tend to simplify over time, but new ones are also innovated, so it's hard to tell which (if either) form more closely reflects the proto-language.

Finally, we have the "le" and the extraneous "b" in "lindubon". I'm going to chalk this up to a grammatical difference between the languages. If "lindubon" is a noun, "le" could be an article (a later innovation in many language families). "-bon" could then be an ending in the other daughter language expressing definiteness or indefiniteness rather than using an article. Or, if this is a verb in some marked tense, "le" could be a helper while "-bon" is the equivalent conjugation in the other language. Generally, with suffix-inflected languages, you don't care so much how the word ends as how it begins.

Okay - I've run on way too long here, but you get the idea.

I never made any serious attempt to learn the languages or the alphabets (except the G rune, which was a bit of a plot point), but that didn't stop me from working on my own fictional language a year after reading these books.

Well, except for Cynewulf's "Crist", arguably the seed of it all:

Éala, Éarendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
And soðfæsta sunnan léoma,
Torht ofer tunglas - þu tída gehwane
of sylfum þé symle inlihtes.

Now I'm going to go play chess online, drink ginger ale, and celebrate my immutable geekiness.

-JM

I suppose I should move on to the Finnish Kalevala some decade because it's almost as lyrical poetry as the good professor's invention.

Danke.

(looks)

Yep.

You could ask Mark Rosenfelder at the Metaverse. He knows a bit about Quechua and has made up a whole lot of languages mostly because of Tlkn.

Xopher (143): I went back and fixed it. I was disappointed that none of the regular words in that post had "q" in them.

Xopher (123): I don't need to compare Nib gaiar, sī nib gaiaran with nef aear, sí nef aearon. If I'd run across the former and had no other context to cue me, I'd still have heard the latter in my head.

Re your "My brain does this in background. Do not envy me": I neither envy nor pity you, because my brain does the same thing, albeit in a less educated way. I'm lucky that it does, too, because otherwise my low-res hearing would be a worse problem than it is. Still, it's helpful to have it formally explained, so I can see what's happening.

Dave F. (156), thank you very much for your own explanation. It's not bit too long. Again, this is stuff I've been inarticulately semi-aware of (enough messing around with Middle English will do that for you), but haven't understood in any orderly way. It's nice to actually know for once why (f.i.) my ear thinks /span/ -> /fan/ is reasonable. My ear is an opinionated critter, but it's not much given to explaining itself.

Carrie S. (165) wins the AKICIF Prize for Most Obscure Piece of Requested Information, for answering Karen Funk Blocher's question (151) about where she can find someone who knows both Quechua and Quenya.

Jim (167): Sorry, but you're right on one count and arguably right on the other -- see Connie's comment, #73 -- and besides, are you really trying to claim you're not a geek?

What do we know about Feanor? He was right-handed, wrote in ink using a reed or quill pen, and rested his hand on the page as he wrote.

But then I memorized the original at about ten years old.

It's pretty. Unfortunately it's an unreadable mess. The letters look so much alike that...well, shall we hypothesize that Elves have perfect immunity to eyestrain and headaches? I guess with their extended lifespans they wouldn't mind taking half an hour to read a page of text.

And I just noticed the 'Spelling reference'. Gave me a good chuckle, that did. I'd just like to comment that 'minuscule' is easier to spell if you realize that its opposite is 'majuscule', and that it really does help me to put Publishers Weekly on here, since I'm never sure whether it's the weekly for the publisher, the weekly for all publishers, or a weekly about publishers...which is unfortunately what the correct spelling implies to me, and seems least plausible.

We know that Elves are immune to letter-differentiation eyestrain because it's mentioned somewhere or other that in private records, they would sometimes switch off and write left-handed in mirror-Tengwar.

(Q: What do you get if you take a passage written in Tengwar and rotate it on its vertical or horizontal axis? A: Twice as much!)

Whoa. Tengwar mirror-palindromes.

I'm not smart enough to make one of those...but I bet there are a couple of people here who could. abi, Teresa...abi and Teresa.

I had no idea in what language it was being displayed in the post. I haven't clicked the link, but other comments have tipped me off. I never delved that far into the appendices, myself. And I never COULD finish the Slmrlln.

That hymn has sustained me in some dark moments, though. Lovely.

My worry is that after all this, I'll learn that my obscurely translated yearbook inscription says, "Have a nice summer. See you next year."

----------
* This is what happens when you are read the four core texts at four**. I grew up knowing those characters the way most kids know Mickey Mouse. I still recall my surprise on rereading the books as an adolescent and realising that Eowyn was in love with Aaragorn. At four, and at seven (second read-through), you miss these things.

** That was also about the time that I was introduced to Star Trek. My entire life has, arguably, been shaped by the fact that I fell in love with Spock on first sight.

...Which is funny, because I've always admired and wanted to be that sort of geek, but figured I didn't have the aptitude.

I have taken
the ring
that was in
your clutches

and which
you were probably
saving
for my birthday

Forgive me
it was so precious
so bright
and so cold

Right, I'll go wash out my head now...

a "This is Just to Say" Generator

And dyslexia, which--if I understand correctly--is often based on mirror-image problems.

I had the same sense of astonishment in the high school re-readings.

You kids get offa my lawn.

One of my favorite memories of Tengwar is from when I was hospitalized with appendicitis at 15. They had a big poster in the children's wing that one of the previous patients had drawn and written in Tengwar, and none of the staff knew what it said. When I translated it, it turned out to be the opening of 'The Creation of Ea' from Earthsea. That was very cool.

OTOH, I read the entire LOTR to my children, which seems to have had an influence on them (my younger son was deeply upset when the film came out and Frodo didn't sing the song about the cow jumping over the moon -- and he was 13 then -- Peter Jackson has much to answer for).

I recognized the proper geek domain of the poem, but got no further without peeking.

Speaking of geekery, I had a geekish epiphany this weekend, and can't figure out what kind of geekery it is: I've long known that the theme from Star Trek TOS is a contrafact on the jazz standard "Out of Nowhere" (that is, a new melody written on an existing chord progression), and I remember there was an episode of ST:TNG where Riker was practicing trombone on the holodeck, and the tune he was playing was "Out of Nowhere." Which was my single geekiest piece of knowledge up until this Sunday. I was watching ST:TOS on DVD and trying to play the chords to Star Trek/Out of Nowhere on my ukulele by ear, when I gave up and looked up Out of Nowhere in a fake book, where I found out that the song is from the 1931 film, Dude Ranch. And Dude Ranch was produced by what studio? Paramount, who owns the Star Trek franchise. I found this information immensely satisfying, but I can't decide whether it's music geekery, Star Trek geekery, or show business geekery.

I love those.

I think Jackson's team did a good job of putting the story on film, except that the big battle scenes could have been pruned considerably without reducing the coolness factor, thereby leaving more room for the subplots (Eowyn and Faramir TLA!). But I heartily recommend the BBC radio production* because it leaves in most of the poetry and songs and preserves the original's air of slow-building menace, which wouldn't have translated well to celluloid. It also features some top-notch voice acting.

*Not, repeat not, the American radio production by a company whose name I don't recall. That one manages to be twee. I guess the production company assumed that anything with wizards in it must be for children in spite of the cannibal orcs, torture rooms, bloody battles, fifty-foot demons with their hair on fire, etc., etc.

Oh yes, indeed...

and now I've got the Swann setting running through my head (no bad thing, that, but my wrists are acting up and I want to head for the piano and play the whole of "The Road Goes Ever On", and that would not be wise).

The Ballantine edition (with the kewl psychadelic covers) I have is dated 1969, so that's when I got it. (I'm thinking that the people I babysat for a LOT gave me an xmas gift certificate for B. Dalton's and that was the Big Purchse, I would have been 13.)

I read it enough that when the editions with the movie covers came out I bought them for re-reading, the original has things like tail feathers from my first pet (a budgie) and stuff like that. The box made it real convenient for sentimental storage.

Was anybody else first introduced to Tlkn through Isaac Asimov's short mystery story about an overheard murder plot? That's what led me to seek out the novels.

I think that Asimov story, "Nothing Like Murder," was first published a few months after I first read Tlkn. I've remembered it fondly ever since.

*clicks link* Oh -- not quite.

I had a friend once in Tolkien fandom who said that Quenya drove him insane because he grew up speaking Finnish, and Tolkien merrily pickpocketed syllables and cadences from Finnish without regard to what the constructed words might be saying -- so someone says "light" and it means "cheesecloth."

Quite funny, to think of it.

Julie L. @ 193, on the Silmarillion: I read it at fourteen, manic and obsessive. I buried myself in the book totally, and still managed only about sixty pages a day, which is not much compared to the usual rate of perusal. It is very thick. It is somewhat easier reading than the King James bible, partly because Tolkien has the pleasant habit of making the begats into appendices. I adored it, but I doubt I could quite manage it today.

I do wish Jackson had included Tolkien's songs in the film.I'd have loved hearing a rendering of 'Eärendil was a mariner'.

I looked at it, I thought "Hmm, I bet it's the one that starts
[vowel] lbrth glthnl!"

And then I clicked the link and looked and said, um, okay, so I'm wrong.

But now after going back and clicking through more of that page, I think maybe I was right after all.

Now I'm going to go read the whole thread and see if the answer is in here somewhere.

If I'm right, I could never have recited the rest of it, translated it, remembered a more specific reference than "somewhere in [trilogy]", or identified exactly which language it was in.

Has anyone translated Elvis into Elvish?

After reading the comments, I should have gone with my first instincts. I couldn't possibly have told you what language it's been translated into, though. Also, reading it more slowly to try and find a rational justification for my instinctive guess, I should have noticed that palan-tīrala as a dead giveaway.

Like abi at #180 I'm not really a Tolkien geek, but did have LotR rooted in my consciousness by the time I started school.

The fact that I have seen the extended version of the films recently, and re-read the books too, probably helped.

Julie at #155 -- dammit -- now I can't see/read "The Road Goes Ever On..." without hearing it double with "Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes..." Ghods help us, it scans beautifully to the tune!

The first one is some Turkish phrase. The second one came along too quickly to not also be spam.

I'm more suspicious of spam than trolls.

At least one knows where the troll on a roll comes from. Properly aged out back, slowly braised and delicately spiced so the sweet, tangy goodness of properly slain troll meat is appreciated.

Spam has no flavor, just salt and preservatives.

I don't know what that language is, but it's pretty similar to Elvish. Please let me know hehe

Fishie