01 decembra 2021

An introduction to the "P-AdW" project, an expansion of Tolkien's Adunaic and Westron languages

An introduction to the purpose of this freetime linguistics projects and this blog.

Tolkien's fictional languages Adunaic and Westron, used primarily by Men and Hobbits, have a fairly substantial fictional vocabulary, grammatical and phonetic rules. However, compared with other fictional languages in Tolkien's ancient fantasy world of Arda, Adunaic and Westron are something of a "child of a wicked stepmother". They've never been expanded to any significant extent, into any more usable forms. A relatively functional languages requires about 3000 to 4000 words, while these two fictional languages have, altogether, at most 400 words, and in addition to that, not entirely completed grammar rules. 

Do veľkej miery je to tak aj preto, lebo profesor Tolkien veľakrát prehodnotil nielen svoje existujúce poznámky, ale zmenil aj svoje tvorivé rozhodnutia a autorské zámery ohľadom roly, ktorú dané jazyky mali zohrávať v jeho fantazijnom svete a Legendáriu. My sa však na tomto blogu zameráme predovšetkým na jeho existujúcu adunajčinu a západčinu, obzvlášť ich najkonzistentnejšie časti.

Začiatkom júna 2021, po rokoch zbežného záujmu o tieto dva umelé (a umelecké) jazyky profesora Tolkiena, som sa rozhodol pre menší experiment. Pokúsil som sa využiť existujúcu slovnú zásobu a pravidlá na preklad kratšieho textu s priamou rečou. Ako predlohu pre tento experiment som použil jednu krátku, príbehovo dosť nepodstatnú scénu z prvej filmovej adaptácie. Postavy v danej scéne hovoria "v skutočnosti" západčinou, ale scéna je samozrejme prezentovaná v reálnych jazykoch (v pôvodnom anglofónnom znení alebo dabovane). Cieľom bolo vytvoriť preklad do fiktívneho jazyka (v tomto prípade rekonštruovanej formy západčiny), aby vznikla názorná predstava o tom, ako daná scéna mohla znieť. 

Úlohou tohto úvodného článku je vysvetliť podstatu Tolkienovej pôvodnej adunajčiny a západčiny, kde zapadajú do príbehového a "historického" kontextu jeho fiktívneho sveta Arda, čo o nich vieme zo všetkých jeho preživších poznámok, a v neposlednom rade aj charakter a ciele tohto projetku.

Tak ako všetko, čo Tolkien napísal a zostavil sám (ešte aj viaceré verzie poznámok, vrátane protichodných), tak aj všetky jeho poznámky k týmto dvom umelým jazykom tvoria pomyslený kánon. Sú to jediné oficiálne súčasti týchto jazykov. Preto prosím považujte všetky novotvary, o ktorých budete čítať na tomto blogu, za striktne nekánonické.

Prosím všetkých čitateľov, ktorý budú čítať tento blog a s ním súvisiace materiály, aby si naplno uvedomili, že toto je len fanušícky projekt, čisto fanušícky experiment. V žiadnom prípade nikde netvrďte, že ide o oficiálne rozšírenie jazykov, pretože o to tu vôbec nejde, a je to navyše nemožné. Ako som už spomenul v jednej z predchádzajúcich viet, oficiálne sú len jazykové poznámky, ktoré vytvoril sám Tolkien. Žiadne iné. Toto je neoficiálny pokus, neoficiálny projekt, čisto nekomerčný projekt, a takým vždy aj ostane.  

Predtým, než sa pustíme do zvyšku článku, vám ešte chcem objasniť posledný otáznik: Zmysel snaženia. Okrem zábavky pre tolkienistov a ľudí zaujímajúcich sa o jazyky a jazykovedu môžu mať rozšírené verzie týchto dvoch jazykov aj praktické využitie. Nie ktovieako veľké, ale nejaké predsa len existuje. A to v LARPe (live-action roleplaying, rolových hrách hraných naživo, spontánno-divadelným spôsobom) s tolkienovskou tematikou, pri hraní stolových rolových hier s tolkienovskou tematikou, alebo teoreticky aj pri tvorbe nejakého nekomerčného krátkeho filmu s tolkienkovskou tematikou. Keď mnohí tolkienovskí fanušíci a aj niektorí riadni jazykovedci s obľubou prispeli do expanzie Tolkienových elfských jazykov a trpaslíčiny, s adunajčinou a západčinou je možné to isté.




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Stuff ahead in development


Primarily with the use of known Adunaic and Westron vocabulary (and grammar) and with plausibly modified loanwords from Quenya and Taliska.

Back in June, when I started my analysis (using primarily documentation from Ardalambion, Eldamo.org and RealElvish.net) and eventually the effort to expand the two languages, I set myself several guidelines and rules.

The first and most obvious is that everything written and created by Tolkien and published by the late Christopher in the decades since his father's death, constitues "Canon Adunaic" and "Canon Westron". Everything I attempt in my P-AdW project is purely my experimental expansion and purely fanon, in its own separate continuity. I never plan to claim otherwise, obviously.

The reason I chose the abbreviation P-AdW ("Petike-Adunaic/Westron", encompassing both languages separately), rather than "Neo-Adunaic" or "Neo-Westron", was down to those two titles being potentially taken, and also because I wanted to emphasize this is my particular experimental attempt, not to be confused with others. Things like "Neo-Sindarin" and "Neo-Khuzdul" have seen a healthy expansion and development, but even though neither Adunaic or Westron seem to have similar fan projects, I didn't want to "stake a claim" on anything that sounds like some big official fanon project by a professional linguist or Tolkien-lang fans. As much as I like reading about Quenya or Khuzdul, I am not a great scholar of Tolkien's languages, though I've learnt a lot of new details while exploring several of them for the needs of P-AdW. In a nutshell, it's P-AdW, because I don't aspire to call it "Neo-anything".

As for the other guidelines, to summarize briefly:
- the expanded Adunaic and expanded Westron of P-AdW have to sound and seem like they could be entirely (or at least mostly) consistent with the Canon Adunaic and Canon Westron of Tolkien. This includes phonetics, something I can't stress enough. P-AdW's Adunaic tries to hew to Canon Adunaic's phonetics and pronunciations as much as possible, right down to even newly coined loanwords needing to sound vaguely Middle Eastern. Canon Adunaic is very much a mixture of grammar and phonetic elements from Indoeuropean languages (mainly Germanic ones, although some phonetics are vaguely Slavic-like) and from Afro-Asiatic languages (specifically semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, and outside of them, some parallels to even ancient Egyptian). Hence, the expanded derivative has to sound the part. Expanded Westron, in turn, has to sound like the "somewhat more European" younger cousin of Adunaic, and its phonetics need to have a "more earthy" quality than Adunaic, to reflect its more cosmopolitan nature (in terms of loanwords, use as a lingua franca in M-E, by varying social classes).
- vocabulary that exists in Westron also exists in Adunaic, and vice versa, but due to historical developments and differing alphabets and phonetics, many of the more specialized words sound different in both languages. Some in a subtle fashion, with just one vowel different, while others might have fairly different sounding syllables. I felt it was necessary to reflect that Westron is the more cosmopolitan language and has a greater amount of loanwords from other Mannish languages of M-E, from more recent or M-E associated forms of elvish (more Sindarin loanwords, as opposed to primarily Quenya loanwords in Adunaic), and very rarely maybe some mangled expression from Khuzdul or inspired loosely by a Khuzdul word.
- if it is possible to create a new word/term in P-AdW by using only Canon Adunaic and Canon Westron, I attempt to use derivatives of only the canonical vocabulary. Naturally, this is limited, and besides a few exceptions, I've already mostly exhausted these options. There's still a lot I can do with just the canon vocab, but there comes a time when I have to look into the professor's other languages for plausible loanwords. (Naturally, I'm focusing on languages likely to influence Adunaic and Westron. The languages of places like Harad would be very unlikely influences, outside of maybe the dialect spoken in Umbar...)
- the only Mannish ancestral language to Adunaic and Westron that I borrow from is Taliska. The language of the House of Beor, one of the three founding cultures of Númenor. There aren't many known words from this particular Tolkien-lang, but there were some useful ones. (Oddly, Adunaic had no term for "rock" or "stone", so I derived a near-identical sounding noun for these objects (bora) from their Taliska counterpart (bor). Other terms I found useful was halad, for "guard" (person), as it was later usable for the derived hald, meaning an abstract guard, or protection, or shielding of some sort, etc.)
- the main non-Mannish language used for loanwords in P-AdW is Quenya. This was a very straightforward decision, as Tolkien made no secret that a great deal of Adunaic vocabulary was influenced by Quenya (almost solely, in terms of elvish languages). Many of the Mannish versions of the loaned Quenya words are very apparent in Canon Adunaic, though adjusted to Adunaic's different phonetics. I ultimately did the same, trying to follow the established patterns from the canon version as much as I could, and keeping the altered phonetics logical and consistent with the rest of Adunaic. The absolute vast majority of new loanwords I've created for P-AdW originated in Quenya. One of the few exceptions to this is me using Qenya (no "u"), Tolkien's earlier prototype for what became the Quenya we know from his published writings, for one particular semantic group of nouns. Terms for plants (including trees) and fungi. I didn't want to loan them from familiar Quenya, but something that felt "more primordial", because I felt it wouldn't be logical if Adunaic had to loan even common terms for nature from Quenya. So, it's a bit of a cheat, using the less famous and more obscure prototype's terms, in "adunaized" form, then extrapolated into a further evolved "westronized form".
- to date, I have used only very few loanwords from Sindarin or from Khuzdul. I don't think a single Khuzdul or Neo-Khuzdul term has been loaned, though I've done some research on Khuzdul's potential phonetic influence on the predecessor languages of Adunaic. There are a few of elements that sound suspiciously similar, even semantically connected, so they might betray some minor dwarven influence on the language in a few narrow areas. Sindarin has only been used when Quenya (or its closely related early prototypes) did not have any version of a term or concept I was looking for. However, P-AdW's expanded Westron is more likely to have more recent Sindarin loanwords (or "sindarinized" loanwords) and is equally more likely to borrow a little more from what occassional Khuzdul terms it absorbed (granted, the dwarves don't use it much in public, so the dwarven vocab influx is still miniscule).


Be warned: Though I try to revise my notes as often as possible (particularly whenever I find an ortographic or grammar error in the newly created vocabulary), I might have some accidental holdover typos or missing notes that aren't fully adressed yet. The project's grown a fair bit in the four to five months since I slowly began the effort, but there's still a huge amount of ground to cover.

Currently, I want to expand adjectives and verbs the most. In the case of verbs, I want to correct any issues I might still have with plausible suffixes for verbs and the correct use of prefixes and suffixes used for emphasis (including gendered prefixes, which are a thing already in the canon version). When it comes to adjectives, the main goal there is to mildly standardize the likely suffixes, and in the case of nouns, check if I'm using declension right, based on the known cases (normal, subjective and objective). New nouns will be added every now and then, though less frequently than until now. The new areas of focus for nouns will be furniture, housing, food and cooking, and various philosophical and social concepts.

I found out that an easy and natural way to distinguish Adunaic and Westron vocabulary, declension, etc., lies not only in the grammar, but the phonetics and of the two languages. Adunaic has the "kh" sound (like the German or Slavic "ch"), "w", has a few established diphtongs, and lacks a short form of "o" and "e", whereas Westron uses only "h" (no "kh") and only "v", has "c" (read as the elvish "c" or Welsh "c"), and has essentially all the five main vowels in both short and long form. I often create variants of nouns and other words in both languages, distinguishing these based on the different alphabets and phonetics.

One goal I want to achieve in the near future is to develop P-AdW to such an extent that you could use it to translate poetry or lyrics (either Tolkien's creations, or unrelated real world examples), and write simple stories (e.g. "I woke up after dawn, got dressed, picked up my basket and went to the marketplace near the eastern harbour. Seagulls were flying overhead as I walked the streets of my fair city, not far from the coastline...", that sort of "daily life" tale). That's the near future goal. Later on, I'd like to develop and refine P-AdW further, until it's actually usable for roleplaying (whether tabletop or live-action), and maybe potentially for things like theatrical productions or fan films.

Elvish gets a lot of a interest, both Quenya and Sindarin, and even Khuzdul's popularity in linguistic projects has grown, but I felt Adunaic and Westron are rather neglected in comparison. Besides practical usability, the desire to not leave these two fictional languages by the wayside was the main motivation to attempt this project.  No language is ever finished, made-up ones even moreso, but expanding Adunaic and Westron into something almost as usable as e.g. Sindarin, could be helpful for the more linguistically-inclined Tolkien fans who don't mind a bit of fanon.




Elvish as She Is Spoke by Carl F. Hostetter, Tolkien linguistics researcher - a detailed analytical criticque of paying too little attention to the nuances of meaning, grammar and context in Tolkien's established elvish languages, resulting in overly cumbersome newly-introduced elvish words or newly-introduced elvish sentence construction. Hostetter also offers useful tips on what to watch out for when attempting to expand any of Tolkien's invented languages with new vocabulary.



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Overview of useful links




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