Faculty of English

Since his birth in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien walked many paths during his life, which led him to be known as an author, a linguist, an academic and a mythologist, along with less career-orientated factions denoting him as a soldier, a Roman Catholic and a father. Therefore, it beggars logic to isolate the attributes of Tolkien’s multiplexed career, such that suitable references
can be made in retrospect, highlighting the points in his life that pay dividends to the man as he is known today.

During his lifetime, Tolkien created a number of languages, all of which predicated on his personal and professional studies of real-world languages. A majority of these were associated with the fictional races from his publications such as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but the two languages which Tolkien frequently revised, thus giving the most elaborate lexica were, those of Elvish origin. These languages are known as Quenya and Sindarin.

The means by which Tolkien created Quenya and Sindarin, and the aforementioned revisions he found necessary will be the initial focus of this essay, as will a further discussion of the secondary world created for these languages. The latter will concentrate on the posthumous success of Tolkien’s works, with specific consideration given to the attention that his work has received as a result of Peter Jackson’s films, and the influence that these have consequently had on the scholars of the present day.

In one of his many letters, Tolkien noted that Elvish was intended to be European in structure, and “specially pleasant”. Whilst the former can be achieved through the study of suitable languages, the likes of which would have been familiar to Tolkien, the latter is not predicated on a similar logic.Tolkien himself acknowledged the inherent ambiguity of his intentions having also stated that “individuals’ personal predilections, especially in the phonetic
structure of languages, varies widely” (letters: 175-76). So in the same way that Marc Okrand intended for Klingon to sound intrinsically extraterrestrial, it was Tolkien’s fundamental interest to make Elvish a beautiful language to speak and to hear. Therefore, despite the intent for creating Elvish being
incorrectly attributed to stories such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it would appear that Tolkien’s ambition was one rooted purely for his own pleasure...

...But what motivated Tolkien to continue developing Elvish languages over the entirety of his career? How close do they resemble the languages he chose to study? Did he give the same importance to an Elvish orthography as he did the spoken word? These are questions that have intrigued the minds of linguists,
fans and academics alike for over fifty years. It is the intention of this paper to address such questions, with reference to the influences of the Elvish language, evidenced by appropriate phonemic theory.

Whilst linguistics are still being made use of to promote global harmony and international communication, suffice to say that similar efforts are becoming concentrated further towards use within the media. So to what extent does Tolkien's work, and those which followed, deviate from the earlier constructed languages? How do other artlangs compare to Elvish? And to what extent have artlangs affected people having become commonplace in modern-day media? These are questions which will be addressed in this paper, with the intention of illustrating not only how Tolkien influenced the current artlang era, but the extent of the impact that artlangs had, and continue to effect our current view of linguistics.

A majority of linguistic research concentrates on the conceptual exchange of information, and as a result the emotional aspects of language are found to be superfluous when observing the characteristics of communication. However, the prosody (or melody) within language becomes increasingly more necessary when observed as poetry or music, and one of the key aims of the present paper is to address the shared characteristics exhibited by the means of communication that exist between primitive language and music.

A preview of the first chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

A preview of the second chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

The much awaited book detailing the orthographies of JRR Tolkien's wonderful world of Arda. Please see other posts for content. Available to order now from Amazon;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elvish-Writing-Systems-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/1782808078/

Whilst there are many studies that have acknowledged the means of reduced intelligibility when testing for emotional recognition in speech stimuli, there remains an absence of a structured methodology in allowing for the systematic removal, of which can then be used to determine the impact of the perceived emotion relative to the demographic of the participant.

Participants were recruited to listen to one of three sets of stimuli consisting of twelve short sentences, read by male and female voiceover artists of different age groups (young, middle-aged, old). Each set (neutral, pseudo, constructed) used utterances spoken with minimal affective cues and vocabulary; the first resembling standard English form, the second using less comprehensive grammatical coherence, and the third having no resemblance of English whatsoever.

The data was compiled and first analysed by gender groups to show how each perceived the emotional effects of the other. A second analysis was then made to determine whether the age of the participant influences the emotional recognition of the speech signal.

Further update at this years PGR Conference - details post-pilot studies currently being undertaken. Pilot showed hypothesis to be statistically correct, which has since led to the following to further determine the demographics associated with vocal aesthetic preferences.

Whilst there are many studies that have acknowledged the means of reduced intelligibility when testing for emotional recognition in speech stimuli, there remains an absence of a structured methodology in allowing for the systematic removal, of which can then be used to determine the impact of the perceived emotion relative to the demographic of the participant. Participants were recruited to listen to one of three sets of stimuli consisting of twelve short sentences, read by male and female voiceover artists of different age groups (young, middle-aged, old). Each set (neutral, pseudo, constructed) used utterances spoken with minimal affective cues and vocabulary; the first resembling standard English form, the second using less comprehensive grammatical coherence, and the third having no resemblance of English whatsoever. The data was compiled and first analysed by gender groups to show how each perceived the emotional effects of the other. A second analysis was then made to determine whether the age of the participant influences the emotional recognition of the speech signal.

This article asks what kind of relationship critics can posit between, on
the one hand, David Foster Wallace’s personal library and marginalia and, on the other hand, his published works of fiction. The controversy surrounding Maria Bustillos’ 2011 reading of annotations in a selection of Wallace’s self-help texts – one result of which was the redaction of those texts from the archive – has served to reinforce the conventional critical understanding of authorly marginalia as a form of personal revelation or truth, and, by extension, as a kind of allegorical key to the respective literary oeuvre. However, this article contends that such a straightforward model of interpretation is unsettled by a reading of the marginalia alongside Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest and his short story ‘Good Old Neon.’ The article concludes that, once the annotations are placed into this more dynamic relation with the fiction, such seemingly fundamental and potentially ‘therapeutic’ notions as truth, origin, and the ‘inner self’ are actually shown to be intertextually and ideologically entangled with a set of popular North American discourses that not only traverse Wallace’s library and oeuvre, but continue to shape his reception inside and outside the academy.