Elvish is hobbitforming

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Lle quena i'lambe tel' Eldalie? The answer to that question ""Do you speak Elvish? "" is "yes" more often than you might realise.

Lord of the Rings fans trade phrases in Sindarin and Quenya in their online film discussions; linguists, particularly those with a puckish sense of humour, have confessed to occasionally speaking the language Tolkien invented; RPG (role-playing games) addicts often keep a downloadable phrase book handy.

But the Elven languages just took the mainstream world by surprise when a school in the UK announced that it planned to put Sindarin and Quenya on the syllabus.

It sounds like a load of Nevbosh, just another instance of hobbitmania run amok. (Nevbosh, an early language that Tolkien helped invent, stands for 'New Nonsense'.)

But the educators who suggested incorporating Elvish into the syllabus suggested that a language, invented or not, that their students might actually be interested in learning, scored far higher in teaching terms than a worthier but dead language.

Every second kid in the playground wants to orate like Aragorn, give commands like Theoden and swear like an Orc; no one wants to go through the veni, vidi, vici routine any more, Gladiator notwithstanding. (It's always possible that Mel Gibson's Passion will spark off an Aramaic revival, but then again, we're unlikely to see it happening in the classrooms at present. LOTR just has more reach.)

It would be short-sighted to dismiss the Elvish thing as just another mildly irritating cultural blip. Helge Kare Fauskanger, who offers a brutally comprehensive (and free) Quenya course online, notes that Tolkien really worked on Quenya and Sindarin.

They aren't complete languages, according to Fauskanger, in the sense that Tolkien offered a limited vocabulary, but they do have a comprehensive grammatical structure, and the rules he formulated for his elven languages make it relatively easy for neo-linguists to add words and phrases that don't at present exist in the Tolkien books.

This is, incidentally, why the film version of LOTR features phrases and sentences that don't appear in the book "" including sentences in the Dwarfish tongue and romantic lyrics cleverly expanded from Elvensong.

It's much harder to do this with the Black Speech that the bad guys in Mordor apparently used: the only actual specimen that Tolkien provided of the Orcish tongue was a curse in Orcish that appears on the One Ring.

Like many of those authors who've attempted to invent languages, Tolkien based his Elventongues on real languages "" Finnish provided a strong base, and so did Celtic tongues.

But Tolkien was to the rest of the bunch what a monomaniac is to a dabbling amateur: he first came up with a version he called Gnomish, which he worked on for years before splitting Gnomish into two far more sophisticated tongues, Quenya and Sindarin.

Frank Herbert was less ambitious with Galach, the Imperial language he invented and used in the multi-volume Dune saga.

Galach might derive its name from English ""'Ngalash-Galach, but it's also amusing to think that he might have borrowed it from Gaelic, where it means 'steamy', which would have been appropriate given that Dune was set in a virtual desert.

Robert Jordan went considerably further when he invented the Old Tongue, which he uses throughout the Wheel of Time series.

The Old Tongue, wrote Jordan, was based on: "Gaelic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some additions of my own "" bridging material, if you will. Grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German and Chinese, with some influences from a set of African languages, read about long ago and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten."

He was trying to create a language that had mutated considerably over time, that incorporated regional differences, but which had never actually faced a threat from a rival or invading tongue.

As Tolkien knew, a language didn't just have to be structurally and logically consistent in order to pass muster as a genuine if manufactured tongue "" the most important part of inventing a speech for another species was getting the sound right.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkovan languages switch the ingredients of the blend "" English, Spanish and Gaelic, by and large "" in order to stress the formality or informality of the tongue. Tolkien used liquid syllables for the elves, and harsher guttural consonants for that one Orkish curse.

Anthony Burgess pulled the same trick in A Clockwork Orange, where the insanely alien and yet utterly comprehensible argot, Nadsat, of his manic protagonist tricks your mind with the familiarity of its rhythms into understanding the meaning behind the apparent nonsense.

Burgess was stressing another factor, though: if slang changes more rapidly than the relative sludge of the language underneath, and we won't understand yesterday's slang today, then we may as well face the fact that we won't get tomorrow's slang today either.

If I have a sneaking fondness for these invented tongues, it's not because I like the way they make what is familiar (the languages we already know) into the alien (the language invented), or because I appreciate the effort that goes into inventing what takes an entire society generations to refine.

It's because made-up languages take anyone with a spark of imagination in their hearts all the way back to childhood, when one of the great pleasures of learning a language was also that of unlearning it, so that apparently mundane words could take on secret new meanings in your private world.

Syllables could be taken apart and reassembled; even the crude manoeuvres of pig-Latin promised an entry into a world of secrets and conspiracies.

And there is always such a thing as going too far. Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinius imagines a brave new world, then offers to be a product of that world, not ours.

It's written in a language and alphabet that is completely invented, to the point where it appears to have no relevance to anything in our world "" which is precisely what you'd expect from a truly alien artifact.

Just as puzzling as the Codex are the Voynich Manuscript, written in a language that doesn't appear to correspond to any known tongue. The Voynich Manuscript still baffles cryptologists and linguists: despite announcements from time to time that a solution has been found, no one yet knows what it is "" a set of laundry lists, a ground-breaking work of philosophy, a complex hoax.

The problem with inventing a language that is meant to be a secret is that sometimes it can stay that way "" for centuries. And there's little point to a joke that no one else can share.

nilroy@lycos.com