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A century and a half ago, a debate was raging about the question whether God spoke Hebrew. Jacob Grimm, one of the brothers to whom we owe the collection of fairy tales, pointed out gently that if God spoke language, any language, we must assume that he had teeth, but since teeth were not created for speech but for eating, we must assume that he also ate, and this leads to so many other undesirable assumptions that we better abandon the idea altogether (1851, reprint 1958:28).
Upon Heber who, as we have said, took no part in the work, God cast His eyes; and amid the general disorder and corruption, He set him and his posterity apart as a holy nation. God gave him also a new and holy language possessed by no other nation, that thereby his race should be cut off from communication with all others.
This language was the pure Hebrew, or Chaldaic. The first tongue, the mother tongue, spoken by Adam, Shem, and Noah, was different, and it is now extant only in isolated dialects. Its first pure offshoots are the Zend, the sacred tongue of India, and the language of the Bactrians. In those languages, words may be found exactly similar to the Low German of my native place.
Thank Wikipedia for bringing these quotes to my atention, the article concluding that Anna Katharina Emmerich had identified the first language with Proto-Indo-European. Maybe - if so the punishment of Babel was for Indo-Europeans a miraculous speed up in langage change and language split. Or maybe not. Tolkien explores the idea of an elfin language which is source of Non-Indo-European words of some, usually Indo-European, languages of Northern Europe, leading back Lithuanian "ranka" (=Greek χειρ) and Icelandic "alft" (=swan) back to Quenya words ranca and alqua. The question whether the words alluded to are Indo-European roots or not cannot be decided unless some other document describes which particular words she meant.
Hans-Georg Lundahl,
15 octobre 2009,
ste Theresa d'Avila,
à Emmaüs (Paris I)
et à G. Pompidou (Paris IV)
... et son culte comporte une délicieuse fête qui commence le 17 décembre et dure six à sept jours (solstice d'hiver).
... la célébration de sa naissance en vint à coïncider plus ou moins avec la fête romaine traditionnelle du solstice d'hiver.
"sometimes when I am sad I like to cut myself ...
... another slice of cheesecake"
| "borogove mimsy"="borogóv mimzi" "borogov mi "boro "borog OR, if you insist on vowel length (borogove=borogóv): "bor which leaves us with: boro OR: bor = boro miz or boró miz z > r (rhotacism) |
BUT. "Mimsy Borogoves" are nonsense words. "Boromir" has been given a meaning: 'faithful jewel' (source Tolkienwiki > search > Boromir).
If Lewis Carroll indulged in non-sense syllables, Tolkien indulged even more (since his elven glossary entries, even in just one of the major languages, probably by far outnumber the crypto-English glossary that could be made from The Hunting of the Snark*) in giving sense to his syllables.
Let us presume, I did not look up the meanings of the roots, it is boro that means faithful and mir that means jewel. I would not let mimsy mean faithful, and I hesitate to call things generally as small as jewels borogoves. So if this is where Tolkien came up with Boromir, he let adjective become noun and noun adjective. But the point is: there is something about "mimsy" which is repugnant to making it mean "faithful", there is nothing repugnant in making "mir" mean "jewel", there is something repugnant in making "borogove" mean "jewel", except a very big and costly such (thrones, crowns, scepters, Arkenstone - possibly, rings - no), there is nothing repugnant in making "boro" mean "faithful". Which is a point against the total arbitrariness of the relation of sound and meaning.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris IV - G. Pompidou
8/21 august A. D. 2009
*oops, that may be Jabberwocky I was thinking about!
OTHER UPDATE: the deletion rules above are what might have been contributing consciously or unconsciously to the invention of either name Boromir or elements it was made of in Tolkien's life, and are of course no more soundlaws for Quenya or Sindarin than cow > woc, how > hoc are internal soundlaws of Nevbosh.
- Qui sunt?
- Angli.
- Non Angli sed Angeli. Cuius regni sunt?
- Deira.
- De ira Dei ad gratiam Christi vocati sunt. Quid est nomen regi eorum?
- Ælla.
- Alleluia ibi cantabitur.
