Did Sth Like Quenya Exist?

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Laketown, but not Esgaroth · Did Sth Like Quenya Exist? · Creation vs. Evolution: What Can Tolkien's Vision Tell Us About Old Earth Compromise?

We know that one of Tolkien's ideas behind Quenya was looking for non-Indo-European words in Indo-European languages.

Ranka (and its Slavic counterpart Ruk) is unique to Balto-Slavic. Not Germanic, not Celtic, not Italic, not Greek, and I just checked with google translate it's not there in Armenian, Iranian, Indian (I checked Farsi and Kurdish for Persian, Bengali and Punjabi for Indian) either. So, he concluded it had to be there in the pre-Indo-European language, so he put it into Quenya.

Álft is unique to Old Norse. Not Greek, not Celtic, not Farsi (Kurdish borrows the English), not Polish, not Lithuanian, not Armenian, not Sanskrit. So, it had to be pre-Indo-European, and he put it in Sindarin, without the final T, and created a cognate, alqua to put into Quenya.

Avis in Latin, maybe with éan in Irish, as a word for bird is unique to Italo-Celtic. In Sindarin it's aew, in Quenya aiwë.

The idea is of course that behind many different Indo-European languages, there was a common pre-Indo-European substrate in NW Europe.

According to a theory in linguistics that substrate did exist, and it is related to Basque and it came with the people from the Steppe.

How quirky would that be to Tolkien to have to identify Noldor with the Wainriders? (The latter are obviously based on Yamnaya people).

Here are some videos about this theory:

Did the Corded Ware speak Basque? An alternative view on the spread of Indo European pt.1
Yamokante | 9 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J18e8jEMQU

They hailed from the East. An alternative view on the spread of Indo European pt.2
Yamokante | 10 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI9Vn1S8MtY

Who gave us our languages? An alternative view on the spread of Indo European pt.3
Yamokante | 14 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku6VJ_AsTXM

Merry Christmas to all Tolkien fans out there!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Christmas Day
25.XII.2025