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

Probable? Not Very

Pope Innocent the third had just launched the largest military operation in medieval Europe not against Muslims not against pagans but against Christians the targets were the Cathars a sect flourishing in southern France but historians analyzing Inquisition depositions note something strange the soldiers didn't just kill heretics they systematically destroyed records Parish books marriage contracts family bibles village registries interrogation transcripts from surviving witnesses describe crusaders demanding not confessions of faith but names of relatives marriage records genealogies going back generations

"but historians analyzing Inquisition depositions"

Why would this note what the soldiers did? The Inquisition was a tribunal, not a newspaper redaction.

Also, it would be very nice to have actual names of actual historians. Not just the word "historians" ...

"they systematically destroyed records Parish books marriage contracts family bibles village registries"

Why not phone numbers while we are at it?

The parish family book (Latin: Status animarum, meaning "State of Souls") is a register of people living in a parish and of events related to them. It is particularly characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church. The parish family books were prescribed in the Rituale Romanum published in 1614 by Pope Paul V. At first, they only contained data about sacraments received, religious knowledge, and religious affiliation. In the 18th century other data were added such as house numbers and ages. The parish family books were maintained by parish priests. They were most precise in villages because the population was more stable there than in cities.

Or a bit older:

In France, parish registers have been in use since the Middle Ages. The oldest surviving registers date back to 1303 and are posted in Givry. Other existing registers prior to orders of civil legislation in 1539 reside in Roz-Landrieux 1451, Paramé 1453, Lanloup 1467, Trans-la-Forêt 1479 and Signes 1500.[13]

The parish register became mandatory in France for baptisms with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts signed into law by Francis I of France on August 10, 1539, then for marriages and burials with the Ordinance of Blois in 1579. They had to be sent every year to the bailiwick or sénéchaussée in the south of France.[14] In April 1667, the Ordinance of Saint-Germain-en-Laye ordered a copy to be kept by the parish clergy as before the ordinance.[15]

German wiki:

Die ältesten Kirchenbücher – sie liegen nur als Fragment vor – stammen aus dem 14. Jahrhundert und entstanden in der Provence und in Italien.

So, in fact, the oldest Parish books were from a century later than the Albigensian Crusade. One cannot totally say "Paul V was nearly as much later as Alexander Graham Bell" because some kind of Church books existed within a century. One could construe this as "well, the Inquisition destroyed the earlier ones" but it is not the most probable scenario, and also, the videast is not backing this up by pointing to actual names of actual historians. But I think I can do one better.

Thought. I recall finding the view in St. Thomas that: a) if a marriage is reputed valid because the contrahents were above 14 for the male, 12 for the female, but b) it wasn't because one of them hadn't reached puberty, then c) instead of seeking an annulment, the contrahent who had reached puberty and wanted to marry someone else should do so elsewhere, where they weren't known. This state was obviously no longer possible to practise once one had parish books, so this would indicate that the system of parish books was not yet put into place.

The same video speaks of "all record keeping institutions" ... in the sense of modern meticulous record, there weren't that many, not even Church parishes.

Right now, I think one should look at if the "Catholic Church" (a k a Vatican II Sect, not identic to the historic Catholic Church due to changes in theology) is scraping inconvenient data from the online versions of St. Thomas Aquinas. I recalled Prima via as including the words "manifestum est et patet sensibus aliquid moveri, utputa sol" (it is obvious and open to the senses that some things are in movement, as for instance the sun), making clear what I also know from Riccioli that St. Thomas was making the daily motion of the universe the clearest example. Here is the translation in New Advent: "It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion." No mention of the sun being among them. Because other than the daily one movements of the sun would not be evident to our senses, and heliocentrism holds that the daily one is only falsely evident to our senses, by the "train passenger" type of optic illusion. Unfortunately the guys at New Advent are heliocentrics, as are a lot of clergy of the Vatican II Sect.

Give me a shout-out if you have access to either info from St. Thomas' Summe in some printed Latin edition, please!

"interrogation transcripts from surviving witnesses describe crusaders demanding not confessions of faith but names of relatives marriage records genealogies going back generations"

If you had spoken about the Spanish Inquisition and about Jewish family records, I could have believed you. Especially if it were about a newly become Spanish territory, since an old one would have had the Inquisitors already keeping track of Jewish families. The problem endemic to Spain was crypto-Jews, after 1492. Inquisitors wanted to make sure a Catholic of Jewish family origins wasn't a crypto-Jew. Two Spaniards (or a Basque and a Galego) would agree with me that this was somewhat overdoing it. I've named St. Ignatius of Loyola and Francisco Franco Bahamonde. The founder of the Jesuits and the Caudillo who died when I was a child.

But for the Inquisition or the previous Crusade into Languedoc, this seems off. Armies weren't highly tightly knit networks of discipline, they were pretty loose stuff involving volunteers. I can picture SS taking Jews from Ukraine to certain camps, I cannot imagine the volunteers of Blue Division (from Franco's Spain) doing so. And Medieval Crusader armies, well, they were more like Blue Division than any kind of SS. But this chasing of documents would have been a work for the Gestapo. Didn't exist back then.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Valérie of Limoges
9.XII.2025

Lemovicis, in Aquitania, sanctae Valeriae, Virginis et Martyris.

PS, the videast has taken Fr. Saunière as being a village priest recording marriages as they were held, in the years around 1200, he was indeed a priest, but of the 19th C. The originator of this theory./HGL

PPS, if there was a letter about "pretender lineage" from 1210 it's about the Albigensian Perfecti claiming a lineage from the Apostles, rival to the Roman Catholic claim (with partial sharing with Orthodox and some more)./HGL

Lying About Nicaea Seems to be Popular

A FB meme included this phrase, which needs an answer on itself, so, I didn't comment, I ran over here:

In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite the divergent Christian streams and create a unique religion at the service of the Empire.*

Nope.

What about:

In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and create a unique religion at the service of the Empire.

Nope.

How about:

In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion at the service of the Empire.

No.

Here is the actual truth. Or close enough:

In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion.

Nothing about "in the service of the Empire", nothing about creating a new religion, nothing about uniting many different divergent streams.**

Actually, the very fact that he gathered bishops and that they were in communion with each other up to the point where some (by this time) non-bishops were condemned, should be a give-away.

Constantine didn't create the Communion, it existed. The penalty of excommunication also existed.

It has often been applied "mutually" if both sides had bishops. This is how Novatians and Cornelians treated each other some decades earlier. Cornelians are the ones known as Catholics (but the Orthodox are also Cornelians), while Novatians died out.

No, they didn't die out because Constantine had them banned. They didn't die out because they were invited to Nicea and got banned by other bishops. They were too unimportant by 325 for Nicaea to deal with them in any way. In a few decades, Cornelians had won the day. By 325, the Novatians were no longer a serious threat to Christian unity. Montanists had died out even earlier.

How about Sabellians? Let's check wiki:

Hippolytus of Rome knew Sabellius personally, writing how he and others had admonished Sabellius in Refutation of All Heresies. He knew Sabellius opposed Trinitarian theology, yet he called Modal Monarchism the heresy of Noetus, not that of Sabellius.

The point is, Sabellianism was already condemned. Arius and Athanasius agreed that Sabellianism was wrong. Arius even would seem to have considered Sabellianism are wronger than Athanasius did.

Simonetti sees Arianism "as an extreme reaction against a Sabellianism which was at the time rife in the East."[10]: 95  Arianism advocated three hypostases. The Trinitarian view also presents three distinct persons within the Godhead,[11] but while Arianism taught three distinct substances, the Trinity doctrine asserts that the three Persons exist in one substance.**

And the fact that Arius and Athanasius, while going to Nicaea in 325 to advocate each his views, were both relying on a condemnation older than Nicaea and its canons is proof enough that the unity was not imposed by Constantine, it was already there. His sole innovation was asking that bishops of all the Church should decide, not just the local ones in Alexandria or the central one in Rome. As the Apostles had already had a council in Acts 15, and the Apostles were the very first bishops, this was not a total novum and could therefore be accepted by the Church.

And here is how one can give a really correct statement:

In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion. But the bishops, knowing the unity had not been broken by Arius stepping out of doctrine, simply did what they always had done, condemned the heretic.

Constantine so spectacularly failed to "unite" Orthodox (a k a Catholics) with Arians, that the latter took some time persecuting Catholics, once Constantine and his respect for the decision of Nicaea were gone, in 337. For instance, St. Athanasius, the star of Nicaea, was deprived of his episcopal see in Alexandria in favour of the intruder George.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8.XII.2025

Conceptio Immaculata gloriosae semper Virginis Genitricis Dei Mariae, quam fuisse praeservatam, singulari Dei privilegio, ab omni originalis culpae labe immunem, Pius Nonus, Pontifex Maximus, hac ipsa recurrente die, solemniter definivit.

* Only the first version is the actual quote. The rest are my modifications, to arrive at a statement that's describing the same historic reality, but in accurate terms. ** Footnotes 10 and 11 are: 10) Hanson, Richard Patrick Crosland (1988). The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381. T. & T. Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-09485-8. 11) G. T. Stokes, "Sabellianism", ed. William Smith and Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (London: John Murray, 1877–1887), 567.

** If you change it from "in the service of the Empire" to "for the blessings on the Empire" and if you change "create a unity" to "avoid disunity" you are obviously on spot. But that's not what he was saying.