andie, she/her, 26, united states. this blog is full of Tolkien. also other art, photos, fandoms, and big-eyes-emoji stuff, but mostly Tolkien. i tag! my girlfriend is bright ivanaskye, who is a lot, but not too much
Tag: languages
hiraeth
(hɨraɪ̯θ), noun | A Welsh, untranslatable feeling, hiraeth is loosely described as a homesickness for a home you cannot return to anymore or a place, which never even existed. Connotations of sadness, yearning, profound nostalgia, and wistfulness are imbued into the state of hiraeth. Overall this beautiful, but painful longing is a an expression of an empty desire and grief over a past life or place. It is the ultimate signifier of a bond, which has ceased to exist. (via wordsnquotes)
toska [tohs-kah]
(noun) An untranslatable, Russian word – Vladimir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” (via wordsnquotes)
rire dans sa barbe
(noun) This French, untranslatable phrase is the most relatable occurrence in human nature. Has anybody ever caught you laughing by yourself? Most likely they have and thought you were a little strange! This word describes this exact moment, to laugh at oneself quietly while remembering or retelling a past event in your mind. If you ask us, it is quite satisfying to know there is a word for this most delightful instance.
An untranslatable word with Swedish origins, mångata is defined as the shimmering and ethereal road-like reflection of the moon on water. (via wordsnquotes)
1. This line in ROTK is really interesting tbh: “The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago
have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was
filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats.
And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers
relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and
it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of
mortal kind.” Idk….I tend to not think of it as something about the food itself as much as like, connecting it to that phenomenon where all kinds of other things elves make has a bit of magic-y stuff put into it via their making.
2. Which means, I assume, that they absolutely have a ton of cooking songs, just like they have songs for doing all kinds of other things down to knife-sharpening-songs, and special ones for lembas presumably.
3. The bit about “the Queen alone is allowed to give lembas” is one of those weird….what if there is no queen around, dude. Do u like, call it something else…? Anyway it’s interesting that despite it being associated with Melian, it’s a cross-cultural elf thing and not a Melian/maia thing. Does “lembas” actually refer less to the ingredients and more to the way it is given or intended? Wait, maybe “lembas” means “bread made from the same original batch of super magic infused yeast the elves in Cuivienen first discovered” (in Quenya it’s “coimas” which has the same ‘awakening’ root….I super love the Silm’s linguistic appendix okay).
4. MELIAN AND GALADRIEL HAVING BAKE-OFFS IN DORIATH THOUGH. Galadriel definitely thinking about Melian and Turin when she gives the Fellowship their supply…
Tolkien’s enough of a…I was going to say anglo-saxonist but I think instead I’ll say nerd… that the thing with the Queen giving bread might be partially connected to the the fact that the word Lady comes from hlafdig, which denotes loaf-giving. A Queen is, etymologically, the person who gives out bread.
OKAY so this is incredible but also absurd, thank you for asking me to translate old English poetry into Greek, but also: why.
Firstly: what did the poet mean by ‘foundation’ anyway. I went and looked it up:
Okay. Okay that helps. We’re going with a purely physical metaphor. Okay GOOD, because Woodhouse on ‘foundation’ was giving me architectural terms and as cool as that is I don’t think it’s in the original. So: frame.
I think we can rule out ‘wicker frame’ and ‘frame of a carriage’, and ‘that which encloses’ seems too vague – ooh. Framework, structure: katastasis, systema. That seems closer to the intent of the line.
Now I’ve just got ‘waste’ to deal with. Back to Bosworth-Toller:
FUTILITY. Back to Wodehouse again:
‘Achrestia’. I hate that. I hate it a lot. But I just remembered that ‘vanity’ has a good Biblical ring from somewhere:
THAT FEELS RIGHT. It’s Old Testament so the original is Hebrew (habel, apparently, but I don’t know any Hebrew so that helps me precisely zero) but the Septuagint gives me mataiotes, which is the noun from mataios, ‘purposeless’. Finally we’re getting somewhere!
Okay, I then spent ages wrestling with ‘turn into’ vs ‘become’, but I’ll spare you that. Here’s the final version:
ἡ τηϛ γηϛ καταστασιϛ εἰϛ την ματιοτη μεταλασσει.
he tes ges katastasis eis ten matiote metalassei.
Literally: ‘The condition of the world transforms into pointlessness.’
dammit I was so excited about vanity that I forgot ‘all’. I was delaying it till before the verb to make it sadder and then I forgot it completely. Here:
ἡ τηϛ γηϛ καταστασιϛ εἰϛ την ματιοτη πασα μεταλασσει.
“Siitä vanha Väinämöinen
Lauleveli, taitelevi:
Lauloi kuusen kukkalatvan,
Kukkalatvan, kultalehvän;
Latvan työnti taivahalle,
Puhki pilvien kohotti,
Lehvät ilmoille levitti,
Halki taivahan hajotti.
Laulevi, taitelevi:
Lauloi Kuun kumottamahan
Kultalatva-kuusosehen,
Lauloi oksillen otavan.”
“Then the aged Väinämöinen,
Spoke aloud his songs of magic,
And a flower-crowned birch grew upward,
Crowned with flowers, and leaves all golden,
And its summit reached to heaven,
To the very clouds uprising.
In the air the boughs extended,
And they spread themselves to heaven.
Then he sang his songs of magic,
And he sang a moon all shining
On the pine-tree’s golden summit;
And the Great Bear in the branches.”
– from Runo X in which our hero plans ahead… Mwahaha
So I realize I haven’t posted in a while. I dont have a good excuse. Anyways I’ve just realized that I’ve been doing these in order as they come in the book but I didn’t start at the beginning so the next few quotes will be from the beginning. I’ll probably end up having to repost this when it becomes relevant again, which is drag because it’s LONG.
I decided not to leave any lines out of this one so get the whole wordy effect. Poetically it’s beautiful but as I’ve said before it’s a pain to type.
Vainamoinen has a plan and hopefully it will all become clear in due time.
Lauloi = he sang
– Written by Elias Lonnrot and translated by William Forsell Kirby
This one is a fairly familiar example in linguistics textbooks, but one that is probably surprising to someone not familiar with Indo-European linguistics.
Punch, in the sense of a fruit beverage, is a borrowing from the Hindi pāñć meaning “five”, from the fact that the original version of punch used five ingredients. Numbers, of course, especially small numbers, tend not to be borrowed, and tend to be pretty stable in meaning as well. They therefore provide a perfect class to look at when figuring out if groups of languages are related. The Hindi pāñć descends from Sanskrit páñcan, in turn from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe. In the course of evolving into Sanskrit, short /e/ /a/ and /o/ all merged as /e/, the labiovelars became plain velars (thus kʷ became k) and (before the /o/-/e/-/a/ merger), /k/ became palatized before front vowels, thus, *kʷe became *ke, became *ce, became *ca.
In an early stage of pre-Proto-Germanic, *pénkʷe became *pémpe, a sporadic form of assimilation. Then, under the normal sound changes, particularly Grimm’s Law, *pémpe became Proto-Germanic *fimf. In the Ingvaeonic languages, a small group of West Germanic languages (made up primarily of English, Frisian, and Low German), nasals before voiceless fricatives were lost, with compensatory lengthening, thus, *fimf became Old English fīf, which became Modern English five.
There were two PIE roots that appear to have been closely related to *penkʷe which have also left descendants in English. *pn̥kʷ-sti-s meaning “fist” and *penkʷ-ró-s meaning “finger” The first is the origin of Modern English “fist” and the second is the origin of “finger”. It is plausible that the original meaning of this root had something to do with “fist” or “hand”. Compare, for example, the Proto-Austronesian *lima, which meant both “hand” and “five”.
The development of “fist” from *pn̥kʷ-sti-s was this way: the syllabic non-vocalic sonorants became -uC-, thus PIE *n̥ became Proto-Germanic *un. /kʷ/ (and /kw/, which merged with /kʷ/ early on) lost its labialization (the /w/ sound) in certain contexts, one of which which was when preceded by /u/, including /uC/ sequences. /k/ before an /s/ or /t/ subsequently became /x/, thus becoming Proto-Germanic *funhstiz, which was simplified to *funstiz. This became Old English fȳst, the result of the /i/ in the last syllable fronting the /u/. The vowel was shortened and unrounded to become Modern English fist. There is, however, another possible etymology of Progo-Germanic *funstiz from the zero-grade of *pewǵ- “punch”, in which case the verbal -n- infix would appear along with the suffix *-sti-s
In *penkʷ-ró-s, Verner’s Law caused /kʷ/ to become /gʷ/. Most cases of /gʷ/, whether derived originally from *gʷʰ via Grimm’s Law or *kʷ via Verner’s Law were subsequently lost, with various reflexes depending on environment. Word-initialy, historic *gʷʰ became *b, most likely after Grimm’s Law happened (thus *gʷʰ → *gʷ → *b), but the opposite order is also possible (thus *gʷʰ → *bʰ → *b), while word-medially it generally became either *g or *w. Unstressed /e/ became /i/, thus creating Proto-Germanic *fingraz.
*pénkʷe is also the origin of Ancient Greek pente (as in pentagon) and Latin quinque (as in quintet), both meaning “five”. This connection is more obvious than the Germanic one because there’s only one sound change each: /kʷ/ to /t/ in Greek and /p/ to /kʷ/ in Latin (”qu” is pronounced /kʷ/).
ephal ephalak idon hi-akallabeth 