Quote:
Quenya has been through a complicated evolution, inside Tolkien's mind of course
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Yet still there's a difference between an evolution that is in one person's mind and one that takes place between people. A person, in their mind, can work through the steps of evolution, can justify things, whatever, but there's something fundamentally different to it than something which has evolved through, basically, trial and error. Not everything in a language makes sense, and things change which don't look like they ought to have changed. It's an issue of what's needed to communicate at the time. Take the Pirahã language, it has no number words, they're not needed to communicate what needs to be communicated.
Let me demonstrate it this way, consider Frankenstein's Monster. Life has existed for thousands of years, it has changed to meet needs and, eventually, has created one Vicktor Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a fairly normal person, he's you're average example of mankind. Frankenstein sits down one day and says "I feel like creating Life today". He would have had an easier time of it if he ended up creating the Game of Life, as it is Frankenstein went through evolution quickly in his mind, he looked at things that were already and worked from what he saw as well as what he figured ought to be. Hey Presto! The creature is created! Is this creature any less alive than Vicktor? Than any of the people and animals around him? No. Yet it is, somehow, different. It is the result of thousands of years of evolution only through the one person who created it.
Not to say Quenya is hideous and will go around terrorizing it's creator and reading Paradise Lost, if it does that we've bigger things to worry about. I also wasn't trying to say that Quenya hasn't evolved, simply it hasn't evolved in a way which makes it "real". The same way Frankenstein's creature was evolved, but not in a way to make it "human".
And anyway, who's to say that we can't grow up speaking Quenya? If someone had studied and learned Quenya well enough to riase their child speaking it then surely to that child Quenya would be as real as its (I'm hoping) other mother tongue. I can't say I see that as being highly likely, but it is possible.
Also, I'm rather intrigued by, firstly, the idea of a language being considered "living" simply because lots of people know about it and, secondly, how "living"/"dead" languages differ from "real"/"not-real" languages. This second espically becuase you, Yuukale Narmo, seem to suggest that if enough people simply know of the
existance of a language it can qualify as "living", as compared to the more conventinal destinction by how many people
know/use the language.
"School Children everywhere know of the existance of Latin, therefore it is a "living" language"
versus
"No one actually uses Latin to communicate day by day, ergo it is a "dead" language"
...Ironcially enough, both "versus" and "ergo" are derived from Latin...but I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. Also, to quallify a language as "living" or "dead" do you have to first grant that it is "real"? Could Quenya be, then, a "living", yet "not-real" language? Or perhaps it is a "real" but "dead" language?