Quote:
|
And in The Problem of ROS (1968 or later)
|
That essay! Tolkien the patience-player, so wrapped up in the complexities of the board he sometimes forgot he himself made the rules and could change them.
Summary: an account of the naming of the Twins and kin, in which certain elements were derived not from Elvish roots but Beorian Atanic, including
ros.
But after a dense and very creative essay, he chucked it all because of the existence of Cair Andros and its translation "ship of long-foam" in print. But whoa thar, podner! Tolkien of all people knew that languages change, throw off dialects and borrow words (English mugs other languages and rifles their pockets for loose vocabulary).
So why not postulate a demotic Gondorian Sindarin, much corrupted/dialecticized from the formal Sindarin of Rivendell? One which necessarily had absorbed into itself stray Edainic/Numenorean elements? After all, it's a datum that Gondor had had no contact with Elves for many generations.
(There is the objection that Sindarin in Gondor occupied a space akin to Latin in OTL, a learned book-language and therefore unchanging- except that ain't the case. Medieval Latin is a hell of a long way from the tongue of Cicero.)
Tolkien, late, made another change I similarly find unnecessary, and rather at odds with LR- his decision that the Silvan Elves didn't speak Nandorin, just accented Sindarin. Not buying it.