Oooh, now a whole thread for this! Thanks,
Form!
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Originally Posted by Formendacil
Continuing the main thrust of the Gnomes/Fairies/How-do-you-like-them? discussion, part of the reason I brought it up in the first place is that, yes, the connotations of "gnomes" and "fairies" brings up the diminutive and the modern connotations. But... before The Lord of the Rings made its influence felt on the collective vocabulary, that's the way we felt about "Elves" too.
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True. I didn't really think about that, maybe because the use of Elves was less common in my English language sphere before I read LOTR, so I don't have any wrong associations there - actually, it's the opposite: when I encounter the word "elf" in the diminutive context, I have to remind myself that they aren't LOTR Elves. It also helps that the Russian translation uses the same word to refer to them, and the word "elf" isn't really used in the language in general.
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Originally Posted by Formy
I'm curious. People of multi-linguicity help me out: does English have an absurd number of names for small, "faerie" creatures (Elves, Fairies, Dwarfs, Gnomes--and now Hobbits) that need to be translated, or is this a function of most languages?
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Well, firstly, once again - not all of these creatures are "etymologically" small. Some of them were just Disney-fied. And second, I think each culture has it's share of fairies and Mewlips, but they may not be used the same way in stories. Russian, specifically, leaves its grandmother's lore for children's stories. Beyond that, you don't really get fiction/fantasy involving these creatures. We didn't really have that much of a fantasy branch of our own for a while - the genre was mostly just ripped off western fantasy. And even now, the best Russian fantasy is semi-scifi. But still, in structure, our "fairies" is sort of similar to the Irish "fairies" - people/characters who can choose to sometimes appear in our world, who meddle with the world and with people's lives, who may be good or bad, and who may take on a variety of shapes. But even the children's stories modify a lot of the good characters to be small. The bad characters remain very elaborate.
Hmmm... now that I think about it, we didn't modify everyone. Characters that are more manlike remain more manlike. But as you climb deeper into superstition, you get less clear-cut descriptions and more tailoring to the story's needs (and since a lot of stories tend to use the role in the same way...). For example, a well-known spirit, the
Domovoy, is the spirit of the house (dom=house). I don't know what his original size was supposed to be, but he was said to have lived either under the top step, or behind the oven (think of the big,
Russian oven, which people sleep on for warmth), or in other corners of the house. It wouldn't make sense for him to be human sized, or even hobbit-sized, because he wouldn't fit, so I suppose there's no problem with depicting him as small. But stories tend to depict him as thoroughly good, without a second possibility. But traditionally the Domovye could be good or bad, could either help a family prosper or mess with their house at night if they didn't like them. Domovye could get angry at their houseowners and tangle their hair or spoil their milk or something. Or they could like them and help slean out the cobwebs on the far corners at night, or something of that sort. And that "independent" and changeable aspect of many characters is lost.
So, not to get too sidetracked with random lore, I would say that English doesn't have too many words - these words all had different meanings and applied to a vast array of different characters. But thank's first to bedtime stories and then to Disney, a lot of these creatures lost their original form and character.
Fun fact: Tolkien is quoted by the
Online Etymology Dictionary on the word "fairy". I agree with him.