[Bêthberry]

Into the breach one more time ... [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

GreatWarg, I do want to thank you for recognizing the purpose of my posts. I had been replying when you posted and did not see your post until after I posted.

Lyta_Underhill, I'm glad you enjoyed Owen's poem. Your reference to Appendix F is valuable as a reminder of Tolkien's stated intentions. His knowledge as a philologist enabled him to create very plausible derivations for his languages. However, there is one aspect of his assumptions about language which no longer holds--or which, I should say, we by and large do not ascribe to any longer.

This is his use of moral terms of evaluation for language. This is most pronounced in his description of the speech of Orcs and Trolls as 'degraded and filthy', "dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong."

It is true that Tolkien eschews words of moral connotation when he describes the other tongues, yet his very contrast between languages (the hobbits using a "rustic" language, the Stoors' language being "queer" in its vaguely "Celtic" "feel", even his reference to older and "revered" tongues) suggests assumptions about the value of language which are no longer regarded as legitimate linguistic assumptions. For instance, Latin is no longer regarded as a better language than English simply because it is older or because it is inflected--that attitude was a holdover from the political power of the Roman empire. This older attitude about language reflected social, political and cultural attitudes, but they do not adequately describe how languages work. Social prestige is still a powerful factor in how people respond to language, but it is no longer regarded as the sole indicator of the worth of language.

This old view of language equated quality or beauty with moral worth and tended to confuse political agendas with appreciation of language. (Many of the Victorian missionaries who travelled to Africa reported that the African languages were "primitive", regarding the languages and the cultures from their self-appointed view of superior, progressive Westerner. When I refer to this, I am not ascribing such narrow mindedness to Tolkien, but simply pointing out a concommitant affect of the general attitude towards language which Appendix F holds.) This, I think, is one reason why many find his use of the antique style for Aragorn and Gondor embarassing--it suggests a moral worth, and this kind of assumption is no longer tenable. (At least, it is not in the fields of linguistics or sociology, or, even, literature.) No form or style of language is regarded as innately holding worth or being more worthy in itself than any other form. The criteria for effectivenss is always the entire range of linguistic interaction between sender and receiver, speaker and audience and context.

Thus, for me, authorial intention can not be used satisfactorily to support the styles of LOTR.

Aiwendil, to return briefly to this point about grammar which perhaps only you and I are interested in...

You have misinterpeted Quirk and Greenbaum's statement, "If the subject is not actually expressed in a non-finite or verbless clause, it is assumed to be identical with the subject of the superordinate clause." Your reading makes it identical with theobject of the superordinate clause.

This is a grammatical point, because, in linguistics, every string of two or more words is in grammatical relation (subordination, coordination, modification, predication, complementation, or augumentation) and every relation has two parts, a head and a constituent element. It is therefore a grammatical fault that 'borne upon the wind' is not 'beside' its constituent or completive part. Yes, we can 'guess' what the non-finite clause refers to because we know that Gandalf and company were not thrown about by the wind, but this is a lexical leap which would not pertain in every example of this sentence type.

Let me return later to your other points.

[ November 12, 2003: Message edited by: Bêthberry ]