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Linguaholic

Does anyone speak Elvish?


True2marie

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This morning I was watching HLN and they were covering the premier of "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug".  I was laughing the entire time because the newscaster had on funny ears and after a segment gave a lesson on how to say a phrase the way an elf would. 

Link: http://www.hlntv.com/video/2013/12/13/how-speak-elvish-jennnifer-westhoven-elf-ears

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That's funny but not a real language indeed, just an invention as you or I could invent a linguaholic proprietary language.

This recalls me the Christian church that my sister attends. The bishop in there told their devotees that "suddenly" the Holy Ghost could posses him to speak out wisdom words.

Sometimes such thing happens and the bishop says incoherent words supposed to be the Holy language and he says anyone touched by the Holy Ghost can talk the way he talks.

I would say anyone can talk incoherent things and say this is a language without needing to be touched by anyone ;)

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I don't think elven language exists. If it does I've never heard about. Any language expert here can shed some light on this?

It exists as any constructed language, like Klingon, Kobaïan, or Esperanto. Some are more developed than others and actually permit conversation, but most, especially those based on fiction, are mostly vocabular substitutes. Not sure about the depth of Elvish itself.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Lilly Evangeline, the beautiful Canadian actress who plays the elf princess Tauriel in The Hobbit Part 2, said that one of the hardest parts of the job was to learn the Elvish dialogues that were frequently given to her just the night before.

Tolkien used to invent languages as a child: putting them into his works was obviously fun for him. His stories are inspired by AngloSaxon sagas like Beowulf of the 8th century (which BTW is the oldest story in the English language) so obviously he's going to have a lot of AngloSaxon and Gaelic influence when creating the language of the elves. But it's only his personal creation as part of his sweeping imagination of Middle Earth, it's not a real language that ever existed in histrory.

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If you are a fantasy or science fiction fan, you will probably know that invented/constructed languages exist, and they are sometimes very deep and complex, with a proper grammar structure, applied linguistic theory, and whole beautiful alphabets.

Speaking of which, I should probably brush up my rusty basic Klingon

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Ahah, Elvish is an invented language lol! I came to this thread expecting to find Elvis fans and after all you guys are discussing "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug". Actually, just yesterday I was watching an interview of the woman Elf and I found that "language" rather entertaining!  :grin:

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I would love to speak Elvish or the Black Language from Lord of The Rings, it sounds so visceral and guttural, I could curse people in it and everyone would bow down to me  :devil:

I hate to admit I had never watched any of the Hobbit until this weekend on a cable station.  I had the captions on and it identified the "elvish" and "black" language.  I did find the guttural quality you talked about but I did see it fit in the storyline.

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There's a remote possibility that elves do exist. Myths all contain some elements of truth in them, don't they? Anyway, I read about elves in an encyclopedia  that listed them [the elves] as 'disruptive spirits.'

If these spirits exist in reality then it's quite obvious that they use some language to communicate with each other. So hypothetically speaking, if "Tolkien was into shamanism," he could have learned the language of the elves.

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I hate to admit I had never watched any of the Hobbit until this weekend on a cable station.  I had the captions on and it identified the "elvish" and "black" language.  I did find the guttural quality you talked about but I did see it fit in the storyline.

Elvish is soft and sweet but seriously listen to Gandalfs' black speech in this clip:

http://youtu.be/PK-lDXRjS3w?t=23s

"Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul."

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