Quote:
Originally Posted by max
I'm actually pretty fascinated by the lengths to which Tolkein went with the development of language. Read the Silmarillion or his collection of letters to Unwin, his publisher. I think this was part of the pleasure of putting it together for JRR.
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Actually language was the germ of the whole project-- Tolkien invented the languages first, then created a world and a history to house them.
The Elvish alphabet (like the Korean one) is phonetically consistent-- the form of the letters reflects how they are physically produced. Probably my first real encounter with linguistics was reading Tolkien's explanations of the relationship between the letter shapes and their sounds (in the appendices of the LOTR).