Language · Structure · Power
Tongues of Arda
Tolkien was a philologist before he was a novelist. The languages came first. The stories grew to house them.
Quenya
← Finnish
Stacks pieces onto the end. The root stays stable. You can always find it.
ciryaron cirya-r-on "of ships"
Sindarin
← Welsh
Changes what's already there. The root shifts under grammatical pressure.
i berian ip→berian "the halfling"
Black Speech
← imposed
Same stacking as Quenya. Every morpheme is a command. It failed.
durbatulûk durb-at-ul-ûk "to rule them all"
Quenya draws from Finnish — agglutinative, transparent, preserving. Sindarin draws from Welsh — mutating, worn by time. The Black Speech uses the same machinery as Quenya, but the orcs couldn't maintain it.
A primer for how the languages work, not what the words mean.
Tolkien needed hundreds of words. He wrote a handful of primitives — stems, suffixes, mutations, sound changes — and let them compose.