Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 29 September 2011 20:19:08, Wm Annis wrote:

> Of course the problem with elves is not the elves themselves, since
> they don't exist (a statement I suppose might refrain from making on
> the windy hills of Iceland, merely as a matter of prudence, you know).
> The problem is how they are so often portrayed.  Alien, unpredictable
> and dangerous elves I can live with,

Sure, they are interesting, and pretty much like what the
Celtic and Germanic myths tell us about them.  But like all
truly alien beings, they are difficult to treat well by
human authors.

>       but Tolkien's pretty, sexless
> elves and their Romantic Weltschmerz I find morally suspect.  And
> Tolkien set the tone for the portrayal of elves.  We get parades of
> wise, ancient and slightly depressed beings floating elegantly through
> works, providing the opportunity for banal, unexamined sentiments the
> author approves of to be wrapped up in grandiose drapery and presented
> as Wisdom.

Yes, this kind of Elves have been criticized often, and
justifiably so.  Tolkien IMHO portrayed them well; most
later ones are just blatant rip-offs, sometimes even
dropped like BDOs into worlds where they simply don't fit.

> And if that isn't bad enough, the same parade of elves marches through
> so much science fiction, except they get called different things, like
> "Minbari", "Nox" or "Liaden" (though the last is pushing a bit).  It's
> the same shtick, elder beings dispensing cod-wisdom to childish humans
> who just can't see to the spiritual heart of things.
> 
> From the conlinguistic aspect, the languages are usually described as
> being unutterably subtle and refined, with strong hints that the
> slightest change in tone will alter meanings radically, but when the
> author gets around to representing them, we usually get the same fake
> Welsh or fake Finnish Tolkien left us.  At the very least, we get
> nothing that even hints at the so-hard-for-humans tonal or semantic
> niceties.  In the worst case, the few words of these languages we get
> merely serve as vehicles for that ancient "wisdom" authors so adore.

Yes, I have noticed this bogosity about many "Elvish" languages
I have seen.  Most of them are just hackwork coarsely imitative
of Quenya and Sindarin (which are excellently elaborated
conlangs, even if they aren't really more subtle and refined
than most human languages), with no hints at any subtlety or
refinement found in the attested material.  "Elven runes" are
usually the Latin alphabet in fancy disguise, with 26 letters
corresponding 1-by-1 with those we all are familiar with.
(Again, this is not true of Tolkien's scripts.)

On Thursday, 29 September 2011 20:31:15, Peter Cyrus wrote:

> Elves and Dwarves DID exist, and maybe still do.
> 
> Tolkien was an expert in the Germanic languages, especially the Scandinavian
> branch, whence the ideas came.  I'm not an expert at all, but have read a
> bit of Norse mythology, and my reading is that the elves (álfar) and dwarves
> (dvergar) referred to the original inhabitants of Scandinavia, the ones the
> Germanic peoples met as they migrated in.  They might have been Lapps,
> Caledonians/Picts, Basques or a people now extinct/absorbed, but they were
> definitely human.

This is pretty much what I assume, too, except that I place
the "real Elves" on the British Isles (the Irish say the Elves
were on the Isles before the Irish themselves, the Germanic
tradition has them in a land beyond the sea), where they had
a sophisticated civilization (also surfacing in Greek myths
as Hyperborea and Atlantis) and traded with the people on the
shores of the Continent.  Of course, these "real Elves" were
100% human, and their language an ordinary human language
(Old Albic is my attempt at re-creating this language).

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1