Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 27 March 2014 20:10:26 Puey McCleary wrote:

> [...]
> Most readers, at least in this particular group, are probably well aware
> that C.S. Lewis was influenced by some of Tolkien's phonaesthetics in the
> Narnia tales and at least the first two books of the Space Trilogy.  The
> word "narn" itself is perhaps best well known in I Narn i Chin Hurin, whose
> audiobook, by the well is read aloud by Christopher Lee.  So when I think
> of Saruman's reading a bedtime story, that is what I think.

How much actual conlanging did Lewis actually do?  He certainly
was aware of Tolkien's project, but he may not have realized the
full depth and scope of it.  I cannot say anything about the
languages of Narnia as I have neither read the books nor seen
the films (critique that amounted to "Lewis tries to shove his
narrow-minded religious stance down the reader's throat with a
poker" put me off).  I *did* read the Ramsom Trilogy, which I
did not really enjoy.  _Out of the Silent Planet_ is fairly
readable, though, but _Perelandra_ is sheer boredom (imagine
a novel where *nothing* happens over more than 300 pages, and
you get it) and _That Hideous Strength_ clearly shows what the
aforementioned critique of Lewis's writing is about.  My own
analysis of the bits of Old Solar in _Out of the Silent Planet_
(the other two volumes do not add much) led me to the conclusion
that Lewis probably did not just make up words on the fly, but
spent some thought on the structure of the language, though
probably not as deeply as Tolkien.  Also, some Old Solar words
bear some remote similarity with Quendian words of similar
meanings, so Lewis was clearly influenced by Tolkien in this
regard.

> The question so much isn't what we know about how the books were written
> and how the author was influenced.  Indeed, that is perhaps more relevant
> to the discussion of art in BART.  The question is, within the context of
> the stories themselves, what can one guess about the languages of Oz,
> Barsoom, Narnia, or any other secondary world?  With Oz and Barsoom we are
> given a trail of transmission which may indicate unreliable narrators.  As
> for Narnia ... well, sometimes my guess is that Susan herself writes these
> stories later in life, and perhaps she Englishifies some of the words and
> phrases.

Fair.  Dorothy, John Carter and Susan weren't field linguists,
so they may have gotten things wrong.  Perhaps the Kingdom of
Helium isn't really named _Helium_ but something that is only
distantly semilar to the English word in sound, maybe /χiɮʲam/
or whatever.  (And of course Barsoom isn't really Mars, at
least not the Mars of our branch of the Multiverse - the
interplanetary probes we sent to the latter have clearly shown
that it is not the same place - but Carter only *assumed* it
was Mars because he had been told that Barsoom was the fourth
planet of its sun and it happened to resemble what people in
early 20th-century North America imagined Mars to be like.)

>       The entire Narnia issue is really quite complicated, because one
> not only has to consider Narnia proper, but also related places like
> Calormen ... and other worlds like Charn -- plus other groups of humans who
> have entered Narnia at various points.  At least with the Space Trilogy
> we're told that the "editor," C. S. Lewis removed and perhaps simplified
> the foreign language in the manuscript.  (This is similar to what the
> "editor" of "The Princess of Mars" does to John Carter's manuscript.)

Ransom appears to have been an individual equipped to make a
fairly good analysis of the language, better than Dorothy, John
Carter or Susan at any rate; so the information we get on the
Old Solar language is probably reasonably accurate.

> If I had to guess I'd say that Narnian (and perhaps even Charnian) are a
> version of Old Solar since that seems to be the original language of
> creation in this multiverse, but really, I'd have to give it a lot more
> thought.

Maybe.
  
> But this then raises more issues.  If, within the context of these stories,
> Old Solar is somehow related to the Eldarin languages ... how do we
> reconcile that with what we're told about how the Eldar created their own
> language?

At the time Lewis wrote _Out of the Silent Planet_, Tolkien
entertained the notion that the Elves learned their language
from Orome.  This is what he wrote in the _Lhammas_, a document
roughly contemporaneous to Lewis's novel.  (I think that the two
writers *did* entertain the notion that their works are set in
the same universe.)

--
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