"GL3" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol05)

PART THREE.

THE
ETYMOLOGIES.

THE ETYMOLOGIES.

The mode of my father's linguistic construction, which as is well known
was carried on throughout his life and in very close relation to the
evolution of the narratives, shows the same unceasing movement as do
they: a quality fundamental to the art, in which (as I believe) finality and
a system fixed at every point was not its underlying aim. But while his
'language' and his 'literature' were so closely interwoven, to trace the
history of the literary process through many texts (even though the trail
might be greatly obscured) is of its nature enormously much easier than
to trace the astounding complexity of the phonological and grammatical
evolution of the Elvish languages.
Those languages were conceived, of course, from the very beginning
in a deeply 'historical' way: they were embodied in a history, the history
of the Elves who spoke them, in which was to be found, as it evolved, a
rich terrain for linguistic separation and interaction: 'a language requires
a suitable habitation, and a history in which it can develop' (Letters no.
294, p. 375). Every element in the languages, every element in every
word, is in principle historically 'explicable' - as are the elements in
languages that are not 'invented' - and the successive phases of their
intricate evolution were the delight of their creator. 'Invention' was thus
altogether distinct from 'artificiality'. In his essay 'A Secret Vice' (The
Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983, p. 198) my father
wrote of his liking for Esperanto, a liking which, he said, arose 'not least
because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is
therefore something like a "human language bereft of the inconveniences
due to too many successive cooks" - which is as good a description of the
ideal artificial language (in a particular sense) as I can give.' The Elvish
languages are, in this sense, very inconvenient indeed, and they image
the activities of countless cooks (unconscious, of course, of what they
were doing to the ingredients they had come by): in other words, they
image language not as 'pure structure', without 'before' and 'after', but as
growth, in time.
On the other hand, the linguistic histories were nonetheless 'images',
invented by an inventor, who was free to change those histories as he was
free to change the story of the world in which they took place; and he did
so abundantly. The difficulties inherent in the study of the history of any
language or group of languages are here therefore compounded: for this
history is not a datum of historical fact to be uncovered, but an unstable,
shifting view of what the history was. Moreover, the alterations in the
history were not confined to features of 'interior' linguistic development:
the 'exterior' conception of the languages and their relations underwent

change, even profound change; and it is not to be thought that the
representation of the languages in letters, in tengwar, should be exempt.