"GL3" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol05)

It must be added that my father's characteristic method of work -
elaborate beginnings collapsing into scrawls; manuscripts overlaid
with layer upon layer of emendation - here find their most extreme
expression; and also that the philological papers were left in the greatest
disorder. Without external dating, the only way to determine sequence
(apart from the very general and uncertain guide of changing hand-
writing) is in the internal evidence of the changing philology itself; and
that, of its nature, does not offer the sort of clues that lead through the
maze of the literary texts. The clues it does offer are very much more
elusive. It is also unfortunately true that hasty handwriting and ill-
formed letters are here far more destructive; and a great deal of my
father's late philological writing is, I think, strictly unusable.
It will be seen then that the philological component in the evolution of
Middle-earth can scarcely be analysed, and most certainly cannot be
presented, as can the literary texts. In any case, my father was perhaps
more interested in the processes of change than he was in displaying the
structure and use of the languages at any given time - though this is no
doubt due to some extent to his so often starting again at the beginning
with the primordial sounds of the Quendian languages, embarking on a
grand design that could not be sustained (it seems indeed that the very
attempt to write a definitive account produced immediate dissatisfaction
and the desire for new constructions: so the most beautiful manuscripts
were soon treated with disdain).
The most surprising thing, perhaps, is that he was so little concerned
to make comprehensive vocabularies of the Elvish tongues. He never
made again anything like the little packed 'dictionary' of the original
Gnomish language on which I drew in the appendices to The Book of Lost
Tales. It may be that such an undertaking was always postponed to the
day, which would never come, when a sufficient finality had been
achieved; in the meantime, it was not for him a prime necessity. He did
not, after all, 'invent' new words and names arbitrarily: in principle, he
devised them from within the historical structure, proceeding from the
'bases' or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds,
deciding (or, as he would have said, 'finding out') when the word came
into the language, following through the regular changes of form that it
would thus have undergone, and observing the possibilities of formal or
semantic influence from other words in the course of its history. Such a
word would then exist for him, and he would know it. As the whole
system evolved and expanded, the possibilities for word and name
became greater and greater.
The nearest he ever came to a sustained account of Elvish vocabulary
is not in the form of nor intended to serve as a dictionary in the
ordinary sense, but is an etymological dictionary of word-relationships:
an alphabetically-arranged list of primary stems, or 'bases', with their

derivatives (thus following directly in form from the original 'Qenya
Lexicon' which I have described in I. 246). It is this work that is given
here. My father wrote a good deal on the theory of sundokarme or 'base-
structure' (see suo and KAR in the Etymologies), but like everything else it
was frequently elaborated and altered, and I do not attempt its presen-