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Originally Posted by Lalwendė
The 'point' is that Eomer is saying the Dunlendings sound like animals, worse, like 'beasts'. He doesn't just say he cannot understand them (as Gamling patiently points out it is an ancient language), he equates their language and them with 'beasts'. There's a definite point here as Tolkien was a skilled linguist and will have known not only the importance and inherent beauty of old languages but will have known the 'politics' involved with language, that no language is the sound of 'beasts'. The sound of 'Dunlendish' is not merely 'unpleasing' to Eomer, it sounds savage.
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And he surely is here recounting the attitude of the ancient Greeks who thought that the language of all non-Greeks sounded like "bar-bar-bar-bar", harsh, savage and brute. So they decided to name all those non-Greeks with a common name of
barbar. Aristotle says in his
Politics that outside the Greek city-states (
polis) there dwells only gods and beasts.
So we meet here with an ancient arrogance that is so much a part of our cultural heritage, tied up with language. As Lal said: the language is a major part of our identity.
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Originally Posted by Raynor
I find French to be very melodic, but I have no doubt a person can "bark" in French. While some people find Russian or German less than pleasant, to be polite, I don't presume they demonise the russians or the germans.
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And russians think their language is beautiful and special as no doubt germans think of their own. I don't think we can very easily make an objective valuation to the degrees of beauty between different languages. We may be enlightened enough nowadays that we don't demonise others because of their language but that has not been always the case - and no doubt some far-nationalistic parties flirt with these sentiments even today and seem to gain at least some followers.
