Quote:
He joined other children living on his street in the creation of imaginary languages.
His neighbours had already created "Animalic," to communicate with each other, and Tolkien invented Nevbosh, a "new nonsense."
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Actually that wasn't with the "children on his street", if I'm not mistaken that was with his cousins that he created Animalic. Not much remains of Animalic, but one phrase I remember is "Dog nightingale woodpecker forty". Which means of course, "You are an *** "
Mary and Marjorie Incledon (his cousins) lived in the neighboring village actually, and were only seen by John and his brother in the holiday periods. However the older sister Marjorie lost interested in Animalic early on, and it was only Mary and John who created Nevbosh (or New-nonsense).
They leave out other languages that he also created however. "Naffarin" he created using the spanish of Father Francis as a guide, as he couldn't find a Welsh primer.
However, Naffarin soon fell out of interest for Tolkien because he found Gothic. It was in Gothic that he next based his language around, though his private journals don't tell a lot about what he created. It wasn't a whole new language he was creating in Gothic, but simply adding into it as many many words are missing. Then, however, he moved on to creating a new Germanic language that was "historic but never-recorded".
They leave out another important point, I think, too. That is of Tolkien's invention of not just languages but the alphabets to go along with them. He did this at a very early age, from simply replacing english characters with new ones, to creating alphabets for whole new systems of language.
[ March 20, 2003: Message edited by: Beren87 ]