Or no Hobbits at all...

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

It seems a fair gesture on the part of a filmmaker to go out and hire an expert on something of which he has little knowledge. That is what happened with the hiring of Salo. Instead of criticizing Jackson for this effort, it would seem some praise is in order for him attempting to go the extra mile to get things right.

I have not criticized Jackson for seeking out an expert on Elvish, I expected him to do so.

And my earlier issue with his desire for 'accuracy' was in a larger context than whether or not he desired to get any grammar correct -- it's about the decision to toss out what one knows is accurate for what simply cannot be Elvish of the same order. It's easy enough: if one wants unassailable accuracy (and authenticity) use what you find in the books. All other Neo-elvish is already on a different level; and it's a different thing from the art of JRRT, no matter how well researched and fabricated.

That said, generally speaking I would no more mind invented Elvish in a film than invented scenes with Boromir, for example. But that's different from largely tossing out the scenes and dialog that Tolkien wrote concerning Boromir -- and replacing them with a greater bulk of others (written by Boyens or someone) which do not capture the spirit of the books, or which change Boromir into a character that resembles Tolkien's in name only (hypothetically -- actually Sean Bean was a bright spot in the films for me).

This kind of constant carping simply reinforces the idea that nothing short of a literal word for word translation- in this case Elvish words = from the page to the screen would have pleased some. I know of no cases where audiences emptied from the theaters in anger screaming "the Elvish was wrong"

Using some constructed Elvish in the same way Tolkien largely used his work would have been fine with me (despite that it is not 'true Elvish' to my mind).

The issue is Jackson choosing to largely discard the actual Elvish in the tale in favor of the Neo-constructions, including the issue raised by Mr. Hostetter, whose comments include '... constituting (mostly banal) _dialogue_ of the sort entirely _missing_ from Tolkien's own application of Elvish in his story (or anywhere else)').

And no one said audiences were emptying theaters in anger screaming. There's no need to inject hyperbole here -- my part of the discussion with zxcvbn has now (since the issue of 'evidence versus opinion' is off the table for the moment) narrowed down to me wondering why I should blame the person hired to construct the fabricated Elvish...

... when I am criticizing rather those who decided to largely leave JRR Tolkien's work at the door, and use lots of Neo-elvish instead.