Tolkien and the 'other' N-word ;)

[Earendilyon]

Originally Posted by Celebuial

Yes that is a great way to learn new words but you have to be strong... I found it very hard to make it through the first half of the first book: it was just a re-shuffling of Tolkien. After a while though it did turn into his own story-which is very good.

I'm not sure that the words I learned where quite as interesting as the ones I learned from Tolkien though. I mean they were in my dictionary whereas quite a lot of the Tolkien ones where impossible(well really hard) to find.

I never considered the Chronicles a reshuffling of Tolkien, not even the 1st half of the 1st book. Everyone his/her own opinion, of course

IMHO, the rare and weird words SRD strews around in his books are les 'usable' in everyday life, I think. In my impression, Tolkien uses archaic synonyms of more 'regular' words than does SRD.
Another impression I sometimes get when reading the Chronicles is, that SRD put in those words to just show he knows his OED, to show how erudite he is. Tolkiens rare and obsolete words fit better in the overall feel and style of the story.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

The strange thing for me when reading Tolkien for the first time was how many of the odd words I was entirely familiar with. I had grandparents who spoke dialect, not mere accent, but a true dialect with its own vocabulary, and Tolkien makes extensive use of dialect in his work. He used the West Midlands dialect, but it's not that far removed from the dialect of where I grew up.

The impression I get from dialects (at least here in the Netherlands) is the fact that they tend to keep words that have become archaic or obsolete in the "official" language. Dialects seem to preserve older forms more likely than the standard language of a country. (Which may be the cause of dialects being considered backwards or even stupid.)