What do you wish Tolkien....

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Findegil

About the needed change to take 'ros' as Beorian: This is not a simple matter. The naming of geographical feuters in Middelearth is mostly in Sindarin. And what connection could their be for Cair Andros to Beorian? The essay failed because Cair Andors was well established in the main text and not only in the appendix and because the system of Sindarin names for geo. features was also a fact observable in many many names. Cair Andors as an acception would have needed an explaination which Tolkien did not have at hand.

I'm no linguist but a borrowing from Beorian seems simple enough to me -- Tolkien arguably needed to solve his problem in an archaic context, or let's say, well before Cair Andros was named in Sindarin.

The Grey-elven speech of Imladris shows Quenya influence -- for example miruvor from Quenya (by way of Valarin). And in a late text Tolkien mused about making an Elvish word, long held (externally) to be Elvish in derivation, a borrowing from a Mannish tongue -- going from memory I think it was atan actually (possibly from Of Dwarves And Men if I recall correctly), but in any case I'm fairly confident the example exists.


I posted this idea elsewhere, and so far anyway, no bites as to why it would be problematic, or notably so. In other words: -ros in Elros and Cair Andros is 'Sindarin' as much as miruvor and adan are (again, if I remember the example atan correctly) -- and Tolkien has perhaps solved his problem -- ros 'red-brown' and ros 'foam' do not both hail originally from an Eldarin context, despite that they both ended up in the Eldarin tongues.

Then again, I'm not wholly sure there is that great a problem here with the homophones being so different in meaning and yet being Elvish, despite that Tolkien obviously wanted to correct this at one point.


Again maybe this only seems to work to me because -- as is no doubt true -- JRRT knew vastly (and I mean vastly) much more about languages than I do. But I still wonder why this idea would not have solved both the problem that inspired the essay, and the subsequent problem of published andros that made Tolkien discard most of it.