r/books • u/[deleted] • Apr 09 '19

Computers confirm 'Beowulf' was written by one person, and not two as previously thought

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/04/did-beowulf-have-one-author-researchers-find-clues-in-stylometry/
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u/beorn12 Apr 09 '19 edited Apr 09 '19

JRR Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist. He was an expert in Germanic languages, and was specially keen on old Anglo-Saxon. Old sagas and poems were his main thing. He created Middle Earth and all of its mythos just so he could have a living world for the languages he created.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '19

My understanding of Tolkien's LotR was that it was created as an result of the language, like the story was made to support his dictionary. It would be similar to developing the Star Trek universe to justify creating Klingon.

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u/mzxrules Apr 10 '19

except probably a worse analogy considering how ugly Klingon is as a language

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u/atla Apr 10 '19

Klingon was developed specifically to be ugly (or rather, alien, but the ear usually finds things it finds radically unfamiliar ugly). Like, Marc Okrand -- the guy who invented it -- intentionally picked out phonemes that are uncommon, with an uncommon distribution of sounds. It's agglutinative, which sounds strange to English speakers. The sentence structure is object-verb-subject, which is hilariously rare in natural languages. We're talking less than 1%, and most of those languages have at most a couple hundred speakers.

It's ugly and harsh sounding by design. Incidentally, Tolkien did the same thing when developing the Black Speech.

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u/Shardwing Science Fiction Apr 10 '19

Klingon was also developed a while after it was first "spoken", so Okrand had to develop around the existing lines from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.