Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work > Tolkien was the first philologist to establish such a network of evolving dialects that derive from one another “by slowly accumulating changes and divergences in form across time from a common ancestor species.”
I can’t lie that this hits me in three directions. 1. Tolkien 2. Languages 3. notebooks I found it fascinating his work to include changes between dialects overtime. I’ve read a bit on the languages in Tolkein’s world and the influences of real world languages on Elvish (particularly Welsh on Sindarin) but I hadn’t paid attention to the evolution of these languages.
via the cramped