Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

@ghostriderofthearagon

dYinGggGggg…

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

@words-writ-in-starlight

If I remember correctly, in the “tree of tongues” material from The Lost Road, Tolkien goes into some detail about how the reason elves have so many dialects is that elves view language as a form of collaborative art, which they delight in, so a newly-coined word or grammatical construct gets spread around just like a new song would.

Elves may be immortal, but they’re also immortal nerd OCs and we must never forget this

Thank you for this addition which is both lovely and educational

So what you’re saying is, they’re us. They’re the internet. Sending “yeet” and “smol” and “I lik the bred” all over creation until two elves who’ve never met in their lives and be like “beans, amirite?” and “yeah I love kitter feets too.”

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS BEAUTIFUL

Hells yeah! The English language relies heavily on stressing and intonation to give shades of meaning to out words, like I think all languages do that but English really just grabs the ball and runs with it. We all know the example of “I did not tell her that” where you stress I, did not, tell, her and that in turn and completely change the meaning of the sentence.

And written English has always struggled with that, not so much in formal settings but when engaging in casual conversation it has always been the problem of “text doesn’t do tone of voice”. But as @botanyshitposts says holy shit we’ve got a generation that has increasingly embraced short form text communication, not like lengthy letters of emails I mean instant messenger, and so we’ve Solved The Problem. 

Remember, until very recently very few messaging services supported any sort of text formatting so you couldn’t even use itallics to convey stress, so different capitalisation took its place, as did asterisks (which, uh, everyone decided that *word* means bolded? really?). And when combined with forms of media where you can use both and all its gained further shades of meaning so while both “they’re just Like That” and “they’re just like that” are emphasised I read them differently in my head.

I am literally writing a book about how modern internet language works and one of the things I would dearly love is if it can help people understand exactly this point! (and provide a usefully authoritative-seeming tome to lob at people in your life who Just Don’t Get It when it comes to conveying tone of voice in writing) 

A fun survey of the meanings of 42 common emoji, from the Cognition and Language Lab (CALL) at Linfield College. You can take it here if you’re over 18 (no other criteria). 

Looking forward to seeing the results when they come out! 

Honestly, it’s not even multiple exclamation point that get me.

It’s the double exclamation specifically.

Ending a sentence with one exclamation point: very good, nice emphasis.

Ending a sentence with three or more exclamation points: okay, we’re going dramatic, right on.

Ending a sentence with exactly two exclamation points: I have no idea what’s going on.

It’s like sentences that conclude with a double bang occupy some sort of semiotic liminal space between the emphatic and the histrionic, and I just don’t know how to respond.

I’ve been using double exclamation marks recently for like a hybrid sincerity/enthusiasm feel, when one exclamation mark doesn’t feel sincere enough but three would be overdoing it. Like “thanks!” is just basic politeness at this point, so “thanks!!” is a genuine note of enthusiasm but not quite as excited as “thanks!!!”.

But I’m pretty sure I’m still in flux with multiple exclamation points, so maybe I’ll upgrade to three for this purpose in a few more months. 

I started fact-checking a book about emoji and the book was so hilaribad it turned into a thread-review. Here are some highlights: full thread-review here.

I’m not linking to the book, because no one should buy it. 

A few papers on Twitter and minority languages

What can hashtags tell us about minority languages on Twitter? A comparison of #cymraeg, #frysk, and #gaeilge

Using Twitter in an Indigenous Language: An analysis of te reo Māori tweets

Why write in a language that (almost) no one can read? Twitter and the development of written literature