Welsh puts the emphasis on the last-but-one syllable of all but a very few polysyllabic words. However the stress patterns of the two languages are quite different so the overall impression, in particular as far as verse is concerned ought to be quite different. Until I looked into the matter closely I’d always accepted that Sindarin was modelled on Welsh and related languages (Cornish & Breton maybe). Gîl síla na lû govaded: A star shines on the time of our meeting.Īnd for your enemies: “Nai Ungoliant meditha le” means “May Ungoliant (a giant otherworldly spider) devour you!” Just for fun, here’s a brief list of some phrases in Sindarin, via Lord of the Rings fan site : Similarities between the two tongues include the sounds and sound structure as well as some grammatical elements. Still, if you look closely you can see how Sindarin was inspired by Welsh.
Tolkien’s created languages are far enough away from any real existing languages that they are not mutually intelligible. I have a friend of mine who is a Welsh translator who went to see the Lord of the Rings films and when they started speaking Elfish in the film she turned to her daughter and said ‘they are speaking Welsh’ so people do see this relationship.” This particular Elfish language is very like the sounds of Welsh and deliberately so. Phelpstead explained to the BBC, “It’s not so much that he borrowed Welsh words, more the sounds. It’s only natural, then, that Tolkien would use one of his favorite languages as the inspiration for the speech of the Grey Elves. It struck at me in the names on coal-trucks and drawing nearer, it flickered past on station-signs, a flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old and yet alive even in an adeiladwyd 1887, ill-cut on a stone-slab, it pierced my linguistic heart.” In “English and Welsh,” a speech he gave in Oxford, he notes that the sounds of Welsh had always called to him: “I heard it coming out of the west. Tolkien was entranced by the sounds of Welsh. The other, Quenya, is based more on Finnish. A new book from Cardiff University Professor Dr Carl Phelpstead gives Welsh geeks one more reason to be proud of their heritage: it was the inspiration for Sindarin, one of two elven languages created by fantasy author J.R.R Tolkien.
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