Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn arenāt in earshot theyāll 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 weāre the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo whatād he say
Frodo: Iām not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think heās 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. Youāre absolutely right. Iāll wait.
#legolasā hick accent vsĀ #frodoās āi learned it out of a bookā accentĀ #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: yāalldāveāffāve
Frodo, crying: please I canāt understand what youār saying
Ok, but Frodo didnāt just learn out of a book. He learned likeā¦ Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:
Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.
Legolas: Wots that mate? āEre, you avinā a giggle? Fookinā āobbits, I sware.
Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*
@ghostriderofthearagon
dYinGggGgggā¦
i mean, honestly itās 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 Chaucerās time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
theyāve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodoās books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isnāt likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragornās foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolasā 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 canāt really tell because there werenāt years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilboās materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didnāt establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isnāt 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 heās probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but heās 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, legolasā 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 heās being casual. or both!
considering legolasā moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
ā¦itās 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 didnāt 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 theyāre 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. thereās 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 yāallādāve pitched a feckinā 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 Hobbitsā weird dialect this whole time: Thatās 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 ātree of tonguesā 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 theyāre also immortal nerd OCs and we must never forget this
Thank you for this addition which is both lovely and educational
So what youāre saying is, theyāre us. Theyāre the internet. SendingĀ āyeetā andĀ āsmolā andĀ āI lik the bredā all over creation until two elves whoāve never met in their lives and be likeĀ ābeans, amirite?ā andĀ āyeah I love kitter feets too.ā
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS BEAUTIFUL
@icecoldham: Feast your eyes
