Arabic Origins??

[reem]

i have noticed while reading the simarillion that some words sound like they were taken out of the Arabic vocabulary...as amazing and unlikely as that might sound!!
like, for exaplme, 'Arda' sounds very much like the old Arabic word of Ard...which means Earth. and 'Nahar' (the horse of Tulkas, i think) means 'Morning' in Arabic. and the horse was supposed to be a shining white and gold of silver (not sure which). i also noted a few other but i can't remember them at the moment. now what i had heard before what that the elvish lanuage was based on the Finnish language, if i'm not very much mistaken. so what's this all about? unless these words already exist in the finnish language??
reem:confused:

[Niniel]

Tolkien based Quenya on Finnish, but only on the sound which he liked a lot. He didn't take many actual words or grammar from it. Sindarin was based on Welsh, some words are taken from it and also some features of the grammer (such as lenition at the beginning of words). He had some knowledge of many other lanuages (Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, Icelandic, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, Dutch, German, French, Hebrew and I might have forgotten some), so in all these lanuages he had heard or read words. Also he read all kinds of words and names in the news.
Later, wen he was writing, some of the names or words that he had heard somewhere would come back to him and if he liked them, he would use them, if they fitted the grammar of Sindarin or Quenya. Does that never happen to you, that suddenly you think of a word and you can't remember where you heard it, but you like it? Tolkien had the same, so he used them in his languages. But he stated specifically that these words were not to be taken as actually referring to their original meaning, which in most cases he had forgotten because he had heard them a long time ago, and also because he really didn't WANT them to have any other meaning than the one he used in his works. He said it was very useless to try to find the 'origin of words', since there was no other origin than that he came form his mind, whether they were put in there because he heard them before, or because he made them up himself, and any meaning that they might have outside his works was a coincidence. (Read the Letters if you want to hear what he has to say about it).

[jallan]

Well aard- means “earth” in Dutch, which is close to Arda also. It is also cognate with English earth; see Indo-European Roots: er-² (http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE130.html).

But Arda actually means ‘the Realm’ in Sindarin.

Individual words that have similar meanings occur in reality by coincidence in languages that have little or no relation between them, which makes it usually impossible to know whether Tolkien did or did not borrow any particular Elvish form from any particular language.

If one ignores meaning altogether, there are always a large number of similar forms between any two languages, especially for shorter words.

Tolkien did partly base his Adûnaic and Dwarvish languages on Semitic languages, in that he based them on a system of mostly tri-consonantal roots.

But, at least for Adûnaic, these roots also had a characteristic vowel associated with them, while it is a feature of Semitic languages (and the wider Afro-Eurasian language family) that roots are consonantal only.

I have seen no indication that Tolkien knew Arabic or any Semitic language. He did produce a translation of the book of Jonah for the English version of the New Jerusalem Bible, but this may have been a translation from the French rather than from the original Hebrew.

Within his legendarium Tolkien explains arda as derived from the Elvish root GAR- , as seen in The Lost Road (HoME 5), “The Etymologies”, under the root 3AR-.

An explanation for Nahar as derived from Valinorean appears in The Lost Road (HoME 5), “Quendi and Eldar”, Note on the ‘Language of the Valar’: Nahar, the name of Orome’s horse. ‘Otherwise it was,’ says Pengolodh, ‘with the steed upon which Lord Orome rode. When the Quendi asked his name, and if that bore any meaning, Orome answered: “Nahar, and he is called from the sound of his voice, when he is eager to run”.’ But the V form that is recorded by Rúmil was næχærra.I suppose this might reasonably well represent Tolkien’s own original thought, that is, that the name of the horse was intended to resemble the sound of a horse neighing.

[reem]

Originally posted by jallan
Well aard- means “earth” in Dutch, which is close to Arda also. It is also cognate with English earth; see Indo-European Roots: er-² (http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE130.html).


I have seen no indication that Tolkien knew Arabic or any Semitic language. He did produce a translation of the book of Jonah for the English version of the New Jerusalem Bible, but this may have been a translation from the French rather than from the original Hebrew.



:) quite imperssive! though i think that tolkien's interest or his comming across the Hedrew language would explain any similarities with the Arabic language if he was inspired by some Hebrew words and such. the two languages (Hebrew and Arabic) are surprisingly close.
reem

[Periharadan]

Hi all!

I noticed recently that the Tengwar writing system, especially the vowels notation, looked very much like arabic :

Vowels are indicated by diacritics (tehtar) which appear above the consonant which precedes them (in Quenya mode) or above the consonant which follows them (in Sindarin mode). When vowels stand on their own or come at the beginning of a word, the diacritics appear over a special vowel holder. Long vowels are always attached to a vowel holder.

other languages use that kind of notation too, of course :

The way the vowels are indicated in Tengwar resembles Tibetan and other Brahmi-derived scripts.

quotes from : http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm