Old Church Slavonic and the origin of Fampyrs, discuss!

[TT1]

It took Tolkien 50+ years to get the LotR published...

Dont be dumb. Lord of the Rings took 17 years to get published.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-world-war-i-is-at-the-heart-of-lord-of-the-rings

Middle Earth world building was an ongoing project for Tolkien that started during his military service in World War I.

Tolkien was born in 1892.
LOTR was published in 1954

Do the math.

So 62 years then?

Precisely. And he was not 12 when he started writing LOTR.

 

[Ulfhednar]

It took Tolkien 50+ years to get the LotR published...

Dont be dumb. Lord of the Rings took 17 years to get published.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-world-war-i-is-at-the-heart-of-lord-of-the-rings

Middle Earth world building was an ongoing project for Tolkien that started during his military service in World War I.

Tolkien was born in 1892.
LOTR was published in 1954

Do the math.

So 62 years then?

Precisely. And he was not 12 when he started writing LOTR.

I still don't want Sawyer developing Engwithan verb tenses...

 

[Prime Junta]

I still don't want Sawyer developing Engwithan verb tenses...

I'm extremely happy that someone is. Ye olde renaissance Englishe you find in most cRPGs is fucking dumb.

 

[torpid]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-world-war-i-is-at-the-heart-of-lord-of-the-rings

It is obvious that both wars played a huge role in the development of artists as artists in that time, there's nothing "subtle" about it. How could they not? They were earth-shattering (both figuratively and literally) for everyone involved. That doesn't mean Middle-Earth or the events within it are "inspired by" any specific war or are somehow allegorical for any specific war. Tolkien himself denied this many times. If it was it wouldn't enjoy this enduring popularity, it would've died down as soon as the buzz around the wars did. It also doesn't mean that the war/s didn't shape him as a person who could and was willing to write a thing like LotR, the first of its kind. LotR is a product of its time, however, there's a reason it wasn't written sooner by someone else, it's absolutely logical to have been written exactly then.

Anyway, I think it's disingenuous to say it took him "50 years" to write it, some of the ideas may have come then, but it wasn't any kind of complete concept or plan. He started manually writing it in '37 and completed it in '49. 12 years is a lot of time for a single project as well. He might've worked on the process/concept of mythopoeia from 1917, but not LotR as LotR.

He started working on the Book of Lost Tales during that time which would eventually be what we know as the Simarillion, and it included the crafting of the languages he would need for LotR. So that's why I start my countdown from there. LotR is basically a footnote in Tolkien's vision for Middle Earth history.

The story of LoTR is AFAIK an entirely post-Hobbit creation though, so its writing should be properly dated as starting in the late 30s, even if some of the background material dates back to the 1910s.

Is this thread a result of Infinitron's scissors? What's the original thread

 

[Ulfhednar]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-world-war-i-is-at-the-heart-of-lord-of-the-rings

It is obvious that both wars played a huge role in the development of artists as artists in that time, there's nothing "subtle" about it. How could they not? They were earth-shattering (both figuratively and literally) for everyone involved. That doesn't mean Middle-Earth or the events within it are "inspired by" any specific war or are somehow allegorical for any specific war. Tolkien himself denied this many times. If it was it wouldn't enjoy this enduring popularity, it would've died down as soon as the buzz around the wars did. It also doesn't mean that the war/s didn't shape him as a person who could and was willing to write a thing like LotR, the first of its kind. LotR is a product of its time, however, there's a reason it wasn't written sooner by someone else, it's absolutely logical to have been written exactly then.

Anyway, I think it's disingenuous to say it took him "50 years" to write it, some of the ideas may have come then, but it wasn't any kind of complete concept or plan. He started manually writing it in '37 and completed it in '49. 12 years is a lot of time for a single project as well. He might've worked on the process/concept of mythopoeia from 1917, but not LotR as LotR.

He started working on the Book of Lost Tales during that time which would eventually be what we know as the Simarillion, and it included the crafting of the languages he would need for LotR. So that's why I start my countdown from there. LotR is basically a footnote in Tolkien's vision for Middle Earth history.

The story of LoTR is AFAIK an entirely post-Hobbit creation though, so its writing should be properly dated as starting in the late 30s, even if some of the background material dates back to the 1910s.

Is this thread a result of Infinitron's scissors? What's the original thread

Middle Earth is a whole cloth - it's all one gloriously unfinished magnum opus. You can't have Arwen and Aragorn without Beren and Luthien. The siege of Minas Tirith is the counterpoint to the Fall of Gondolin- the Hobbit/LotR is a few decades in a several thousand year history. Tolkien started creating ME in his teens/twenties and never stopped. He was in his 60s before any of it was published and his son is still publishing parts of ME lord today.

 

[Ulfhednar]

I still don't want Sawyer developing Engwithan verb tenses...

I'm extremely happy that someone is. Ye olde renaissance Englishe you find in most cRPGs is fucking dumb.

I'm fine with what's already there - it might be better to say I don't think he needs to invent a coherent Engwithan language - I want the game to come out in 2018 not 2068.

 

[Lacrymas]

Even if they did create a language it won't take 50 years to do so, Tolkien took "50 years" because he was inventing the concept of the secondary world. You must understand that nothing like Middle-Earth had been done before, it might seem trivial to create another world now, but it wasn't back then. It wasn't a thing that people could imagine or come up with at all, the conditions weren't right. Not that they couldn't create another world, it's that the concept of creating another world couldn't occur to them at all. So, yeah, creating another language won't take 50 years, trust me, especially if they hire an educated linguist to help them out. Maaaybe it will take 1 year to hammer out the basic things, since they won't need this language for "high" usage like dissertations, novels, scientific journals. At most they'll need it for very basic short stories or myths and even then I doubt it.

Not that I want them to create it, it's a very low priority. I want them to iron out their lore presentation first, before going all in with a language.

 

[FreeKaner]

I think rather than phonetics, what's lacking in modern fantasy languages is just naming things. Naming conventions are all too direct, which is not at all like actual languages, where shifting not only happens commonly but also constantly. Words almost always are static to their meaning in games, you very rarely come across something named after things that are unrelated to their current usage, they are always related to contemporary meaning.

If I were to give a very obvious example for how it actually is; Lord coming from hlafweard in Old English, literally bread-keeper. The word "guild" coming from "payment" could also be another simple example of naming after association. Concepts named after particularities and happenstance are also lacking, things like "grognards" for example, or "avant-garde" or "Old Guard". These are just some basic examples off the top of my head which could be expanded vastly.

I find a lot of RPGs just try to make their naming conventions too universal, profound and everlasting, ignoring the actual chaotic and passing nature of language, as well as keeping different languages that interact with each other too seperate. Languages borrowed a lot from each other if they were interacting, even in hostility. Not enough just actual sincerity is found in the languages, they sound too sterile and scientific, approached scientifically too disconnected from human (or any other sapient creature) element.

 

[Neanderthal]

Saw a sword wi Ogham on it other day instead o usual Futhark inscription, like to see a bit more o unusual stuff, an kenning how to translate that stuff in game is always fun for me.

 

[Severian Silk]

I prefer Klingon.

 

[Iznaliu]

Really, I didn't know that. Any examples?

That priest that you talked about is an example.

But which "ъ" is it that is a cognate? The modern or the OCS?

It would be a cognate to both since the modern is derived from the OCS.

IDK... until I see it written somewhere and can cross-check the "ъ" in different words.

For example:

OCS рыбарь (rybarĭ) → Serbo-Croatian рибар/ribar

OCS быстръ (bystrŭ) → Serbo-Croatian бистар/bistar

 

[AwesomeButton]

The priest is most probably a wrong reading/translation of name. In some internet pages it says it's his name, in others it says that an unnamed priest called some knyaz "an evil upir". I no longer know who is messing up what.

Priests usually picked specific church-approved names, so I find it weird some priest would use this as his own name.

 

[Mynon]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227582-vampires-of-the-slavs

 

[Iznaliu]

The priest is most probably a wrong reading/translation of name. In some internet pages it says it's his name, in others it says that an unnamed priest called some knyaz "an evil upir". I no longer know who is messing up what.

Apparently it might have been a nickname, but some argue an identification with the Swedish rune-carver Öpir