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Post by Rune Owl on Dec 1, 2020 0:43:52 GMT
I am re-reading the Lone Wolf series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy at the same time. The Wikipedia article about Joe Dever lists Tolkien as one of his influences. I see a lot of places were Dever seems to have drawn from Tolkien's work.
In The Two Towers, the Elves refer to the riders of Rohan as the "Rohirrim." I was curious about this today, so I looked it up.
So -rim is a "class-plural suffix" in Tolkein's Elvin language. Dever seems to have adopted the same idea for the people of the Darklands (which is the homeland of the Drakkarim and includes the countries Zaldir, Nyras, and Nyvoz).
My assumption is that the word is borrowed into the common language of Magnamund from the Drakkarim language. If we wanted to call them something in the common language without borrowing a word, then "Darklanders" would be a good fit.
Am I correct in thinking that the Drakkarim language and the Giak language are the same thing? Is the language of Sommerlund a linga franca for all of Magnamund, or is there a separate common language something like Esperanto? Dever definitely brings up multiple languages, but some of these basic details are a little hazy to me.
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Post by rhygar on Dec 31, 2020 10:31:54 GMT
There could well be influence from Tolkien. The -im [pronoucned -eem] suffix might come from Hebrew though?
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Post by Rune Owl on Jan 1, 2021 3:42:01 GMT
The -im [pronoucned -eem] suffix might come from Hebrew though? Yes. That is also very plausible.
Here is a funny story about that. I originally read the Lone Wolf books in the late 1980s. Then in the early 1990s I stole the word "Drakkarim" and used it for something else in a tabletop game that I was running. A friend of mine, who was Jewish, noticed the suffix -im, and asked me if the word was from Hebrew. I just looked at him blankly.
I don't know which real languages Tolkien drew from to invent his imaginary languages. I guess he drew from a lot of them. It seems possible that Tolkien lifted the suffix from Hebrew before Dever lifted it from him and then I lifted it from Dever. It's possible that my friend was right and neither Dever nor I knew the original source when we did our stealing.
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