Adûnaic

The adûnaic (sometimes also written adunaic without accent) is a built Langue imagined by the novelist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien. In the universe of fiction in which proceed the accounts of the Ground of the Medium, the adûnaic (“Language of the West”) is the language of the Men of Númenor during the Second Age.

External history

First phase - Shortly after the Second world war, Tolkien was harnessed for a time with a new account, The Notion Club Papers . Setting out again of the ideas that it had outlined in its unfinished novel The Lost Road , Tolkien developed the history of the island of Númenor and its fall under the domination of malefic the Sauron. It then designed the first elements of the adûnaic, a language of which the structure trilitère points out the Semitic languages slightly. In margin of the account where briefly this new language appears (by the means of dreams carried out by one of the characters, named Lowdham), Tolkien gave of it rather detailed report, although him such an unfinished, in a “report/ratio” allegedly written by Lowdham ( Lowdham' S Report one the Adunaic Language ).

Second phase - As often in this field, the designs of Tolkien on its built languages were changeantes. A little less than one ten years later, whereas he worked with the drafting of the appendices of the Seigneur of the Rings , Tolkien hesitated over the idea that the Men of Númenor would have in fact abandoned their languages first to adopt a elfic language, the Sindarin. But finally, it preserved nevertheless the adûnaic and quoted several names of kings de Númenor in the appendices. The publication of the Seigneur of the Rings thus solidified in the marble this last position. Other texts of this period were published in unfinished Contes and legends , and “the Line of Elros” comes to supplement the list of the known words adûnaics.

Contrary to the other languages invented by Tolkien, which were the subject of constant revisions throughout its life (in particular the Sindarin and the Quenya), it seems well that Tolkien worked on the adûnaic only during these two phases. The data of the Lowdham' S carryforward do not seem entirely compatible with information coming from the appendices of the Seigneur of the Rings . We do not know however the extent of the changes that Tolkien would have brought to its presentation of the adûnaic if he had sought to give a more final version of it.

Internal history

The adûnaic drift of the languages of the human tribes which were established on the island of Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age, and more particularly of that of the people of Hador.

It seems that in a remote past, the men were in liaison with the people of the Dwarves and that their idioms then incipient were influenced by the language of the latter. As for the Khuzdul of the Dwarves, the vocabulary adûnaic bases on consonant roots trilitères, or sometimes bilitères. Later, the influence of the elfic languages, in particular of the Quenya and the Sindarin, was also felt.

During the Second Age, the Men of Númenor established several Ground colonies of the Medium. It developed a common language to with it mixing the adûnaic with the local languages, at the origin intended for the trade and mutual comprehension with the autochtones. This Pidgin was spread and evolved to what became then the “common speech” of the Earth of the Medium, the occidentalien.

After the immersion of the island of Númenor, Númenoréens in exile formed the kingdoms of Gondor and Ground Arnor of the Medium. The adûnaic disappeared with the profit from the common language. It will be however noted that the inhabitants of Dol Amroth, who were of stock númenoréenne but whose establishment out of Ground of Mileu went back to a former colonization, apparently continued to give each other names in adûnaic, even if they more probably did not use of this language to the daily newspaper.

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