Concerning Tolkien (and Languages)

Tolkien loved languages. From the time he was little, he couldn't get enough of them. He studied Latin, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, and Gothic. And then there were his favorites - Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, and Finnish. How wonderful. There are so many languages I want to learn. I need someone to motivate me to study them. Instead I sit here on my toosh and do nothing. But Tolkien took the initiative and learned. He was not fluent in all these languages, but he was in some of them. What a brilliant mind.

Tolkien and I agree that the loss of languages is the tragic loss of the societies that speak them. We need to preserve them both for the sake of those societies, and for the beauty that languages in and of themselves possess.

'The bigger things get, the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb...There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. Knox says 1/8 of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, [it's a] shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say ‘baa baa’.'

Btw - my list of languages I want to learn includes Swedish, French, Russian, Spanish, ASL, and signed English (all of which I have dabbled in), and Hebrew, Welsh, Hawaiian, Ojibwe, Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. And like 847 others.