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Quenya (〔Tolkien wrote in his "Outline of Phonology" (in Parma Eldalamberon 19, p. 74) dedicated to the phonology of Quenya: ''ny'' is "a sound as in English ''new''". In Quenya is a combination of consonants, ibidem., p. 81.〕) is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used by the Elves in his legendarium. Tolkien began devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar several times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from ''Elfin'' and ''Qenya'' to the eventual ''Quenya''. The Finnish language had been a major source of inspiration, but Tolkien was also familiar with Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish languages was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak those tongues in their own fictional universe since he felt that, as with the historical languages he studied professionally, his languages changed and developed over time not in a vacuum, but as a result of the migrations and interactions of the peoples who spoke them. Within Tolkien's legendarium, Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called ''Quendi'' ('speakers') in Quenya. Quenya translates as simply "language", or, in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history, "elf-language". After the Elves divided, Quenya originated as the speech of two clans of "High Elves" or Eldar, the Noldor and the Vanyar, who left Middle-earth to live in Eldamar ("Elvenhome"), in Valinor, the land of the immortal and God-like Valar. Of these two groups of Elves, the Noldor returned to Middle-earth where they met the Sindarin-speaking Grey-elves. The Noldor eventually adopted Sindarin and used Quenya primarily as a ritual or poetic language, whereas the Vanyar who stayed behind in Eldamar retained the use of Quenya. In this way, the Quenya language was symbolic of the high status of the Elves, the firstborn of the races of Middle-earth, because of their close connection to Valinor, and its decreasing use also became symbolic for the slowly declining Elven culture in Middle-earth. In the Second Age of Middle-earth's chronology the Men of Númenor learnt the Quenya tongue. In the Third Age, the time of the setting of ''The Lord of the Rings'', Quenya was learnt as a second language by all Elves of Noldorin origin, and it continued to be used in spoken and written form, but their mother-tongue was the Sindarin of the Grey-elves. As the Noldor remained in Middle-earth, their Noldorin dialect of Quenya also gradually diverged from the Vanyarin dialect spoken in Valinor, undergoing both sound changes and grammatical changes. The language featured prominently in Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings'' trilogy, as well as in his posthumously published history of Middle-earth ''The Silmarillion''. The longest text in Quenya published by Tolkien during his lifetime is the poem "Namárië", and other published texts are generally no longer than a few sentences. At his death Tolkien left behind a number of unpublished writings on Quenya and later Tolkien scholars have prepared his notes and unpublished manuscripts for publication in the journals ''Parma Eldalamberon'' and ''Vinyar Tengwar'', also publishing scholarly and linguistic analyses of the language. Although Tolkien never created enough vocabulary to make it possible to converse in Quenya, fans have been writing poetry and prose in Quenya since the 1970s. This has required conjecture and the need to devise new words, in effect developing a kind of ''neo-Quenya'' language. == External history == J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first ''Elven tongue'' c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham. He later called it Qenya (c. 1915), and later changed the spelling to Quenya. He was then already familiar with Latin, Greek, Spanish, and several ancient Germanic languages, such as Gothic, Old Norse and Old English.〔Letter number 163, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.〕 He had invented several cryptographic codes, and two or three constructed languages. Taking an interest in the Finnish mythology of the Kalevala, Tolkien then became acquainted with the Finnish language, which he found to provide an aesthetically pleasing inspiration for his High-elven language. Many years later he wrote: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."〔 Regarding the inspiration for Quenya he wrote that: Tolkien never intended Quenya, or any of his constructed languages, to be used in everyday life as an international auxiliary language, although he was in favour of the idea of Esperanto as an auxiliary language within Europe. With his Quenya, Tolkien pursued a double aesthetic goal: "classical and inflected".〔 This urge, in fact, was the motivation for his creation of a 'mythology'. While the language developed, Tolkien felt that it needed speakers, including their own history and mythology, which he thought would give a language its 'individual flavour'.〔Tolkien, J. R. R ''The Lord of the Rings'' "Foreword to the Second Edition".〕 He wrote: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues".〔 This process of first inventing a language and then creating a background setting for its fictional speakers has been described as unique. Dimitra Fimi, a Tolkien scholar, argues that Tolkien's invention of Qenya started as a quest for the ideal language, to match the moral and aesthetic objectives that were part of his project of creating "a mythology for England". Fimi argues that Tolkien deliberately used sound symbolism to unify sound and meaning and make the language appear as an ideal language, fit to be spoken in the utopian realm of the Elves and fairies of Valinor. Tolkien considered Quenya to be "the one language which has been designed to give play to my own most normal phonetic taste".〔Tolkien, J. R. R. 1997. ''The Monsters and the Critics and other Essays''. p. 212〕 From the onset, Tolkien used comparative philology and the tree model as his major tools in his constructed languages. He usually started with the phonological system of the proto-language and then proceeded by inventing for each daughter language the necessary sequence of sound changes. "I find the construction and the interrelation of the languages an aesthetic pleasure in itself, quite apart from ''The Lord of the Rings'', of which it was/is in fact independent."〔J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to a reader published in ''Parma Eldalamberon'' (17), p. 61.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Quenya」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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