Animalic

From Tolkien Gateway
Revision as of 17:52, 7 February 2020 by Aarrnn (talk | contribs) (Created page with "'''Animalic''’ was a private language invented by Mary and Marjorie Incledon, Tolkien's young cousins, around 1905. Tolkien, then about ten years old and already strong in Lati...")
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

'Animalic’ was a private language invented by Mary and Marjorie Incledon, Tolkien's young cousins, around 1905. Tolkien, then about ten years old and already strong in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, found it amusing and learned it. The only surviving fragment of the Animalic is the phrase given by Tolkien in The Monsters and the Critics p. 200: Dog nightingale woodpecker forty, meaning "you are a donkey", the animal and nothing else. Forty was the Animal word for "donkey" while donkey was the word for 40. It appears that the Animalic was a rather awkward language; certainly it was not rational that extremely frequent grammatical words like "are" or the article "one / one" be rendered by long words like nightingale and woodpecker. We will never know how many animal words Mary and her sister made. Tolkien's judgment is harsh, but justified  : the Animal was "raw ... to the extreme" (MC: 200) .However, he was one of his very first acquaintances in invented language, perhaps the first. And he was going to generate the Nevbosh - the first invented language to which Tolkien contributed.