25 thoughts on “Name the language”

  1. it sounds like my hungarian teacher!
    so I would make a guess and say hungarian or finnish …………… or a related lang!

  3. Doesn’t sound finno-ugric to my ears … or at least it doesn’t have vowel harmony.

  4. If it *is* Finno-Ugric (I still have my doubts), then it might be Estonian.

  5. It’s definetely not Estonian. That I can tell you.

    I would say it is Quenya, the High Eleven language created by J. R. R. Tolkien for Middle Earth.

  6. I’m not surprised that this language isn’t heard very often:
    ‘A laita te’ – it’s Tolkien’s Quenya

  8. Tolkien was an English man and was a professor of Ango-Saxon (Old English). He created Middle Earth to give his made up languages a home.

    He created Quenya (High Elven; Quenya was to the Elves what Latin was to the Europeans) which was (loosely) based on Finnish. He also created Sindarin (Grey Elven) which was the evryday language of the Elves and it was (loosely) based on Welsh. I am not sure of Tolkien could ever spoke Finnish and Welsh and if he could to what degree but I do know he spoke Icelandic and could read the old Norse myths and tales in the their original language.

  9. Dear Simon, I would like to suggest you that if it is possible, in mistery languages you put languages of same family, when it is possible, as you did with Scandinavian languages ( Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) in that case I felt the absence of Icelandic and Faroes together. In today’s mistery. It is a fino-ugric language. It wuld be more interesting if it had Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and other languages. I think this give us a motion of the difference of those languages. I could see this in Scandinavian languages, where Danish is closer as British English and Portuguese from Portugal, and Norwegian is opener as American English and Brazilian Portuguese.
    I will agree with TJ.

  10. Colm: thanks for the info!
    Dunno where I read that …… but I guess i saw some where that he was finnish!
    thanks again! ^_^

  11. I think it would be either Faroese or Icelandic. My gut feeling is telling me it’s Faroese. To me, it doesn’t really sound Finno-Ugric, but then again, I haven’t really looked into Finno-Ugric languages apart from Finnish.

  13. @renato figueiredo: The mystery language this time was Quenya. It’s an Elven language from Middle Earth created by Tolkien (the man who wrote Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and other books). Whilst Tolkien got his inspiration for Quenya from Finnish (with some grammar elements from Latin and some phonology elements from Spanish and Italian), it is a made-up language, and so not derived from Proto-(Finno-)Ugric and therefore can not be considered part of the Finno-Ugric family.

    Otherwise it would be like saying Esperanto is a Romance language with some English, Germanic and Slavic influences. Constructured languages and IALs need to be kept seperate from the natural language they are based on.

    @TJ: No problem! 🙂 I am a LOtRs fan and I am also learning Estonian and Finnish so I was sort of at a big advantage for this mystery language.

  15. The answer is indeed Quenya, one of the languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and based mainly on Finnish. The recordings comes from Ardhon Ellammath (the Realm of the Elf-languages), a site which includes recordings of Quenya, Sindarin and other Tolkienian languages. The text in question is the Ringbearer’s Praise:

    Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar’ni Pheriannath!
    Daur a Berhael, Conin en Annûn! Eglerio!
    A laita te, laita te! Andave laituvalmet!
    Cormacolindor! A laita tárienna!

    I haven’t been able to find an English version of this text though.

  16. I was stuck: from the tonal quality of the speaker´s voice and some of the consonants I was sure that it was germanic (and in fact the reader was a native german speaker, so I was right) but I had nothing to pin it onto. I was thinking something far northern, but had no idea so I looked 🙂

  17. I must have watched LOTR way too may times, because I knew right off that it was “that Elf language”! Didn’t know what it was called though. 🙂

  18. I think it’s good that conlangs are being regarded for these mystery language quizzes. 🙂

    d.m.f.

  20. The Ringbearers’ Praise (for it refers to _two_ Ringbearers, Frodo and Samwise) is in fact in _two_ languages of the Elvish family, namely Sindarin (lines 1 & 2) and Quenya (lines 3 & 4).

    Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar’ni Pheriannath!
    Daur a Berhael, Conin en Annûn! Eglerio!
    A laita te, laita te! Andave laituvalmet!
    Cormacolindor, a laita tárienna!

    The “th” sound and initial “d” occur only in Sindarin, or Grey-elven, whose phonology was inspired by Welsh; Quenya, or High-elven, is the one that was inspired by Finnish, with lots of vowels and liquids.

  21. @ Ronald Kyrmse: I stand corrected. Thanks very much for proving us all wrong! It’s great to learn something new. So Sindarin and Quenya. That’s cool and unusual! 🙂

  24. When I first heard this I thought it was an eastern syllibic languange similer to Japanese or korean. And the accent was like a cross between German and Japanese. But I dont know?

  25. @ Colm: Thanks for the thanks!
    An additional piece of information: In this text (line 2), the names of Frodo and Sam appear in Sindarin as “Daur” – that’s Frodo – and “Berhael” – the mutated form of “Perhael”, or Samwise (Halfwise). Yes, Sindarin has mutations similar to Welsh. 😉

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