Quote:
Tolkien also observed something that I readily empathise with:
For Tolkien, a beautiful word is something that must not only sound pleasant to the ear, but also look good in print. An apt example would be Kalevala, the name of Finnish national epic that inspired the creation of Quenya, the ancestral form of Elvish.
I've lost count of the number of times I've come across sci-fi and fantasy names/words that not just sound ugly but also look absolutely hideous in print. To me, it is instant proof that the author doesn't pay much attention to such aesthetic details, and that usually doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.
The written word is meant to be read aloud. When students complain about studying Shakespearean poetry, it's often because they haven't heard it performed on stage. It's only then that they'd begin to appreciate the rhyme, meter, consonance, assonance and alliteration that determined how certain words were used in certain ways.
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The thing about Asiatic and European languages are the highly different sentence structures. For example, in Mandarin, we use and treat particles as nothing more than vocabulary connectors (thus they are called empty words) while in English, they are used often as referents to perspectives (first, second, third).
Secondly when it comes to point and proof in a single sentence, there are certain placements for types of words, for example, in this case of adverbs (too, where the Chinese equivalent is "也")
English : He likes coffee
too!*
Chinese : 他
也喜欢咖啡!
Google translates it as 他也喜欢喝咖啡, but it isn't correct because the English version never specifically stated that he likes to "drink" coffee, simply that he likes coffee. Sure one can argue that coffee is solely for beverage purposes, but what if the overall subject is about the colour of stockings or favourite prankster dye for white suits?
* - "He also likes coffee" isn't correct. In this case of translation, the word "too" is better used than "also" because there isn't two different nouns (or subject issues) to compare together.
The third one is pretty vague and hard to explain, I tend to find that speech replies in Chinese often includes the idea/subject only, while in English it tends to be more complete including the subject and slight elaboration.
I haven't studied much into Quenya, but if we are to identify how sentence construction is usually done in different ways, it may yield suspicions that Tolkien may have included the precision style of Asian languages into the broad style of European languages.