David Salo
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David Salo (born 1969) is a linguist who worked on languages for The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, expanding the Elvish language and defining some languages that previously had no words. He is a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
His primary professional interest is Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language spoken in medieval China.
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Tolkien's languages
Salo's interest in Tolkien's languages arose when he read Tolkien's work as a boy, but press interviews date his extensive knowledge of the languages to the years after the completion of his undergraduate degree. In 1998 he founded the Elfling mailing list for Tolkienist language enthusiasts. In 2004 he published a linguistic analysis of Sindarin: A gateway to Sindarin: a grammar of an Elvish language from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the rings (ISBN 0874808006).
David Salo was contracted for The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy to write all the material in Elvish, Dwarven and other languages for the movies, as well as assist with other language-related items such as the Tengwar and Cirth inscriptions which appear in the movies. Salo also wrote Elvish lyrics for the movie soundtracks.
For the movies Salo had to create many 'missing' Sindarin and Quenya words, all of them based on existing words, and grammatically and semantically fitting in with the known material. Since the other languages used in the movies, Khuzdul and the Black Speech, were not really developed, Salo created entire new languages which fit in with the known words, often called neo-Khuzdul and neo-Black speech to set them apart from Tolkien's original languages.
Salo has promised to create a webpage detailing his inventions once he has time for it.
From a post by Salo on the Elfling list:
- Why is there Elvish in the movie? Why did Peter Jackson care enough to strive for some accuracy in the way language is presented? (…) The Elvish in the movie is addressed to the minority of viewers who know something about the languages. And what are they going to want to do when they hear the Elvish sentences? They're going to want to figure out what they mean, and *why* they mean what they mean. Part of *my* intention, my particular vision and contribution to this movie, was to create sentences which would be intelligible to the people who study the languages (…) I'm enormously happy to see some people saying based on their knowledge of Elvish, great or small, that they recognized and understood some of what they heard on the screen. That's great - that's *exactly* the kind of effect that I was looking for.
References
- Price, Jenny (2 Jan 2002). Scholar of Tolkien languages helped 'Rings' movie makers stay authentic to source (http://www.detnews.com/2002/entertainment/0201/03/f08-379930.htm), Detroit News.
- Smith, Susan Lampert (18 Jan. 2003). UW grad student provides translations for Lord of the Rings movies (http://www.madison.com/wisconsinstatejournal/local/40925.php), Wisconsin State Journal.
External links
- The Elfling list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Elfling/)
- David Salo's Elfling site (http://www.yarinareth.net/David/elfling.html)
- Discussion of David Salo's book A Gateway to Sindarin (http://weet.us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=116)
Reviews of Gateway to Sindarin
- Review (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lambengolmor/message/760) by Carl F. Hostetter
- Review (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lambengolmor/message/765) by Patrick H. Wynne
- Review (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lambengolmor/message/780) by Bertrand Bellet
- Review (http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/salo_discussion.html) by Thorsten Renk
- Review (http://www.textkit.com/0_0874808006.html) by Jessica Levai
- Customer Reviews at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0874808006/ref=dp_nav_0/002-5250466-0800048?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=507846&s=books)