David Salo

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This article is about the American linguist. For other uses of "salo", see Salo (disambiguation).

David Salo giving a talk in Bloomington, Illinois, April 30th, 2005

David Salo (born 1969) is a linguist who worked on the languages of J. R. R. Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, expanding the Elvish language (particularly Sindarin) by building on vocabulary already known from published works, and defining some languages that previously had a very small published vocabularly. 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.

1 Salo on Tolkien's languages
2 Assessments and Criticisms of Salo's Work
3 References
4 External links
5 Reviews of the book Gateway to Sindarin

[edit] Salo on Tolkien's languages

David 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 0-87480-800-6).

Salo was contracted for The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy to write all the material in Elven, 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 created many missing Sindarin and Quenya words, based on his studies of attested versions of these languages in Tolkien's writings, grammatically and semantically fitting them with the known material. Since other languages used in the movies, such as Khuzdul and the Black Speech, were never really developed by Tolkien, Salo created entirely new vocabularies for these, more or less following the patterns found in the few attested examples of these languages. Because of Salo's work in inventing the forms used in the movies virtually from scratch (especially in the case of Dwarven and Black Speech), his versions of the languages are often called neo-Khuzdul, neo-Sindarin, or neo-Black speech, to set them apart from Tolkien's original languages.

In a post on the Elfling list, Salo offered his own take on the use of Tolkien's languages in the movies:

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.

[edit] Assessments and Criticisms of Salo's Work

The estimation of Salo's work on Tolkien's languages has been mixed within the Tolkien language community. His early essay "Development of Galadriel's Lament," in the journal Tyalië Tyelelliéva (No.12, 4 April 1998), is considered by some to be one of the finest linguistic analyses of the Quenya poem. Salo's Qenya Botany (from Tolkien's early "Qenya" language) is also of some note. However, while his work as a linguist for the Jackson movies has garnered him respect among many involved in the study of Tolkien's languages, others are not so satisfied with Salo's scholarship. In particular, Carl F. Hostetter, editor of the journal Vinyar Tengwar, has been a consistent critic of Salo's work on Sindarin, the language which figures most prominently in the movie versions of Tolkien's books.