Subpage: User:IJzeren Jan/List Of Conlang-Related Articles
Welcome!
I'm not a person who likes talking about himself, so I will limit myself to the necessary. My real name is Jan van Steenbergen, I was born on June 3, 1970 (on the same day when Hjalmar Schacht died), and I live in Zaandam, near Amsterdam. Educated as a specialist on Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, I've worked as a journalist, as a translator, and (currently) as a software engineer in a bank. My main interests are: Poland and Ukraine; language, particularly constructed languages; Classical music; history. I am mostly active in the Dutch Wikipedia, under user name IJzeren Jan. Here I will probably mostly be dealing with interwiki links, and perhaps small modifications of existing articles. Also, I might dig up interesting stuff to translate into Dutch or Polish.
My user name, IJzeren Jan literally means Iron Jan. How so? Well, during my student years I used to play computer games from time to time, and "IJzeren Jan" was one of my favourite nicknames I used in highscores. Later I almost automatically used it in my e-mail address, and now as my Wikipedia user name. Only much later I learnt that IJzeren Jan was also the nickname of my famous countryman Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who also happens to be the symbol of my native town Hoorn.
I am the author of several constructed languages, one of which, Wenedyk, is listed in the English wiki. This language is featured in forth-coming fiction related to another wikified subject I am personally involved in: Ill Bethisad. More about this and other things can be found on my home page, http://steen.free.fr/ .
Best regards,
Jan
Portal:Constructed languages
Language of the Month February 2012 |
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Quenya (pronounced [ˈkʷɛnja]) is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth. Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi in Quenya. The tongue actually called Quenya was in origin the speech of two clans of Elves living in Eldamar ("Elvenhome"), the Noldor and the Vanyar. Quenya translates as simply "language", or in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history "elf-language". In the Second Age the Wise of Númenor learned the Quenya tongue. In the Third Age, (the time of the setting of The Lord of the Rings) Quenya was no longer a living language for the Noldor of Middle-earth. Exilic Quenya was learned at an early age by all Elves of Noldorin origin, and it continued to be used in spoken and written form, but their mother-tongue was another Elven-tongue, Sindarin.
Tolkien began with devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar four times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary however remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language itself was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language has been a major source of inspiration but Tolkien also knew about Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish language was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak that language in their own fictional universe since he felt an aesthetic need to provide a historical background for the language itself. Find out more...
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