Subject: There's an interesting thought.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-06-25 16:07:00 UTC
Obviously, the ability to speak Quenya or Sindarin is quite young - or, as some would say, not yet there! And the data coming out of ELF is going to lead to revisions of what we 'know', so the speakable Exilic Quenya of twenty years hence will not be the same as it is today.
But... what about in a hundred years? All of Tolkien's data should be available by then, which means Quenya courses and wordlists can be as 'up to date' as possible - though of course not matching what was in Tolkien's head, because he almost certainly didn't write most of it down. But when a stable, consensus Quenya exists - will it evolve in the way you're talking about, creating a vernacular version? I guess that would depend on there being communities which use it (rather than just fanfics using the same rote phrases over and over). Maybe something like Second Life could have Quenya (and Sindarin - showing my bias, there!)-only regions.
Or, of course, we could start a whole spaceship speaking it. That would probably do it too.
I think the transition to 'vernacular' Quenya will come when people start coining their own... not words, but roots. At the moment, we want to stay close to Tolkien, which leads to doing things like trying to paraphrase 'window' as 'lightdoor' - something that natural languages rarely do. Can a consensus Vernacular Quenya (Seventh Age Quenya? Atani Quenya?) come into existence with actual new words? I don't know; it seems like we'd get a proliferation of dialects and creoles long before we got a stable version.
But give it a century or two... hmm.
hS