randomslasher:

curse-you:

mirkwoodest:

mikkeneko:

bookhobbit:

so Shire-talk is canonically a very different dialect of Westron than what Gondorians or Elves or whatever speak and some of the hobbits can code switch between the two and it’s extremely interesting to see how Tolkien portrays it

I’ve just gotten to the part where Frodo meets Faramir, and the difference between how he talks to Faramir and how he talks to Sam, for instance, is v noticable

with Sam he’s a lot more casual and even slightly more modern (for the value of 1954, not 2017) vs with Faramir where he switches to this very formal, quite archaic to our ears (“seven companions we had”)

and then Sam himself doesn’t seem comfortable speaking this prestige dialect (his style includes rather more general “vernacular” features common across regional nonliterary English dialects) – probably bc unlike Frodo he was not given the type of education that would lend itself to learning how to speak it comfortably – so there’s this clash between how Faramir talks to them and how Sam talks back

there’s also the bit where Theoden meets Merry and Pippin, and Merry greets him in very high formality, Pippin addresses Gimli casually bc they’re friends, then turns to Theoden and switches to the formal style, they both talk some more to him, and then after he’s gone Pippin turns to Merry and says Theoden was a “fine old fellow, very polite” (in the more casual style)

In that one scene you have a lot of style switching depending on the person they’re addressing and their status and relationship to the hobbits, but, for instance, Gimli’s sentence structure sounds more like the formal dialect even when he’s happily berating them and calling them villains, probably because he doesn’t use Shire-talk

basically: you can tell this dude was a linguist

Remember the time Sam squared up and addressed Faramir in a manner literally  described as “giving a stern talking-to a child who just gave him sass” and Frodo was just like oh my god Sam what are you doing

@curse-you I feel like we were just talking abt that scene?

YEA we were !! sam just went off on faramir

i LOVE this bit

Listen Samwise Gamgee is the hero of this book and I love him more than anything.