Post #4145530
2026-07-27 19:53 UTC
Tolkien‘s linguistic inventions are startlingly creative. In ordinary story telling, invented languages rarely appear, and if they do, they are just superficial props. But each of Tolkien‘s languages is complete—dare I say, “Turing complete”—equipped with its own origin story, evolutionary history, regional dialects, cultural functions, fully formed script, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, idioms.
#Tolkien’s originality, ingenuity, thoroughness, industry, and process could serve as inspirations in designing new #programming languages. We still stand to gain much, even if we #IT practitioners do no more than to look upon Tolkien’s life work as mere aspirations.
Replies (2)
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@UweHalfHand@norcal.social 2026-07-27 19:56
@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz I am dorking around with a version of Oberon-2; I will make sure it can be localized to Quenya or Sindarin 🥸😜
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@vnikolov@ieji.de 2026-07-27 21:03
By the way, did you know that the names of the dwarves (or was it "dwarfs"?) come from a piece of mediaeval Scandinavian literature? In the latter, Gandalf is also a dwarf. @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz