Re:Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered in cop...
by eru on Friday October 23, 2015 @10:12PM
(#10442159)
At least that's what he said. The Hobbit for example would / could have been told without the languages, and was at first independent of the Middle Earth.
Re:Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered in cop...
by hcrisp on Friday October 23, 2015 @11:49PM
(#10442353)
Relevant quote: "All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function. The stories were comparatively late in coming." From letter 163.
These things are related, but in the exact opposite way from what you're suggesting.
Tolkien was, first and foremost, a linguist. Language was his passion, and he was of the opinion that, e.g., Esperanto was much more of a dead language than Latin or Ancient Greek are, because Esperanto doesn't have a culture to call its own, whereas Latin and Ancient Greek have a wealth of culture attached to them, and, therefore, a life of their own.
Elvish and dwarfish weren't invented to give Middle Earth more detail. Middle Earth was invented so that the languages would be, in a sense, alive.