"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

general principle followed throughout: the Common Speech
was to be represented as English of today, literary or colloquial
as the case demanded. Consequently the text was cast into
English spelt as at present, but modified as it might be by writers
in haste whose familiarity with the written form was imperfect,
and who were also (on the first and third pages) transliterating
the English into a different alphabet - one that did not for
instance employ any letter in more than one distinct value,
so that the distribution of English k, c - c, s was reduced to
k - s; while the use of the letters for s and z was variable
since English uses s frequently as = z. In addition, since docu-
ments of this kind nearly always show uses of letters or shapes
that are peculiar and rarely or never found elsewhere, a few
such features are also introduced: as the signs for the English

vowel pairs ea, oa, ou (irrespective of their sounds).
This is all very well, and perhaps gives some idea of the kind
of text Gandalf was trying to read in great haste in the Cham-
ber of Mazarbul. It also accords with the general treatment of
the languages in The Lord of the Rings: only the actual words
and names of the period that are in Elvish languages are
preserved in what is supposed to have been their real form.(13)
Also, this treatment was imposed by the fact that, though the
actual Common Speech was sketched in structure and phonetic
elements, and a number of words invented, it was quite imposs-
ible to translate even such short extracts into its real contem-
porary form, if they were visibly represented. But it is of course
in fact an erroneous extension of the general linguistic treat-
ment. It is one thing to represent all the dialogue of the story in
varying forms of English: this must be supposed to be done by
'translation' - from memory of unrecorded sounds, or from
documents lost or not printed, whether this is stated or not,
whenever it is done in any narrative dealing with past times
or foreign lands. But it is quite another thing to provide visible
facsimiles or representations of writings or carvings supposed to
be of the date of the events in the narrative.(14)
The true parallel in such a case is the glimpse of Quenya given
in Galadriel's Farewell - either in a transcription into our alpha-
bet (to make the style of the language more easily appreciated)
or in the contemporary script (as in The Road Goes Ever On) -
followed by a translation. Since, as noted, the provision of
a contemporary text in the actual Common Speech was not
possible, the only proper procedure was to provide a translation
into English of the legible words of the pages hastily examined
by Gandalf.(15) This was done in the text; and short of a con-
struction of the actual Common Speech sufficient to allow the
text to be in its contemporary form, all that can legitimately be
done.

A special difficulty is presented by the inscription on Balin's