ENTS
This race is perhaps most mysterious of all dwelling in Middle-earth. Old as the first forest, they remember uncountable ages, peoples and the fall of ancient Elvish kingdoms, and great wars of the Elder Days. The Onodrim or Enyd (the Elvish names for this folk) were taught to speak by the Eldar at the time when the shepherds of woods were speechless creatures wandering about their green realms. Looking in the eyes of Fangorn - the oldest among the Ents - one of the hobbits felt "as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake." [3]
The language of the Ents - that strange race of half-trees half-human-beings - was unlike all others: slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of wovel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the lore-masters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing. They preferred the Eldarian tongues, especially ancient High-elven, which was the first language they had heard and learned. Being very skillfull in tongues, they grasped them quickly and never forgot. Unlike the Dwarves, the Ents did not keep their language in secret for none of other race could manage something like 'Lourelindorenan lindolorendor malinornelion ornemalin'.
"It's a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say and to listen to", says Fangorn about Entish. Most roots of this language have Quenya or Sindarin origin like the names of Fangorn 'beard-(of)-tree', or Fimbrethil 'slender beech'. But the grammar remains purely Entish. In the Appendix to The Lord of the Rings we find an example of an Eldarian borrowing constructed in Ent-fashion: "Taurelilomea-tumbalemorna Tumbaletaurea Lomeanor". When translated word for word it means "Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalley-black Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland" and can be rendered as 'there is a black shadow in the deep dales of the forest'. And we still have a purely Entish word a-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or- burume, by which Fangorn meant 'hill'.
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