The Lhammas
the languages-of-the-world tract (The Lost Road and Other Writings, HoME 5)
Nature
The Lhammas — “the Account of Tongues” — is the language-tract of the mythology: a survey, set within the legendarium, of the tongues of the world and of how speech was first lifted and then sundered. Ascribed to the sage Pengolodh, it maps the speech of the Valar (Valarin), the great Eldarin tongue in its branches (Quenya and the Greyspeech, later Sindarin), the secret speech of the Dwarves (Khuzdul), the rough tongues of the Orcs, and the younger speech of Men. It is the sibling of the Etymologies in the same volume.
Contents
The gift of speech and the doctrine that all speech descends from that of the Valar; the one family-tree of the tongues; The great division of Eldarin into its kindreds, and the gap between the speech of the Light-folk and that of the Grey-elves of the west; The Dwarves’ Khuzdul, secret and far-removed from Elvish; the harsh jabberings of the Orcs; the many tongues of Men; The gathering of the whole in the lore of Pengolodh — a philological map of Arda in the first ages.
Composition
Drawn up in the later 1930s (c. 1937, at the time of the later Quenta and the Etymologies), The Lhammas was published by Christopher Tolkien in The Lost Road and Other Writings (HoME 5), with an analysis of its doctrines and of the later changes as Tolkien’s linguistic scheme itself evolved — including the growth of Sindarin into the chief tongue of the Grey-elves.