Le langage dans Harry Potter et le Seigneur des Anneaux

[jerome]

Voici la transcription sur l'aspect philologique d'Harry Potter et du Seigneur des Anneaux. C'est en anglais et par ici.

Rowling is hardly the first writer to play with language in ways that can have pedagogical value. In an article a few years ago I talked about the philological puzzles encoded into Tolkien’s claim to have invented the word hobbit—a claim that, it turns out, was very likely intended as an amusing linguistic game. Diving down that particular hobbit-hole leads one on a winding circuit from Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—with stop-overs in forgotten horticultural terminology and countryside fairies. Following the bouncing Bilbo through all this, it turns out, is a great way to introduce students to the history and usage of both primary sources, like a fascinating 1888 discussion about the standardization of weights and measures in both technical and linguistic terms that took place in the wonderfully named House of Commons’ Select Committee on Corn Averages … and secondary sources, like the enormous range of information that’s waiting to be pulled out of our great descriptive dictionaries. All of it is fascinating, and all of it reveals how Tolkien could build a world from a word.