I am what you’d probably call neurotypical, and I do see a lot of implied meanings and unspoked sentiments in conversations, although I’m consciously trying to avoid doing that in this comment.

I don’t recognize the type of person you’re referring to in your post, because to me, manipulation is an entirely separate trait from seeing layers (even too many layers) in a conversation. Some manipulative people actively look for the worst qualities in others, and try to twist meanings in order to see the worst possible implication in other people’s statments. I understand that those are the people that you’re referring to. However, I think that many people see unspoken layers in a conversation without seeking out the worst interpretation.

I think even the most basic conversation has a certain degree of implication. For example, “sugary” has the denotative meaning of “sweet,” but it also has connotations of being overly sweet, almost cloying. I would only use the word “sugary” if I meant “sweet, and almost too sweet.” “Joyful” means “happy,” and it has connotations of pure, possibly religious happiness. “Delighted” also means “happy,” but it has connotations of a simpler, possibly physical happiness. I might accept an invitation by saying “I’d be delighted to come to your party,” but not by saying “It would make me joyful to come to your party.”

As far as I know, almost every word has many connotative meanings in addition to a denotative meaning, and in conversations I look for connotative meaning (not only of words, but also of phrases, sentences, ideas, and body language). To me, this complex interplay of connotation is one of the things that makes language beautiful. The joy I get from reading, writing, and conversing, comes from understanding the layers of implication. These layers, for me, make conversation not just a bare exchange of facts, but also an attempt to create beauty with one’s words.

I understand, partly from reading your post, that not everyone does this, and that those who do look for implications do so to different degrees. This is something I will have to look out for in the future, because I don’t want to read meanings that aren’t there. And I can see how a conversation between two people who see two different layers of meaning could become muddled and confused from too much over-analysis.

I hope I haven’t stated my case too strongly. I just want to make it clear that reading layers into a conversation can be an entirely innocent and unmanipulative action.

Mary E. Zimmer in ‘Creating and Re-creating Worlds with Words: The Religion and Magic of Language in the Lord of the Rings’ in ‘Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader’ edited by Jane Chance, writes that in Entish: “‘real names’ are not arbitrary, but instead ‘tell you the story of the things they belong to’.” (Lord of the Rings). The Ents’ name for the Orcs is given – in abridged form – as: “‘evil-eyed-blackhanded-bowlegged-flint-hearted-clawfingered-foulbellied-bloodthirsty, morimaite-sincahonda.’ This, however, is not their ‘full name’, which is coextensive with their existence and thus ‘as long as years of torment’.” (Lord of the Rings).

She quotes from ‘An Introduction to Elvish’ by Jim Allan et al: “Entish may have lacked anything that may be called a common noun, for Ents would be able to take the time and use the complexities of their own tongue to describe every object and every person in a way that would, in effect give it a distinct proper name of its own.”

Kathryn W. Crabbe writes in ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition’ that “The language of the Ents is characterized by the translator as ‘slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel shades and distinctions of tone and quality.'”

Treebeard told Merry and Pippin that it takes a very long time to say anything in his language, “because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”

He then says “a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burume”, which Tolkien describes in Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings as “the only extant (probably very inaccurate) attempt to represent a fragment of actual Entish.” Treebeard says “that is part of my name for it; I do not know what the word is in the outside languages: you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the Sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world.”

Ents loved to string together Elvish words in Ent-fashion, as in Treebeard’s name for Lothlorien: “Laurelindorenan lindelorendor malinornelion ornemalin…Taurelilomea-tumbalemorna Tumbaletaurea Lomeanor”, which are Quenya words.

Tolkien explained in a letter dated 8 June 1961 that “Treebeard was not using Entish sounds on this occasion, but using ancient Elvish words mixed up and run together in Entish fashion.” (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter).

Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden on 7 June 1955 that he did not consciously invent Ents. “And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the ‘unconscious’ for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through.” (Letters).

He wrote in a letter dated 4 May 1958 that “a single word in human language (unlike Entish!) is a short-hand sign, & conventional.” (Letters).

Basically, I was there for moral support, and I had some generally related but impersonally unrelated questions for the doctor about this friend’s condition. I just wanted to know some of the details about a certain surgical procedure I’d heard described different places, and I thought the doctor would be the best one to provide them. I couldn’t find the answers online, and I thought that would be a great time to pick the doctor’s brains and get some real insight into an intriguing subject for me.

I waited till the end of the visit, then asked the doctor about this type of surgery… and I got some really interesting information back. Fascinating… I had no idea that the internal organs interacted that way… Way cool to find out (for me, anyway)!

The only problem was, my friend became convinced that I was “setting her up” for surgery, and she’s highly surgery-phobic. I have spent the last few days trying to calm her down — and since I’m pretty nearly her only support during this medical situation, we’re both feeling like we’re on thin ice.

She typically engages in this multi-layered talk that is full of inflection and innuendo and insinuation… I can’t follow her, half the time, and I tend to just smile and nod. But lately, my sensory issues have been just maddening, and my communication has been way off, so I just don’t have the patience to sort through the labyrinth that she creates around the simplest of sentences. I just can’t follow, and when I ask for clarification or I try to get clear, she says I’m attacking her and starts to yell.

It’s just not good.

The thing too, is that she doesn’t take my Asperger’s very seriously, and she’s one of these people who says I’m just not trying. I’m just not making an attempt. And she says I just am not aware of how mean I sound. I honestly don’t intend any such thing — I literally just want to get clear about things, but she interprets that as aggression.

I’m at an impasse, here. It’s maddening. But there it is.

I guess I’ll just have to get more sleep, and see if I can find some more reliable information about Asperger’s that she can hear. She’s also not open to “heady” info, so that complicates things even more.

Maybe I can find a picture book or something…

I really don’t know. I wish I could offer some more insight into how to deal with this, but I’m stumped.

“No wonder you have such an eccentric culture: none of your words have their own meanings. You have to look up one word to understand another. It never ends.”

I always got stuck at the fact that if the name of a thing was actually a huge long story about the thing, then each word in the story must be a huge long story, and each word in that story must be a huge long story, and… if you took it as literally as I did, it’d be infinite, you could never get done saying in Entish what in English would be a single word.

And thus, the Ents never seemed to speak what Entish was literally described as, but they did certainly appear to speak what Tolkien conceived Entish as.

Not being a linguist, nor as thorough a Tolkien scholar as you — did Tolkien ever tackle the recursion problem? Did any of his readers ever ask that question somewhere where he answered it?

After my realization that I was an Aspie a few years ago, and learning that there are all these other levels of meaning for most people, I suddenly feel blessed to have a better understanding of why I’m missing out on things, but still frustrated at how hard it is to get myself to understand all those other layers of meanings and to actually engage in interactions on those non-literal levels.

The very interesting idea that “there are unspoken assumptions behind *all* communication just because of the nature of language” is new to me.

Ents were able to speak in Entish.