I had the great pleasure of talking with Tech Support about the graph I shared on July 10th:

Tech Support made a few interpretations –

• Clearly Bilbo’s native language of Westron is perfectly suited to hobbit life and has many specific words relevant to the Shire and the hosting of tea-parties that English simply can’t translate and hyphenated words must do to cover the inadequacy.
• British English is plenty concerned with hunger and sogginess and dimness, so the Mirkwood scene was directly translatable into common English words.
• He hazards a guess that Westron is agglutinative, that it is a more parochial and conservative language than a language that has reached the “modern” stage.

Shout-out to Mark Rosenfelder whose Language Construction Kit moved Tech Support from actively resisting the conventions of grammar (as nine-year-olds are wont to do) to giving Mama grammar lessons so she can do her thesis work.