In addition, Tolkien invested a large amount of time and energy creating languages, especially the Elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin, both of which appear, sometimes untranslated, in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had a private theory on the way that the sounds of a language convey a feeling of beauty; he felt pure pleasure in the vocabulary of the Gothic language, and indeed of Welsh. Shippey explains that He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognise language 'styles', could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgements based on phonology. Thus Tolkien has Legolas say, on hearing Aragorn singing The Lament of the Rohirrim in Rohirric (the language of Rohan), which Legolas does not understand: