Comments by Gilruin

These are the 10 posts of 226 by Gilruin.

  • David Salo's 'A Gateway to Sindarin'

    Hi @maia melian! The FAQ has a pretty comprehensive resource thread.

    In principle, you’d want to check for every claim, whether there are attested examples to support it, but this can ofc get arbitrarily time-intensive & complicated. A good first step would be to cross-check if Eldamo has something on the topic and check the claim there, the things there have better citations and are more current (also, check out Eldamo’s Sources page and keep in mind that the Gateway is from 2004).

  • Elvish from RoP — Season 2

    Elrond’s Battle-cry

    SDCC Trailer [3:18]

    gurth ‘ni chudath vín! “death to our foes!”

    View thread

  • Elvish from RoP — Season 2

    This is a thread to collect the bits and pieces of Elvish from Season 2 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power. See the thread for first season for more information.

    View thread

  • Contribution “Srag” by Númendil

    Thanks for contributing to Parf Edhellen!

    @Aldaleon, what is your opinion on recording Deutero-Black-Speech like this? Personally, I don’t think it would prove all that useful, but I wanted to ask.

    Gilruin · gilruin

  • Trying to add (sing. Perorch; pl. Piryrch) and (sing. Pertorog; pl. Pirtereg)

    Seconding Gwilithiel’s comments. Despite their use in MERP we will not record them in their ‘mistaken’ form. This lexicon tries to give a faithful account of Tolkien’s thoughts on his languages, not collect artefacts of their adaptation and alteration in the wider fandom.

    View thread

  • Contribution “Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!” by Gwilithiel

    Thanks for contributing to Parf Edhellen!

    This already looks quite good, only a couple of things left to fix before publishing:

    • There is something wrong with the translation in the gloss for the second verse. You have split “Ride now, ride now!” and “Ride to Gondor!”, which makes the translation switch from the top to the bottom of the gloss.
    • pothatha is a bit questionable, Sindarin tends to avoid double th/dh: Hadhathang → Hadhafang/Havathang, úthaeth → úthaes/úsaeth, so I would suggest ?pothasa (though this being a grammatical ending might make things more complicated?)
    • Lastly, I’d suggest to spell na ‘Ondor with a capital letter, that’s the usual practice for mutated proper nouns, cp. Caras i·Ngelaidh instead of Caras i·nGelaidh.

    Gilruin · gilruin

  • Contribution “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit - A Neologism” by Númendil

    Thanks for contributing to Parf Edhellen!

    There are a couple of grammatical problems still:

    • The locative of talan would be talamessë, because it has a stem talam- and requires a connecting vowel. Also talan is glossed ‘flat space, platform’ after LotR was written (cp. the wood-elven flets), so it might not still mean ‘ground’ after that.
    • The aorist form of har- is hare ‘stays’, its present ‘is staying’ is hára. The form hara does not exist for basic verbs.
    • ‘there’ in this sentence is a specific artefact of English grammar, it might not be the most natural way to express this in Quenya.

    Gilruin · gilruin

    View thread

  • Reconstruction of Gandalf's Westron name

    We know next to nothing about Westron. If we trust Lisa Star’s report from Tyalle Tyalliéva 17 about a Westron manuscript from Marquette, we have the following words:

    • NDER- > Q nér, S dîr; Adunaic narû vs. Westron rama ‘man’
    • AN- > Q anna, S ann; Adunaic *yô vs. Westron casto ‘gift’
    • TAM- > Q tamo, S tân; Adunaic tamar vs. Westron dramar ‘smith’

    This should serve to demonstrate that:

    • many Westron words, especially day-to-day words like ‘staff’ do not descend from only from Adunaic, but also from the local substrate languages.
    • Even those where one might assume an Adunaic influence like for dramar, the descent does not seem direct, because t > dr would be a very unusual sound change.

    In other words: We can’t really say.

  • Formal vs Informal mode from Superiors to Inferiors

    While it’s still dangerous to extrapolate from French, the situation for Sindarin might indeed be different from what I outlined for Quenya above. The only evidence we have though seems to be Glorfindel’s mae g(ī)‘ovannen to Aragorn.

    View thread

  • Formal vs Informal mode from Superiors to Inferiors

    @Gwilithiel where are you getting this from? If it’s your intuition about the usage of such pronouns in any real-world language you know, that’s not a particularly good source, the actual social implications of those basic pronominal concepts can vary greatly between languages.

    It depends a bit if you work in a -tye/-lye or a -(tye)/-lye/-tar paradigm.

    In CQ [= Classical Quenya, not Common Quenderin] tye had gone out of use except in colloquial lan­guage where it was used chiefly among kinsfolk, but also as an endearment (esp. between lovers). When used by par­ents to children there was nothing "imperious" about it – for children used tye to parents and grandparents etc. – to use the adult lye was more stern. Cf. tyenya ('my tye') dear kinsman. When Pippin used the form (the pronouns were borrowed from Quenya into Common Speech) to Denethor it was amusing because it was treating him as if he was Pip­pin's grandfather. (VT49/51)

    So from that we get:

    • lye is the default.
    • tye is a special marker of closeness, but is not usually used to emphasis social differences – Pippin got to keep his head for calling Denethor tye after all. That is however undoubtedly also connected to Pippins size.

    So I’d say variant (1) is definitely the default.

    Peregrin Took, for instance, in his first few days in Minas Tirith used the familiar for people of all ranks, including the Lord Denethor himself. This may have amused the aged Steward, but it must have astonished his servants. No doubt this free use of the familiar forms helped to spread the popular rumour that Peregrin was a person of very high rank in his own country. (LR50/1133)

    I would read this less as “nobles usually go around and tye anyone they meet”, but rather “That Pippin could even presume to have close ties to Lord Denethor must mean that he is some kind of lord, surely the Steward doesn’t have lowly friends”.

    I’d argue (2) is rude in both directions, presuming a closeness that there isn’t. Naturally socially superior individuals can get away with doing rude things more often, but from the description it doesn’t seem like it was a standard way to disrespect someone. The only contrary notion I could find is “two different pronouns for the 2nd person sg. (not pl.), the one imperious or familiar, the other polite” (PE17/135), but since this discusses commonalities between Quenya and Sindarin, this might primarily refer to the pre-Classical situation.

    (3) probably yes if they are very close friends.

    (4) On a formal occasion or if others might disapprove of the relationship perhaps still lye, in other contexts the situation feels a bit constructed.

    (5) as I read the quotes, tye needs at least a bit time. But with Elves there are of course things like forsight, osanwe, kinship of the fear and reincarnation, that could influence the percieved closeness to a persons dramatically in quite a short time.

    View thread