Comments by Gilruin

These are the 10 posts of 226 by Gilruin.

  • Contribution “You're lovely” by Aldaleon

    • vaniel isn't tagged as a perfect 2nd person.
    • máre is probably the adjectival plural of mára, not the noun.
    • né should be https://www.elfdict.com/wt/504557, not the verb.
    • I don't think antaina is an imperfect participle, if I'd need to assign a tense to it, I'd say it's aorist.

    @Vyacheslav Stepanov how does nás alasse "there is joy" work? Shouldn't the gloss be "it is joy" (or alternatively the Quenya be e' alasse)?

  • Does anyone know where I can learn Khuzdul(Dwarvish) grammar?

    We know next to nothing about Khuzdul grammar compared to Sindarin or Quenya, but here are three pretty good analyses of what’s available to start with:

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  • Can one omit the relative pronouns i/ya in Quenya?

    Very probably not. While this phenomenon isn’t restricted to just English, it is not common enough to suspect it by default and as far as I know we have no reason to suspect it in Quenya (i. e. examples, descriptions....). There is an abudance of participles though that can usually archive similar effects:

    • Eldar coitaila Veleriadesse Valariandesse ohta carner Moricottonna “The Elves living in Beleriand made war against Morgoth”
    • Arcastar estane macil mahtaina ló Túrin Ñuranga “Arcastar called the sword wielded by Túrin Gurthang”

  • Elvorals

    She stated he said his father had trifled and made notes concerning "winged Elves, (Avariels) and thought about writing on them but never pursued that area. It was from our conversations that I began writing this story.

    I have of course only very limited information to work from here and certainly do not want to imply that only things I personally know can be true, but it seems to me rather unlikely that Tolkien indeed imagined those things like you say. For one all the names you have mentioned in this thread or in your introduction can be found in Forgotten Realms:

    If the Tolkien Estate would believe to have any claim on even some of those names, hell would break loose on Wizards of the Coast and that evidently didn’t happen.

    Also, the names don’t add up when analysing their relations to what we know he did imagine about his languages, e. g. let’s take Avariel

    -iel is attested as a feminine suffix of some kind between 1917 (GL/45) and December 1959 (PE17/23), it is required to explain S Gilthoniel, Tinúviel. Alternatively the suffix present here is -riel “crowned maiden”, which is necessary to explain S Galadriel. Ava(r)- depending on the language can be reasonably assumed to be from the roots √ABA, √AWA or √AMA (v was not a consonant present in the primitive language). √ABA is used for “refuse” since the 1930s (Etym/AB) and is tied to the can name Avari “the Refusers”. √AWA is used for “away” from 1913 onwards (QL/33 - PE22/167) and while not directly necessary for any legendarium name in particular, it is required for the Namárie line Sí vanwa ná, Romello vanwa, Vaimar and was extensively discussed in Quendi & Eldar, so it seems fairly stable nevertheless. √AM is a root for “up”, again remarkably consistant from 1913 onwards (QL/30 - PE17/146, 157) and is needed to explain all the Amon Sûl/Hen/Lhaw/... hill names.

    So the best we can get from this √AM + -riel “up-crowned lady”, which is not a particularly reasonable name for a tribe of Elves; for one, does it imply that they all were women? (Also this name would require Tolkien to have imagined a language that is essentially Sindarin minus i-mutation, but that is at least not completely impossible). You might counter that Tolkien could have changed his mind about some of those things, but to the extent the names require it, this seems highly unlikely. We know that Tolkien 1) tends not to abandon roots that have survived from the Qenya & Gnomish Lexicons through the Etymologies and then into LotR in his later essays, 2) tries to keep forms published in LotR or relevant to his Silmarilon manuscripts of the time viable when changing his linguistic conceptions (e. g. PE17/41), and 3) had some names he liked/felt were important that he worked his languages around. Most of the names we are talking about would require a change in multiple of those well attested, fixed-in-place roots to an extent we have never seen in any other document. Also this would mean that neither Christopher Tolkien nor the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship felt like it was necessary to write in any of their publications that “oh, btw Dagor Dagorath was abandoned for flying Elves in some late document that changes a previously unseen amount of well established things about his languages and cosmology and also apparently some D&D designers gained access to the names in this draft – we must assume telepathically”.

    gilruin · Gilruin

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  • Elvorals

    Tolkien never wrote any books about them. He only mentioned them in his later unpublished works.

    Well, all four people who have responded to you don’t remember reading about them and couldn’t find them in the classical indices, so I believe a reference is in order.

    • If you mean a posthumously published work like HoMe, PE, etc., then a reference to a page number should be easy anyway.
    • If you are referring to a completely unpublished work, then it would need a shelf number in Marquette/Bodleian, but since the Tolkien Estate controls the access to those collections, I don’t assume you got there.

    Queen Faenya, both Sindarin and Quenya are acceptable as she was fluent in all elvish languages

    Just for your information, Faenya is not a possible word/name/sound sequence in either Quenya (where ae does not occur) or Sindarin (where all final vowels were lost).

    Vedui and thank you for your reply.

    Vedui is the soft mutated form of medui “last(ly)” (and has no business being mutated in this context). I’m bringing this up because I don’t think you actually meant to reply to Aldaleon with something like “finally (you answered)” but something in the spirit of the following reply “and thank you for your reply”. There used to be a group of role players called the ‘Grey Company’ that created a patchwork from Tolkien’s languages to use in their role playing by looking at famose phrases from Tolkien an setting their first ideas about them as true; from Ai na vedui Dúnadan! Mae govannen! “Ah! at last, Dúnadan! Well met!”, that vedui means “greeting”. That is wrong (the easierst counter would be to look up Tolkien’s explanation of it in “Words, Phrases & Passages from the Lord of the Rings”, Parma Eldalamberon 17, p. 16), but it continues to show up on the internet in some places. Aril Tel quessir also looks suspiciously like Grey Company Elvish, so I would again ask you to link where you got that from, so we can check the resource & explain better. I don’t doubt that wherever you got those from claims to represent accurate Tolkienian Elvish, but the accuracy of resources varies widely and what one can find on certain websites is more akin to a telephone game.

    @Gwilithiel The tanslation looks good to me, assuming that one agrees with the G → S Neologisms. A couple of points I would change though:

    • di chyry – I assume that’s di + in + curu-pl? That might work (but contrast what you did with v’i), I think in this case we can get away with just leaving off the article, with the following genitive helping to keep the phrase determined.
    • a gû >> a chû “and bow”, with sibilant mutation a(h), which is our latest attested version for “and”, I believe.

    Also one could arguably misread Orthoratha i thrû ennor Avariel gwanos edhellen as “the evil of Middle-earth will conquer an Avariel of elven birth”, but I like the inversion, so how about Orthoratha thrúath ennor/thrû ennorath to keep it visible that the object is mutated?

    gilruin · Gilruin

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  • what does the * mean when I see it in the word dictionary?

    Or more detailed from the about page:

    Unverified or debatable glosses

    You'll sometimes encounter the symbol *, usually together with a warning. These exist to inform you that the gloss originate from a source which might be outdated or questionable. This is unfortunately fairly common because linguistic material on Tolkien's languages are only sporadically made available to the community; initiatives have the time to arise and gradually wither between publications. Hiswelókë, which haven't been updated for years, is nonetheless still excellent, and one of the prominent sources to date on the Sindarin language.

    Would it be a mistake to trust glosses from an outdated source? Probably not. I recommend you to try to find another source which corroborates the proposed translation.

    This also occures for some perfectly fine words, just because Parf Edhellen has no perfect way to filter them out.

  • Contribution “múltha-” by Sámo Collarwa

    Long vowels before clusters shortened at various times, first in Common Eldarin, so I don’t think the ū would stay long for long enough to participate in ō > ū

    eldamo.org

    The most likely development path to me is mōltā- > molta- > moltʰa- > molθa-

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  • dwarvish translation of "You hew upon that one."

    Unfortunately we don’t have enough information from Tolkien about Khuzdul to form such a sentence.

  • sindarin translation of "He has the favour of the Lady." ??

    I’d say sâf list e cheruin, for more information about Sindarin check out our Links & Resources.

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  • sindarin translation of "Help him!" ?

    I would suggest natho den! (natho den ! or natho den ! in Tengwar). It’s the imperative of natha- (which is attested later than gresta-) + the object form of te ‘he/she’, which I think is better supported than e.