Comments by Elaran
These are the 10 posts of 195 by Elaran.
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Account “Aldaleon”
Aldaleon's profile page is not the right place to discuss this, but I will reply here so that you would see it.
I have reviewed and rejected your proposed contributions. Though while doing so, I pressed enter too soon by mistake. About your "fëran = void" proposal, I was saying that neologisms are not made up out of thin air, instead they are based on attested roots and cognates, and your proposal does not have any such support. I am not sure what you mean by "real" but "fëran" is certainly not an attested (i.e. created by Tolkien, or simply "real") word.
I should add that "ë" is not used between two consonants in Tolkien's Quenya orthography, it should simply be "feran" (the word is still "fake" however). Your name is also using it, but Quenya does not allow "ei" as a diphthong either.
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Words for geometrical shapes
There is naith which Tolkien used both as "angle" and "triangle" from the root NEK "narrow". A clearer word for the triangle is nelthil (lit. "three-point(s)"), and based on that the square would be can(ad) + till, which can either be (old compound) *cannil or (new compound) *candil. Perhaps "turned square" could work as "diamond, lozenge", which I would translate as *perchandil, with the initial element *pern (cf. Q. querna "turned").
In other cases I also provide a more literal translation but I doubt that the Elves would call that particular shape a "diamond shape", but they could relate it to their heraldry. And perhaps "heraldry shape" can be translated as *tangant "token-shape".
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Sindarin Calendar
The most accurate Tolkien calendars website has language options but its goal does not concern the languages (unlike your question, I think). And since Tolkien did not provide Sindarin forms of all the Quenya terms, some words remain as Quenya even with the Sindarin option. For example Q. enderi "middle-days" remains untranslated because Tolkien did not provide the Sindarin cognate (which would have been *enedhoer).
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Translation into Sindarin
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Question about Sindarin
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Translation into Sindarin
Because it is a poem and I translated it in prose form, no rhyme or anything else. It may be an accurate translation but is not a beautiful one. And a longer text means a greater chance for its (even strictly "non-neo") elements to become obsolete with a new publication of Tolkien's notes, which is not at all ideal for a tattoo. Meanwhile there are no risks on our part with simply offering a Tengwar transcription, hence my suggestion.
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Translation into Sindarin
@Leo Newmark: As you have joined Discord, we have already discussed the problems in private, and I provided an attempt of my own so I am skipping it here.
@Selina Kyle: If you could pick which stanza(s) you would like from here, I can provide a Tengwar transcription with English (rather than a translation) for that. This is the safest option since Tolkien's notes on his languages are still being published, so even what we deem to be a correct translation today can turn out to be incorrect (as it happened often in the past) and become obsolete, which is definitely not ideal for tattoos.
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Translation into Sindarin
@Brad Benjamin: I do not understand why you shared that translation if you do not like it. As for your criticisms, it is a very old translation, written when there was very little published information on Sindarin, and it has "bizarre grammar" because it is a poem and the author tried to achieve a rhyme. And it does have a few neologisms but is not riddled with them. Forms like verai can be explained with ease, that particular one is the lenited plural of bara "eager", and its plural has that strange form because of its origin as [BARAS > barasa > baraha > barah > bara], and the plural goes [barasi > barahi > berehi > bereih > beraih > berai].
@Leo Newmark: I am sorry to say that your translation is very problematic. So much so that pointing out each problem would turn this message into a wall of text. In such cases I would usually skip to offering an alternative but I do not have time for that either since the poem is rather long (longer than two stanzas). I strongly recommend joining Vinyë Lambengolmor to familiarise yourself more deeply with the language.
@Seline Kyle: Unfortunately there are no (and perhaps never will be) any proper translations of the poem. If you could share why you need the translation, we could find other ways to help. For example, if you simply wish to have it written with Tengwar (aka the Elvish Alphabet) for an image or perhaps a tattoo, that can be arranged without a translation, since Tengwar can basically be used with all languages.
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Tolkien's word "leithian" and associated forms (e.g., "leithia," "leith")
I would agree with Röandil but I should also share this from Tolkien's earlier works: Sindarin's draft form "Goldogrin" had leithia- as...
G. laith(r)a-, v. “to let slip, lose, mislay, forget; (intr.) to be lost”
And of course, we cannot trace Tolkienian words back to real languages, but there are certainly a few inspirations, and this seems to be one of them. Another one that I recently noticed was Proto-Germanic *auzi "dawn" (Old Norse ?aur) which we see in Q. aurë (former root form "auri-") & S. aur "day".
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MAJOR UPDATE on "The King's Letter"
Unfortunately, I think that your doubting yourself is very much on point. Because the first rule of thumb when it comes to Tolkien's languages is to understand that no one neither is nor can be "fluent" in either Quenya or Sindarin, not even with a lot of fan extensions in mind. We simply lack too much information, and although Tolkien's notes are still being published, I doubt that we will ever know enough to become fluent.
That brings me to another important point: As Tolkien's notes are still being published, we keep learning that either our theories (which we use to "fill in the blanks" to a degree) are wrong, or Tolkien changed his mind on what he himself used at some point. In other words, any courses or lessons that fail to incorporate all of the information from the newest publication (and all previous ones) become partially or fully obsolete.
So, for example, even if a person used to be very knowledgeable with Sindarin before 2007, we would have a hard time acknowledging that today, as we now know a lot more. As for your question, yes, it should be "I Berian".
