Comments by Paul Strack
These are the 10 posts of 80 by Paul Strack.
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Gloss “mëar” by Ardalambion (Helge Fauskanger)
Based on its etymology and related words this is likely one “gore” in the “blood and guts” sense.
See, for example: eldamo.org
This early word is related to an early character Measse, who was a goddess of battle.
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Version 0.7.0 of Eldamo
Details here.
I may add Parf Edhellen to the sites where I cross-post this announcement, but right now it feels a bit weird, so I want to see how people react first.
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Account “Aldaleon”
Aldaleon, this might be a bit weird, but I want to ask if I can post notifications on new Eldamo releases on the Parf Edhellen forums. I'm trying to figure out how to let people know about new releases after G+ dies.
In theory Eldamo is a "competing" Elvish dictionary, but as I see it, Eldamo and Parf Edhellen are complementary: they do different things. Eldamo is mostly about the raw data, while Parf Edhellen has a large number of community features that I will never add to Eldamo.
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Community update
While we are wishing for community features ... it might be nice to have an RSS feed or more comprehensive email notification system for the Discussion threads on Parf Edhellen. When G+ goes down, this site might become the most active forum for Elvish discussions.
For example, right now you can only subscribe to individual threads. You might allow automatic subscription to all new threads.
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Community update
When you get around to implementing neologisms, it would be helpful to provide a list somewhere that shows neologisms by order of creation, to support the review process. I’ve done something similar in Eldamo and found it very helpful.
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Quenya or Sindarin? (Or Noldorin?)
Of the two, I generally find that Quenya is easier for beginners. It is a more “complete” language in the sense that we know more about it and have a larger vocabulary for it. It’s grammatical rules are more straightforward.
Sindarin has a complex set of sound mutations that can be difficult for English speakers to learn, unless they are familiar with real-world languages that have similar rules, like Welsh. However, within Tolkien’s world, Sindarin was used more commonly than Quenya, being the ordinary daily speech of most Elves of Middle Earth. Sindarin appears more often in Peter Jackson’s movies, for example.
So I generally recommend Quenya first if you just want to learn any Elvish language, but if you want to role play or write fan fiction in Middle Eath, Sindarin is more practical, since Quenya is an ancient scholarly language rarely spoken, like Latin in the real world.
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Gloss “-a” by Eldamo Import
There is another adjectival suffix -ya, and aya in Quenya’s phonetic history generally developed into ëa. So a + a is probably a + ya > ëa
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What is your opinion on neologisms?
I am of the opinion that you should allow neologisms on Parf Edhellen. The reality is that the words that Tolkien left us are nowhere close to forming a functional language, and neologisms are necessary for communicating even very rudimentary concepts.
While your concerns about possible conflicts with unpublished material is valid, if you take a “wait and see” approach, you will probably be waiting forever. It will be decades before all the unpublished material becomes public, and some of it may never be published.
Of the two options, I would prefer as more open approach to incorporating neologisms. I think you should set some minimum standards for including neologisms, namely it should be justified in some way and have an etymology. Have a more rigorous standard such as a list of approved neologism creators might produce a more coherent result, but also risks petering out when the approved authors lose interest and move on to other things.
The reality is that it is unlikely you will get community agreement on what is and is not a valid neologism. For example, I disagree with Elaran’s derivation of NQ. solya-, and prefer Ben Shapiro’s existing neologism NQ. suila-. While an open policy on neologism creation would almost certainly result in conflicting words, you would not be any worse off than you would be if you limited yourself to Tolkien’s own words, which are already full of contradictions.
That said, I also think that some kind of community rating system, where people could “up vote” or “down vote” neologisms, would be a helpful and fair way of building consensus on “good” vs. “bad” neologisms.
EDIT: I just realized that Elaran gave solya- as an example of a “poorly supported” neologism.
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Pleonasm after "you" (Quenya)
There is a difference between “bad English” and “colloquial English”. Saying “how do you people do this?” is colloquial English. It’s not “wrong” it’s just less formal. Saying “how people liking you are be doing such things” is bad English. It sound like you are a foreigner who doesn’t really know how to form English sentences. Or more accurately, like a foreigner applying the idioms of your native language to English.
Since we know so little about ordinary daily speech in Quenya, most attempts at “colloquial” or “informal” Quenya are going to sound like “bad Quenya”, not “informal Quenya”.
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Pleonasm after "you" (Quenya)
We don’t really have a large enough sample size to answer questions like this. We only have a few hundred attested phrases, barely enough to puzzle out basic grammar, much less idiomatic usage.
What I’ve seen is that, in practice, most people lean on the idiomatic usage of their native languages when writing Neo-Quenya.