Question

Elbrethil #1057

Hello, I just had a few questions and was hoping someone would be able to answer them.

  1. In a lot of the “elvish phrasebook” sights, I see a lot of words that don’t show up as existent on this website. Such as “agórer” and “allen”. I was wondering if those words were actually real words and existed in elvish.
  2. When speaking elvish do you say the words like you would in English or do you have to rearrange them to be proper elvish?

Thank you for taking your time to read and answer my questions.

Elaran #1061

1 - Just like we cannot find "did" in an English dictionary (unless it is listed alongside "to do"), Sindarin's agor "did" (agórer "they did") as the past form of car- "to do" does not appear in dictionaries as well. This does not make agor any less real than "did". Both Quenya and especially Sindarin change the forms of words depending on their roles and such. This makes it so that words which appear in phrases are seemingly non-existent in dictionaries, because only the base forms can be found.

2 - If you mean to ask whether "Elvish" (which actually refers to more than one language) has its own grammar, the answer is a resounding yes. Both Quenya and Sindarin have numerous intricacies that distinguish them from other languages, as the first answer demonstrated. Hence it is unwise to approach the languages with only a dictionary. A dictionary by itself can help neither for making names nor for forming sentences by itself, such an approach is bound to yield inaccurate results.