What is your opinion on neologisms?

Hello everyone!

As some of you might know, Parf Edhellen has changed a lot over the last couple of months. I have improved the user experience, added public flashcards, fixed bugs and introduced some new functionality. I have been listening to your feedback and focused what little time I have on the things I believe would have the biggest, positive impact.

Now, I am at a point where I am considering whether to change my policy on neologisms. To this day, I have intentionally restricted neologisms to words "established by the community." But, as some of you might point out, there is currently no general consensus around what "established" really means. And seeing the discourse at public forums and Discord channels (Vinye Lambengolmor in particular), it appears to me that the public is becoming increasingly interested in extending the vocabulary of Tolkien's languages.

Historically, I have held back against this development because I have seen how wrong similar initiatives have been in the past. As an example, the authors behind the Elvish in the Lord of the Rings movies really dove deep into the material available at the time the movies were made, and produced famous neologisms like **hannon le "thank you" and **I amar prestar aen "the world is changed". While you can make a case for hanna- as a derivative from √KHAN, neither neologism has aged very well.

More material has since been released from the Bodelain Library through publications like Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, but there are still many gaps in our understanding of the phonetics and overall structure of Tolkien's beloved languages. So I have so far decided to hold back due to the arguably capricious and changeable nature of neologisms.

Now, however, I am curious what you think. Should I change the process, and allow more neologisms on the website? Should there be a set of curated authors who we trust, or should I trust all of our members to contribute quality neologisms?

I am curious of your opinion.

Thanks in advance,

Leonard

I will offer two neologisms here:
1 - Neo-Quenya: solya- v. "to wave, hail, greet"
This is a cognate of S. suila-, which in my theory comes from "ᴹ√SOL+jā-" and developed like gleina- from LANjā (hence it is suila- rather than [solja- > solia- > sœlia- >] selia-, similar to how gleina- is not glenia-) thus the S. form shows the rare medial I-intrusion.

2 - Neo-Sindarin: ail adj. "all, every, each"
This is a cognate of Q. ilya, derived from √IL+jā [> elja > elia > eli > eil > ail] like MINjā [menja > menia > meni > mein] > main. The root can be found in the etymologies of both Quenya and Sindarin's attested words, and the phonetic development rules are established by many other adjectives of this form.

Words like ‽hanna- are created with the first approach, relying on assumptions rather than solid evidence, whereas the second approach yields such results that only a very late and currently unpublished note from Tolkien which rejects all of his own "-ai-" adjectives can invalidate. Thus, viewing both methods from the same perspective would either give way to more problematic words or hinder the progress of Neo-Elvish.

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.

As I'm nowhere near the big names everyone above me is: take or leave this at your will I'm just a dude.

I wholly support there being more neologisms on Parf Edhellen, but your fear of this site turning into a jumbled mess where someone unfamiliar with Tolkien's languages would end up looking at a search result and become bewildered by the mess. I'd suggest letting there be a few authors with the power to directly submit Neologisms and to assist (possibly) in the review process for community Neologisms. Looking through Eldamo's neologism lists there are several names that appear on the list repeatedly, but a few random ones from a few people in the crowd do show up. Another two quick things (no idea what it would be like to make/manage/deal with but if there were ways to A) make gloss descriptions a sort of "click to expand" style: that would remove some of the feared clutter, and B) make the form for submitting a neologism slightly different as so provide a more inflexible "here's how the word is derived" style could make descriptions more uniform and consistent: several times I see a neologism here and have to cross reference to Eldamo in order to gain a more complete sense of its derivation and how plausible it is.

A way of ordering search results based on merits of the Neologism would be helpful and would tie into Paul Strack's idea of the community voting up/down Neologisms based on merit. A logged in user could have the ability to do so same as giving thanks here in the discuss section. Trick is: it goes in with my earlier two comments as a means of creating more possible headache: community members might upvote a neologism just because it sounds cool or it has the exact phrasing they were looking for rather than upvote it for its actual plausibility. Limiting it to - as aforementioned - logged in users may help with this, but even then I would have misgivings.

Here's to hoping I haven't left a mess,

Gondrembor's son

Salve

So I too am no where near as well informed on Tolkien’s languages as those above me, but I will still offer my humble opinion in hope that it will further better the community and this website.

I think the advance in quantity of neoglisms on Parf Edhellen would be a great way to open doors for those less confident or skilled at deriving new words, as they would be able to learn the skills etc, even if it were through mistakes. I agree with Ríon that there should maybe be a few, trusted authors that can submit their neoglisms with out it being necessarily reviewed, and then look over and correct, maybe, those of others.

I look forward to seeing Parf Edhellen evolve and become even greater!

Nimlothiel

Hi,

indeed gathering neologisms in public dictionaries like Parf Edhellen and Eldamo is a good thing as it helps us build a strong NeoEldarin vocabulary (and some semblance of consensus around it :). As all, I would recommend them to be clearly marked and separately searchable. Also I would make it a condition for inclusion that the submitter/originator provides a clear etymologic/semantic explanation on how it was derived, even if it is a simple derivation and even if the explanation only takes four words.

Peer review is good and necessary. I am unsure about giving them weight according to the number of reviews done (would you give Helge's review a lesser weight just because maybe he only pops in once every few months and reviews the words that are somehow interesting to him?).

For the review mechanism I would suggest tagging the neologisms from a selection of pre-defined tags and rate them accordingly (if such a thing can be implemented programmatically). I am thinking of tags like "transparent derivation"; "easily understandable"; "fills vocabulary gap"; "attested form exists but can be used as synonym"; "derivation method unknown/questionable" (for old neologisms for which this is not available any more); "attested cognate exists"; "debatable construction" etc.

So neologisms could be classed like "debatable" or "obscure derivation" but at the same time "fills vocabulary gap", another one "transparent" but at the same time "attested alternative exists" etc.

Everyone,

Thank you so much for sharing your insightful opinions. I am currently churning out a larger update for Parf Edhellen's graphical user interface, and I will review your feedback in depth (and also in public formulate the intended strategy going forward) once I have completed the work I am currently doing.

For those curious, you can follow the work by observing the ts branch on Github.