Sindarin Verb Conjugations

Nessa Saurbasher #2626

Hi - I have a book called the Languages of Tolkein's Middle Earth that has a description on how to use Elvish verbs. I'm trying to conjugate the verb mad-, to eat, in the present 'you' form. The book says the only Sindarin verb ending with a pronoun attached is the 'I' form, but I was noticing the suffix for 'you', -d or -dh, on this page, and was wondering if I could simply add that on to make 'madad', you eat. If not, where else would you use that pronoun? Thanks!

Kinnuch #2627

Hi Nessa, in Sindarin the verb is divided into two types, one is end up with -a, we call them A-verb. While the verb like mad- is another type called Basic verbs. These kind of verbs, when adding pronoun suffix, need to add an interim -i-. Thus, when you mean 'I eat', you should say 'medin'.

As about the second person suffix, you should be awared that in Sindarin, there is a polite(formal) second person suffix and an informal suffix. The polite one has single form '-(o)l' and the plural one '-(o)dh', the informal one only has single form '-(o)g'.

Here the (0) means that when A verbs conjugate, the ending -a will transfer into -o, like verb gosta- 'to fear'→ gostol 'you(formal) fear'(but in the mad- situation we don't need to because Basic verbs do not have vowel endings).

One other question is that you may doubt that when mad- 'to eat'→medil 'you(formal) eat', why the stem vowel a changes into e. This is quite complicated. In linguistics, this is a phenomenon called Vowel Harmony, where different vowels influence other vowels and some shifts may happen. Tolkein called it I-affection, because those vowel shifts in Sindarin often happen due to the interim -i-.

I-affection changes all vowels in the syllables except the last one, and has rules below:

a,o→e (example: talan 'tree'→telain 'trees')

e,i,y stay as the same

u→y

some o(to be precisely, the o from ancient ā) stay as the same

aw→ew

So here mad- actually becomes medil when you say 'you eat', or medig 'you eat' when in informal conditions.

Gilruin #2632

That book of yours is unfortunately rather outdated, check out our recommended links and resources. Here is for example Paul Strack’s write-up on the Sindarin present.

@Kinnuch, talan is “flet, flat space, platform (in a tree)”, not “tree”, which would be orn or galadh.

If one is only interested in the i-affection results for the stem vowels of basic verbs, one can condense the list to:

  • a, o → e: sav- → sevin ‘I have’, nor- → *nerin ‘I run’.
  • e, i remain unchanged: heb- → hebin ‘I keep’, nidh- → nidhin ‘I will’.
  • If you encounter a basic verb with any other vowel, that’s at least suspicous.
Kinnuch #2634

@Gilruin, oh yes, talan is the platform in a tree not the tree itself, sorry about the mistake, I should replace the example with galadh→gelaidh

Nessa Saurbasher #2648

@Kinnuch @Gilruin Thank you both for these extremely helpful answers! Hopefully I'll translate everything right this time.

(Probably not. But we can hope.)