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!
Sindarin Verb Conjugations
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.
That book of yours is unfortunately rather outdated, check out our recommended links and resources.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:
@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
@Kinnuch @Gilruin Thank you both for these extremely helpful answers! Hopefully I'll translate everything right this time.
(Probably not. But we can hope.)