The Sindarin Conversation Thread

[kaelln]

My (probably incompetent) attempt:
Im aphad yrch Ettenmoors annûn an Evendim emyn, forn Fornost, harad na annui falas Evendim ael. Yrch thia an Michel Delving.

Literal:
I follow orcs Ettenmoors west toward Evendim hill, north Fornost, south toward shore Evendim lake. Orcs appear toward Michel Delving.

What I actually intended:
I have tracked the orcs west from the Ettenmoors to the hills of Evendim north of Fornost, then south along the western shores of Lake Evendim. They appear to be headed toward Michel Delving.

[mcapanelli]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the more I read pedin edhellen the more I realize it's laid out a lot like English. It's just a matter of learning a few simple rules and then the words of course. Am I on the right track?

[Greg]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the more I read pedin edhellen the more I realize it's laid out a lot like English. It's just a matter of learning a few simple rules and then the words of course. Am I on the right track?

*Crosses fingers* If you're right, I might actually be able to manage this. If not, I'll be forever lost; I'm no linguist.

[Ernildir]

My (probably incompetent) attempt:
Im aphad yrch Ettenmoors annûn an Evendim emyn, forn Fornost, harad na annui falas Evendim ael. Yrch thia an Michel Delving.

Literal:
I follow orcs Ettenmoors west toward Evendim hill, north Fornost, south toward shore Evendim lake. Orcs appear toward Michel Delving.

What I actually intended:
I have tracked the orcs west from the Ettenmoors to the hills of Evendim north of Fornost, then south along the western shores of Lake Evendim. They appear to be headed toward Michel Delving.

Well that was a pleasantly extensive reply. I'm glad that you're jumping headlong into this translation business and making the best of the knowledge you have.

Here is how I would have translated your intended meaning into Sindarin. I'll combine the explanation of my translation with a critique of yours.

Aphannen i yrch annui uin Ettenmoors na i emyn Evendim forn Fornost, a harn athar i felais annui ael Evendim. Thiar anglennad Michel Delving.

I followed the orcs West of the Ettenmoors to the hills (of) Evendim North (of) Fornost, and South across the western shores (of) lake Evendim. They seem to approach Michel Delving.


Aphannen: a verb in the past tense, "I followed". You used two separate words, im aphad, "I follow". In Sindarin, we usually have the pronoun (such as "I", "you", "we") infused into the verb, so we don't need more than one word to express "I followed". To say "I follow", you would simply use aphadon. In the first person, all you need do is affix an "-n" to the root aphada-. Roots that end in "a" also have that "a" changed to an "o" in the first person. Then to get the past tense aphannen, "I followed", you would need to use a technique known as nasal affixation in this case. There are a few different ways to form a past tense, and we'll learn them as they come up. I'm not accustomed to forming past tenses myself, so explaining nasal affixation in my own words with the Gateway as my guide is going to be very helpful to me. Just to make sure we all know, the nasal sounds are "n" "m" and "ng". If the final consonant of a root is "t", "d', or "n", we'll use "n" as our nasal. If it is "p", "b", or "m", we'll use "m". If it is "k" or "g", we'll use "ng". In this case, the final consonant of our root aphada- is "d", so we're using "n". Anyway, basically, the "d" becomes a "nn" and the final "a" becomes an "e". So we have aphanne- as a sort of past tense root. We would want aphannen, "I followed", which we get through affixing the first person "-n". We could also produce aphannem, "we followed", aphanner, "they followed", and aphannel, "you followed.

I realize that nasal affixation for the formation of past tense is a bit of a complicated concept, and I do not at all have the process memorized, but let's not let it intimidate us. Just as every other aspect of the language, it should click in our minds at some point and come very naturally and familiarly to us, assuming we continue with this learning process.

okay... word number two.

i: a definite article, "the". A very common word. Just as a side note, although we do have the definite article i, "the" we don't have the indefinite article, "a". Like the word "of", we must also imply the existence of "a" in our sentences.

yrch: a plural noun, "orcs", we already knew that.

annui: an adjective, "western". I had a problem here. We both wanted to give the meaning "West" (adjective). You used the Sindarin noun annûn, "West". I used the Sindarin adjective annui western. Unfortunately, there is no middle ground. There is no Sindarin adjective that only means "West". So, basically, neither of our interpretations are completely correct in this case. I used "western" just because it was an adjective, but I would say it's fine to use either word in this case, because the ideal word doesn't exist.

uin: a combined preposition and definite article, "from the". Lots of combined words in Sindarin. I like them.

Ettenmoors: ... that's not Sindarin, so I'm not even going to talk about it. Nice place, though.

na: a preposition, meaning "to (in the sense of toward)" in this case.

i: our definite article, "the" again.

emyn: a plural noun, "hills". Plural of amon. Think of Amon Hen, "Hill of the Eye" and Emyn Beraid, "Tower Hills". In pluralization, "a" becomes "e" in nonfinal syllables, and "o" becomes "y" in final syllables.

Evendim: I wonder what language "Evendim" is from, and what its meaning is.

forn: an adjective, "North, Northern"

Fornost: our favorite stronghold of the North Downs, meaning "Northern Fortress".

a: a conjunction, "and".

harn: an adjective, "South, Southern". You used harad, which although it also means "South", it is, strictly speaking, a noun.

athar: a preposition, "beyond, across".

i: I wonder why I'm repeating words. Perhaps I should only define each word once.

felais: a plural noun, "shores". You used falas, which is the singular. Compare falas/felais and barad/beraid.

annui: our adjective, "western", again; this time used correctly. You used the same word. Just remember that adjectives follow the nouns that they modify. felais annnui rather than annui felais.

ael: a noun, "lake".

Evendim: I really need to stop repeating myself.

thiar: a third person plural verb, "they seem". You used yrch thia, "Orcs seem". Since we've already defined the Orcs, we don't need to repeat ourselves, so we can more correctly and easily use the combined pronoun and verb thiar, they seem. This was formed by affixing the plural third person "-r" to the root "thia-".

anglennad: a gerund, used in an infinitive sense, meaning "to approach". Just to define some terms here, a gerund is a noun formed from a verb. In English, these usually end with "-ing", such as "a teaching". In Sindarin, they end with "-d". The process is much the same as creating our pronoun/verb combinations. Simply affix the "-d" to the root and we have our gerund. Normally, anglennad would mean "an approaching", in other words an instance of an approach. In Sindarin, however, gerunds can also give the meaning of an infinitive form. The infinitive form is "to [verb]". In English, the infinitive form we want is "to approach". We can acquire this meaning through the use of a Sindarin gerund, so we have simply thiar anglennad, "they seem to approach".

Michel Delving: I wonder if I should just skip terms that aren't Sindarin in future explanations. :p What do y'all think? Would it be more understandable for me to go through every single word of an interpretation, whether Sindarin or not, or only go through the words that we need to know about?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the more I read pedin edhellen the more I realize it's laid out a lot like English. It's just a matter of learning a few simple rules and then the words of course. Am I on the right track?

*Crosses fingers* If you're right, I might actually be able to manage this. If not, I'll be forever lost; I'm no linguist.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If by "it's laid out a lot like English", you mean the syntax, or sentence structure is similar, then I would agree. I'm still working on mastering syntax myself, but it does seem that the general lay of things is quite similar to English, especially archaic English. Of course, we can use Sindarin with incorrect sentence structure and chances are nobody will even notice. And yes, there are a number of rules that we need to learn. As to whether or not they are simple, I suppose that's debatable. I don't really have an opinion on the matter. A number of rules, particularly consonant mutations (which we haven't gotten into yet) are a bit overwhelming, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't simple. It depends how we define simple, I suppose.

Greg, I expect that you are quite capable of learning Sindarin. I'm far from being a linguist myself, although I do enjoy language. Certainly, I would say you can manage this, but it would take a lot of time and commitment. Any language takes a lot of effort to learn. One advantage of Sindarin is that there are only about 2,000 words in the vocabulary, however, as opposed to the thousands upon thousands of real world languages. This, although it limits our speech, makes the learning process a little bit quicker. Anyway, if you have the time and commitment to join our endeavor here, I'd love you to participate. Theoretically, all of us will find certain aspects of the grammar a bit overwhelming, but we will grow accustomed to them as we continue to observe and use the patterns. Remember that all of us learned our native language as infants, simply through observation and trials of reproduction. We should be able to learn Sindarin in much the same way.




Just a small note. I am a student, and school has begun. I have much less free time than I did during the summer. Consequently, I will have less time to spend on this Sindarin adventure during the school year, but I still hope and intend to continue with the process as long as we're all still interested, whatever the pace may be.



--
Le hannon, a harthon trevedithal i ven agor.
~Eric

[kaelln]

Hi Ernildhir! I was wondering if you could help with a couple of phrases. I wanted "evil is as evil does" and got as far as um = evil and garo meaning something like does. So something like "um something something um garo".

Also, I wanted something like "evil ugly orc". So something like "Um something glamog". Glamog is the sense I wanted, as in "yelling one". I couldn't find ugly, but I found disgust "fuia-", but I have no idea how to turn that into "disgusting".

Help!

[Ernildir]

Hey, Kaelln. I'm sorry I haven't gotten around to responding to your last piece of Sindarin translation. School is pretty intense this year. I hope to come up with a reply eventually. :/

Concerning "evil is as evil does",

The word ûm does mean "evil", but it is actually an adjective, whereas in the phrase you're going for a noun would probably be best. Unfortunately, there is no noun that means "evil". In this case, you could either stick with ûm if you don't mind using an adjective, or look for a sort of synonym such as "the Enemy" or "darkness". Garo, independently, is in the imperative form and actually would be a command to hold or posses something. It could also be a mutation of caro (the c mutates to a g in some cases) which does mean "do! or make!", also being in the imperative. To get the third person singular, it would take the form câr, "he, she, or it does". So if you're going to stick with the adjectival evil, we'd have "ûm no be ûm cär" (no meaning "is" and be meaning "as". If you don't want to use the adjectival evil, you'll have to decide on a synonym to go for and use that instead of ûm.

Concerning "evil ugly orc",

Ûm would work fine for evil here, as an adjective is just what we need. For "ugly" we can use "hideous". There are two ways you could do that. Either use the adjectival prefix ul- or the adjective uanui, both meaning hideous. This would come out as either ullamog ûm (the "g" in glamog would vanish due to consonant mutation) or glamog ûm uanui.

I hope that helps.

[kaelln]

That's great! Thanks!

[kaelln]

Ok, how about, "Mor um no be mor um car"? The online Sindarin dictionary gives "mor" as "darkness, dark, night", so we have literally "evil dark is as evil dark does" with the adjectives and nouns switched around. Did I get the word order correct?

You know, if we're going to wind up with a usable language, there will have to be new words eventually. A good start would be to fuse existing words to create new ones. For example, something like "morum" for evil as a noun, done according to the rules, of course. The Rangers in the "Dies the Fire" series make new words for their version of Sindarin, but there is nothing in the text to indicate how they go about it. What do you think?

[Ernildir]

Yes, that would work just fine. The word order is correct.

I do agree that the creation of new words by the fusion of others is sometimes necessary, and I've had to do so in the past, but I like to avoid it unless it really needs to be done. It's interesting that this is performed in Dies the Fire. That book has been suggested to me at least a couple times already... I should get around to reading it sometime. I expect the author would have just followed patterns of Sindarin compound word formation.

[Taurthir]

This is why I never did french at school past compulsary classes. But in the glory of Tolkiens work and to be a true Ranger im going to give this a go. I just hope it doesnt get muddled as ive done writing english in elvish before and it hurts to memorize so much. Oh and just because I own it

Taur’ohtar: ?

[kaelln]

I'm not sure whether any of the "new" words show up in the text or not, it's just that the author mentions (through the characters) that the Rangers made up new words. The Rangers don't actually show up until the second book, "The Protector's War", which takes place ten years after the first book. I'm currently reading the seventh book in the series, "The High King of Montival", which takes place around 24 years after "Dies the Fire". I'm a big fan of the series, myself. It is fantasy- *not* science fiction, although it masquarades as such, and it becomes more and more fantasy as the series progresses. Tolkien is a huge influence on the characters in the books, although the writing is about as un-Tolkienlike as you could imagine. I found it a huge amount of fun, with witches and knights and cannibals, oh my! The cannibal attack in Dies the Fire reminds me of zombie movies; it was a surreal hoot! I wish there were one or two cannibal attacks per book, but sadly, there isn't. We just get that one, sigh. Anyway, I heartily recommend it, as long as you don't take it too seriously. There's stuff in there that could keep you up at night!

[Cimrandir]

Hi there,

How exactly does one go about learning this language? Is there a website or book? Where do I start?

Thanks,
TexasRanger36

[Ernildir]

Hi there,

How exactly does one go about learning this language? Is there a website or book? Where do I start?

Thanks,
TexasRanger36

There is a book: A Gateway to Sindarin, And a downloadable pdf course: Pedin Edhellen

They're both good resources.

Kaelln also has an online dictionary that he uses.

What we're doing here is using these resources as guides to perform translations as best we can. Theoretically, in consistently performing translations, we are slowly learning the grammar and vocabulary through repetition. You're welcome to join us, although I've recently slowed the process down somewhat by taking way too long to respond to Kaelln's last translation.

[Erucheb]

Here is how I would have translated your intended meaning into Sindarin. I'll combine the explanation of my translation with a critique of yours.

Aphannen i yrch annui uin Ettenmoors na i emyn Evendim forn Fornost, a harn athar i felais annui ael Evendim. Thiar anglennad Michel Delving.

I followed the orcs West of the Ettenmoors to the hills (of) Evendim North (of) Fornost, and South across the western shores (of) lake Evendim. They seem to approach Michel Delving.


. . .

--
Le hannon, a harthon trevedithal i ven agor.
~Eric

Mae g'ovannen, mellyn nín!

If I may, I would translate this rather as follows:

Aphannen annui i-yrch ed Rudaur 'ni Emyn Uial, for an Fornost. Coriel sen, hain aphannen dan harn ar i-thaeg annui Nenuial. Thiar gwod na Velegrond.

"I followed the orcs west(erly) out of Ettinsmoor to(wards) the hills of Evendim, north of [lit. 'for'] Norbury. Having done this( thing), I followed them again south(erly) beside the western bounds of Lake Evendim. They seem to (be) go(ing) to(wards) Michel Delving."

Aphannen -- same as Ernildhir; apha[-n-]n-en "follow-[past]-I".
annui -- western, west(erly). An adjective, here used as an adverb. Taken by analogy from Tolkien; "noro lim" = run swift(ly), where lim is an adjective functioning as an adverb. Note that "westerly" is simply "western" with the ending "-ly". In Sindarin, you don't need an ending; you just use the adjective.
i-yrch -- the-orcs.
ed -- out of, from.
Rudaur -- stop-affected form of "Rhudaur", the Trollshaws or Ettinsmoor. Rhu "troll, wicked being" + taur "forest, shaw".
'ni -- to the, at the, towards the.
Emyn Uial -- hills of twilight; Evendim Hills. Emyn "hills" + uial "twilight". Evendim is English for the twilight of evening (i.e., the evening dim).
for -- north. An adjective; not to be confused with forn, which means "northern".
an -- to, for. The "of" in "north of Norbury" is idiomatic; in Sindarin we don't know how it works, but I chose a dative construction like Welsh. For an Fornost = north for Norbury = (idiomatic) "north of Norbury". There is no fear of mistranslating this as "north to Norbury", since for an adverbial use the "full" adjectival form, forn, would be used. So we have Ech for an Fornost "You are north of [lit. 'for'] Norbury" versus Anweg forn an Fornost "You went north to Norbury".
Fornost -- Norbury (North-castle).
Coriel -- perfect participle of car-, "do".
sen -- this. An adjective, used substantively.
hain -- them, those, the things previously mentioned. As an object, it seems to procliticize on its verb (cf. "hain echant"). Glossed in PE17.
dan -- again.
harn -- southern, south(erly). Again, an adjective used as an adverb (and again, the English is also "southern + -ly = southernly < southerly").
ar -- beside. Hypothetical application as a preposition; only attested as a prefix.
i-thaeg -- the-bounds, limits, border. Nasal-affected from *in taeg. I prefer this to i-felais because falas denotes an open beach or wavefront along an ocean, not a smaller beach around a lake, and I know no simple word for "beach, shore".
Nenuial -- Lake Evendim. Nen "lake/water" + uial "twilight".
Thiar -- same as Ernildhir; thia-r "seem-they".
gwod -- the (extremely hypothetical) gerundial form of the (extremely irregular) verb gwa(e)- "go". Used in an infinitive sense, completing thiar: thiar gwod = "they seem to (be) going".
na -- to, towards, at.
Velegrond -- Michel Delving. Lenited from Belegrond. Michel means "great", and delving is, well, "delving". The name is pieced together from Tolkien's translations of Mickleburg (Belegost = great fort) and Dwarrowdelf (Hadhodrond = dwarf delving). Respectively, beleg means "great" and rond is (one word for) "delving".


~ No gevael, mellyn! No vael i-'wannad lín a lim i-'ovaned lín! ~

[Ernildir]

Well, that's certainly another way to do it! I like how you got the perfect participle in there.

Welcome to the forum, I should say. I'm always excited to meet another Sindarin enthusiast. Feel free to introduce yourself in the "general forum stuff" forum. I'm intrigued by your name. Eru (the One) + heb (some derivative of the verb hebi- "to keep")? Am I close? What meaning were you going for?

What Sindarin resources do you use, out of curiosity? At first glance, I don't disagree with anything in your alternate translation save the positioning of adjectives. According to Gateway, adjectives ought to follow the nouns they modify, save in a few poetic exceptions. Do you have a resource that says otherwise? Just curious.