Learn Quenya

There’s a new Yahoo group forming specifically for beginners interested in studying Tolkien’s languages:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfschool/

May change. It’s too idiomatic to English in my ear, and my grammar sucks.

lanne Miruvorailo* :: minya anna rimba annaron Estel antane nin mí coiva i loa 6002 ::

*I had to come up with something in place of Amritsar, which I think would require an extra “a” in between the “mr” if transliterated into Quenya, and also to be consistent with having changed the name of the giver. Since “Amritsar” means “lake of nectar”, I smushed together “míruvore” and “ailin’/ailo”.

With typing it’s not so bad, but calligraphy? Always forgetting the bar on malta. Bad student! No lembas!

You know, I’d completely and utterly forgotten that this site is probably highly googlable, and I realized, to my utter horror today, that anyone looking for my Quenya -epesse- cilmesse [agh, didn’t catch that] on said search engine lands results that consist almost entirely of my entries on this site. (Oh right, story behind my horror—my ex knows my Quenya name from another site and if ever he got curious as to what it meant he would immediately find me here)

I was this close to deleting my account but decided instead to change my user name here to Tindómiel (why does 43T hate special characters???) and pray the googlybots disseminate that instead of the one that starts with an “m”.

I hadn’t expected it to be a rare name. Then again, all attested examples of the -mir ending are for male names (not that this bothers me in the least) and most guys would prefer something a little more gallant than “muina” (hidden, secret) to tack onto the front of that. But if there were ever a succinct way to sum me up, “hidden jewel” has to be it.

As an aside, practicing Quenya is forcing me to learn the alt-code shortcuts for special characters…

This really doesn’t belong here, but somehow “learn to write in Black Speech Mode” doesn’t seem like a fitting goal. 8)

One thing I’ve found is that if you start off learning Tengwar in Quenya mode, it’s really hard to get used to writing tehtar in the correct place in any other Mode. So I found out when planning the inscription on my saber handle in Black Speech:

Mornacil, ghaashmakul krimpuga Muinu, Gothbuurz

Meaning “Mornacil, a firesword (lightsaber) bound to Muin, a Dark Lord”. I’m going to have to triple-check the letters before I engrave it onto my hilt…

• Yes, I know there’s CBS and DBS and you can’t really tell them apart with so few attested examples. Also, there’s no attested word for “sword” in DBS, CBS, or Valarin, so I borrowed from Sindarin to come up with “makul”. I did try to minimize the amount of making-things-up that I’d have to do for this, but it’s very hard not to.

• Yes, I’m crazy. Couldn’t you tell already?

Well, at least the Tengwar lessons are sticking. My friend was wearing a shirt featuring a Middle Earth map done Yahoo Maps style with a route mapped from the Shire to Mount Doom (how cool are my friends, no?) and I was bothered by the fact that the Mapquest logo was done in Tengwar with númen standing in for the “m” sound. Is there an English mode where this is done, or is it a typo? I’m guessing typo. It was also written tengwa-to-tehta, as Quenya is, which I’m not used to seeing for English modes. Pheer the nerd.

In other news I’m also re-reading LOTR and I’m about halfway through TTT. Wish I could bring that into the lab. I should see if someone has the text online—I always have little bits of downtime but it’s a pain in the ass to go out and have to come back in and gown up again.

Why neo-Quenya, you ask? Because of the tengwar. Well, that’s how it all started. I’ve always had a thing for fonts and codes and writing systems and as a wee bairn I used to pass notes in class written in hieroglyphics and runes. I would have used an English mode for Tengwar sooner had I been paying attention long enough to realize how seriously Tolkien had fleshed out his languages. Now that I know, I’m hooked, not just on the writing but on the language itself. I want to be able to speak it too, and to have fellow geeks (hopefully) be able to understand some of it.

I’ve downloaded Fauskanger’s (oops, I thought that was Salo’s) tutorials and I’m also using Wikibooks’ articles as a quick reference. I’ll be adding the Etymologies and other bits of Tolkien’s writings on his languages to my library shortly. But I want to get this right. So I’m spending a large chunk of time on the basics. I’m having to undo my vowel pronunication, and learn how to fully roll a “rr” for the first time in my life (I know the single flap “r” from Japanese, but my Spanish teachers never pushed the “rr” issue, which I’m sad about now). After about a month of practice, the trill is starting to emerge (thanks to tutorial bloggings by Language Lover and Tensor), but it’s still touch and go. The Spanish helps with some of the other Quenya consonants, at least.

I should add that I’m really bad with languages, and the prospect of fifty bazillion noun declensions scares me. But dammit, this is such a beautiful language. My goal is to be able to write poetry in Quenya mode tengwar and read it out loud as if I know what elves are supposed to sound like. I can do it! Eventually! :D