Learn Quenya

i would like to learn the elvish lanuage 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”.

I had a brilliant idea we should all get together all IRC and talk in Quenya. IN addition we could get groups together on skype or somethign.

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

I think that’s what I’m gonna have to do. Downloaded a few of the lessons from ardalambion a while back and worked through them, but now can’t remember a thing! Gonna go back to the start to refresh the old memory, then take it from there!

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.

I Can’t find good manual on learning quenya and I can’t find really big English-Quenya dictionaries! Maybe someone of you could help me?

Can’t take this goal staring at me; anyway, I do want to someday, but it is not an urgent goal.

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