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In the November/December 2003 issue, David Salo, the linguist who supplied all the dialogue in Middle-earth languages for the Lord of the Rings movies, offered to answer readers' questions throughout November. Judging by their e-mail, Muse's Elvish scholars are mainly interested in writing love letters.
(If you missed the Muse article, you can find out more about Salo in this online profile.You can check out David's Elvish Phrase book at Muse's official Web site, and other Elvish links on our URLs page. The LOTR issue of Muse is still available for $4.95 from Carus Publishing,1-800-821-0115; ask for item # MUS0311. Salo is also working on a Sindarin grammar book.)
Q. I couldn't find a translation for the title of Rena Archwamety's article ("Ma Quetelyë i Eldalambë?"), but am I correct in translating it as (loosely) "Do you speak the tongue of the Elves?" or maybe "How do you speak the tongue of the Elves?"?
A. The title is supposed to mean "Do you speak Elvish?" or more literally, "Do you speak the Elf-language?" You could, poetically, use "tongue" for "language", but the actual (Quenya) Elvish word for "tongue" was lamba, while the word for "language" was lambë. In Sindarin Elvish they are both lam.
Q. You messed up in the mini pull-out book called The Elvish Phrase Book. You put melon means I love you when it really means friend. It says that in the first Lord of the Rings book. But I really liked the issue otherwise.
A. You are thinking of two similar sounding and related words in Sindarin: mellon, which means "friend", and melon, which means "I love". Like other languages, words in Sindarin are related by sharing common roots. The root mel means "love" or "hold dear". A mellon is a person who one holds dear, that is, a friend. The verb mela- means "love". With any verb whose "stem" ends in -a, when the verb goes with the first person singular pronoun "I", you drop the -a and add the ending -on. So linnon means "I sing" (from the verb linna-) and melon means "I love".
Q. In the Sindarin guidebook in your November-December issue, I noticed that for "I love you" you have "Le mellon". I believe that that means basically "You friend". The real way to say it is "Im [I] melleth [love] le [you]."
A. You are right that if the phrase were "le mellon" it would say "you friend". But it is actually "le melon."
"Melon" means "I love", and is a distinct word from "mellon" which means "friend". In Sindarin, a verb can indicate the subject (the person who is doing the action) without actually using a separate word (like "im", which means "I") for the subject. In this case, the "mel-" part of "melon" means "love", and the "-on" part means "I". You could also say "melon im" or "im melon", but you don't have to include the "im".
In Sindarin too, a pronoun (a word like him, her, them, you, me, or us), when it represents the person or thing which an action is done to, usually comes before the verb. In this case, the word is "le", which means "you".
The word "meleth" does mean "love", but it is a noun, referring to the feeling which is called love, and not a verb, referring to the action of loving.
Middle-Earth Languages, General
Q. In The Fellowship of the Ring [movie], parts of the music for the Balrog chase scene in Moria contained a chorus of male voices chanting/singing in a strange, dark-sounding language that didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before. Could you provide some enlightenment as to what this language is and perhaps a rough translation?
A. The language you heard is what I sometimes call "Neo-Khuzdul" or New Dwarvish. It's based on or inspired by the few Dwarvish words and names which Tolkien created and which have been published; but since Tolkien did not provide us anything regarding the grammar of Dwarvish (except a vague hint that it might be like Hebrew), and only gave us a very small vocabulary, something like 90% of this language is a new invention--by me. It sounds like Khuzdul, but I am sure that in structure and vocabulary it is much more different from what Tolkien would have created than any of the Elvish.
Part of what you hear goes like this:
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Fire in the deep!
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Urus ni buzra! |
| Flames lick our skin! |
Arrâs talbabi fillumâ! |
| Fear rips our heart! |
Ugrûd tashniki kurdumâ! |
| No! No! No! |
Lu! Lu! Lu! |
| The demon comes! |
Urkhas tanakhi! |
Some of the things you can see here are the construction of verbs with the prefix ta- (for third person): talbabi "lick", tashniki "rips", tanakhi "comes"; the suffix -mâ for "our": fillumâ "our skin", kurdumâ "our heart". We have some related words, like urus "fire", arrâs "flame"; and some words that should look familiar, e.g. buzra "deep" (cf. bizar "valley, deep place" in Azanul-bizar), and urkhas "demon, balrog", related to rukhs "orc" much as Quenya rauco "demon" is related to urco "orc". So there is real linguistic structure there, and an homage to Tolkien's languages; but very little of it is genuine Tolkien.
Q. Would you please translate this to Quenya for me?
Times are hard
they break your heart
look up to the sky
believe in me
Thank you so much I really appreciate it!
A. Thanks for asking me about your poem. But perhaps, instead of having me translate it, you'd like to try translating it yourself? If you go to http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf/qcourse.htm, you can try your hand at learning Quenya; and once you've made a start at translating your poem, you could go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Elfling/ and ask for comments on it.
Q. What are some handy terms in Elvish, Orkish and Ringwraith?
A. If you're interested in knowing more about these languages, I would suggest looking at the Ardalambion site at www.uib.no/people/hnohf ; it is very helpful.
Middle-Earth Languages, Grammar
Q. On the Internet, I was looking up dictionaries and grammar, but one site I visited said that Sindarin had no word for 'is'. Is this true, or my source wrong? If there is a word for this, what is it?
A. There is a Sindarin word for is: na-. But this is (so far) only known in two forms, the imperative no "be!" and the noun form nad, which means "something that is, an existent, a thing". But many sentences in Sindarin can be written without using a verb for "be". For instance, if you want to use an adjective as a predicate (telling you something about the subject), you can say, for instance, erchail in edhil "the elves are tall", without using the verb is at all (literally, it is "tall (plural) the (pl.) elves"). Or if you want to say "there is" or "there are" something, you can just leave the verb out and name what you are referring to.
Middle-Earth Languages, Alphabets
Q. I have been looking through my LOTR books, I have The Hobbit and all three of the trilogy books in one. I found the two languages of Tengwar and Angerthas, but am a little foggy on some of it. I would really like to learn Angerthas and maybe Tengwar later when I'm better at it but I have a few questions about Angerthas. I noticed throughout the books that they use Angerthas sometimes, like when Gandalf uses the G-rune from Angerthas as his initial. Was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to be able to write and speak it, for instance I looked on the next page and on the page of consonants and, quite frankly, I was soon so confused, that I couldn't make heads or tails of what I was reading.
A. The writing systems of the Angerthas and Tengwar are very tricky, because they have many variants and different forms. I think you have already seen the explanations given in Appendix E, but I agree that they are rather confusing. Perhaps the easiest way to approach this is to start reading and writing in one of the available modes. If your copy of The Lord of the Rings has an inscription on the title page, you can try figuring that out. The part in Angerthas reads: "The Lord of the Rings translated from the Red Book".
Try figuring out which letters in the Angerthas correspond to which English letters. Remember that sometimes a single certh (one letter in the Angerthas) can correspond to two letters in English (like th and oo), especially when those two letters correspond to a single English sound, which is different from a letter. And sometimes a single English letter is represented by more than one certh, because it can be pronounced two different ways (did you ever notice that the s in is and the s in so are pronounced differently? Or the th in this and the th in thin?). Try to make a table in which you figure out which cirth (that's the plural of certh) correspond to which English letters or sounds, and when they differ, try to figure out why.
You might then like to try the tengwar on the bottom of the title page, which read: "of Westmarch by Jhon Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Herein is set forth the history of the War of the Ring and the Return of the King as seen by the hobbits."
This is a bit harder and gave me a lot of trouble when I was your age! The vowels are represented by dots, curls, and slashes above (and sometimes below) the letters; and the words "of", "the", and "of the" are all represented by single signs.
Then you can try writing your own messages in the alphabets! You will also find other texts written in the same alphabets, with a few slight differences, in other books by or about Tolkien.
Q. In the box on page 12, you pointed out that Tolkien made a mistake in spelling his name "Jhon". This "error" has reasoning behind it. The Feanorian Tengwar system is entirely phonetic, whereas the h in "John" is silent and may therefore be excluded. Tolkien probably considered the J in his name to be softer and more aspirated than the J in "just" and therefore invented the consonant cluster Jh. (In the same vein, you will notice that he spelled "herein" phonetically as "herin".)
A. I am not sure that I would say that Tolkien's writing of "John" as "Jhon" was a *mistake*, but it can't be for the reasons that you mention. The sound of "J" in "John" is not aspirated (i.e., it does not have a breathy sound after it), and Tolkien, who knew his phonetics very well, would not have thought that it was. What I think happened is simply that, since Tolkien was writing within a very narrow space, he drew the upper part of the "h" tengwa-letter so high that the tehta mark for the vowel o could not fit above it; so he drew it after the letter instead.
The word "herein" is not misspelled as "herin". The final e, being silent, is indicated not by the "acute accent" tehta, but by a dot under the tengwa for r; so in this case, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the English spelling and the tengwar spelling, except that Tolkien recognizes the difference in sound between the first and second e's.
Q. I have one question about Tengwar. I have no idea what the values are and they don't reveal them anywhere in the book that I can see. If you could help me out I would much appreciate it.
A. There are several different possible values for each of the letters, but the most common are these (using the order on the tengwar chart):
1) t 2) p 3) ch (as in chat) 4) k (or c as in cat) 5) d 6) b 7) j (as in jar) 8) g (as in grass, but not as in gem) 9) th (as in thin) 10) f 11) sh 12) kh (the sound of German ch in the name Bach) 13) dh (=th as in then) 14) v 15) zh (the sound of s in measure, or ge in rouge) 16) gh (there's nothing like this in English, it's sort of a rough, growly g) 17) n 18) m 19)ñ (almost n+y, like in Spanish señor, or the n in menu), 20) ng (as in sing, but not with a following g sound as in anger, which could be written with 20+8) 21) r 22) w 23) y or sometimes o 24) sometimes used for a 25 and 26) are variants of r; 27 and 28) are variants of l 29 and 39) are variants of s; 31 and 32) are variants of z 33) h 34) wh (as in when) 35) sometimes y, sometimes a vowel, often e; 36) sometimes w, sometimes u.
When you are using tengwar to represent English vowels (instead of the marks above the letters which are called tehtar) you can use 24 for a, 35 for e, a letter something like i or í for i, 23 for o, and 22 for u.
But in Elvish, the vowels were: a letter shaped like c for a, 35 for e, a letter shaped like i for i, 23 for o, and 36 for u.
There is a book called Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien; if you can find it you will find longer examples in both Cirth and Tengwar that you can practice on.
Q. I was wondering if you wrote a language guide that I could get so that I can learn to read, write and speak Elvish. I have the little guide that was in the Muse magazine with the Sindarin phrases in it and I would like to learn more.
A. I have written a kind of guide—really a grammar of Sindarin, but it is not published yet; I hope it will be published next year. But you can still find some useful information, though not as comprehensive, at Helge Fauskanger's Ardalambion site at www.uib.no/people/hnohf.
Q.Is there anywhere I could get an English to Sindarin dictionary?
A. Some English-Sindarin glossaries have been privately published, but I think they are generally too inaccurate to recommend. The best available one that I know of now is online, at http://www.geocities.com/almacq.geo/sindar/sdintro.html. But I hope that an accurate Sindarin dictionary will be published soon.
Q. Le suilannon. When I read your article I had thoughts of how cool it would be to speak Quenya. So my real question is: can you buy Elvish dictionaries and if so where? Hennaid.
A. A few people have published their own Elvish dictionaries, but many of them are incomplete or have serious errors. I don't know of a good Quenya dictionary that you can find. There is a decent Sindarin dictionary available at the web site http://www.geocities.com/almacq.geo/sindar/sdintro.html. But the best place to start is with the section called The Etymologies in the book The Lost Road, edited by Christopher Tolkien; it shows the working document that Tolkien used for his elvish vocabulary while writing The Lord of the Rings. But it is not free from errors either, I'm afraid.
Q. I am interested in learning Elvish for a second language. I was wondering if you could tell me all of the websites and books you used for reference. And what dictionaries did you use? I have Quenya dictionaries, but I'm not sure they are accurate. I would also like a Sindarian dictionary, so could you tell me all there is?
P.S. What language do they use in the movie? And where can I find a dictionary of it?
A. There are many languages used in the Lord of the Rings movies, but the most common one is Sindarin, the everyday language of the Elves. You can find a dictionary of it at http://www.geocities.com/almacq.geo/sindar/sdintro.html, though it is not always available.
I did not use any website for reference, but I used almost all of the books that Tolkien wrote about Middle-earth. I hope to publish, among other things, a bibliography that will point you to every page that's relevant to Sindarin in Tolkien's works.
I am also not sure if your Quenya dictionary is accurate; there are many available that are not very good. I would suggest you compare what you have learned with what you can find on the Ardalambion website at www.uib.no/people/hnohf.
Q. I greatly enjoyed the November/December 2003 issue, particularly the article concerning the Elvish language. There were several good on-line sources in the article, but I was wondering if you had any recommendations for non-Internet sources, other than The Lord of the Rings itself. The article also mentioned The Lost Road, which I had never heard of. Would that be a good place to start?
A. Lost Road is the fifth volume of a set of books called The History of Middle-earth, a collection of documents which relate to how J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Many of these are earlier drafts of the stories in those books. The Etymologies, part of The Lost Road, is a little different; it's a working reference that Tolkien used in creating the Elvish phrases in The Lord of the Rings, and it contains a large number of Elvish words, both Quenya and Sindarin (the latter in the guise of "Noldorin", which is what Tolkien called it at the time.)
Perhaps the best place to start, though, is with Tolkien's notes to The Road Goes Ever On, a book with musical settings for some of Tolkien's poems, including those in Elvish. Tolkien provided explanatory material for singers, explaining in detail the vocabulary and grammar. If you can follow those, you will have made an important step toward understanding how Tolkien built his languages. I have written a more extensive bibliography listing all of Tolkien's references to Sindarin elvish, and explaining what they contribute to our understanding of his languages; I may have that published next year.
Q. I saw your picture in the Muse magazine and I'd like to know, do you really have pointy ears like they show you having?
A. I am sorry to say that I do not have pointed ears!
Q. I'm hoping to do an Elvish section for my Lord of the Rings web site and I was hoping you could answer a few questions that I could post on the section:
- When did you first read The Lord of the Rings?
- Which of Tolkien's books did you find most helpful for learning Elvish?
- What is your favorite of the languages Tolkien created (Quenya, Sindarin, Rohirric, etc.)?
- Can you recommend any published book(s) or web sites for people who want to learn Elvish?
- How do you say "The Lord of the Rings" in Quenya/Sindarin?
- Which is your favorite LotR movie?
- Which of all the LotR actors/actresses spoke Elvish the best?
- Do you have a favorite character from Tolkien's writings?
A. Thank you very much for your questions!
I first tried to read The Lord of the Rings around 1975 or 1976, when I was six or seven years old. I found it rather difficult, and I didn't finish it for quite some time, though I must have finished it by 1977, when The Silmarillion was released.
I used all of Tolkien's books to help me learn Elvish, but the most helpful were Tolkien's notes to the song book The Road Goes Ever On, which explain Galadriel's song Namárië and the Sindarin hymn to Elbereth. I also found the etymological glossary in The Lost Road extremely helpful.
My favorite language is, of course, Sindarin, since I have spent so much time on it! It is perhaps the most complex, and the one Tolkien worked the hardest on; but I think he may have liked Quenya better, since he actually produced quite a lot more text in Quenya.
For learning about Quenya and Sindarin, the best site I can recommend is Helge Fauskanger's Ardalambion at www.uib.no/people/hnohf.
Tolkien in one place rendered "The Lord of the Rings" as Heru i Million in Quenya, but the word Mil or Millë for ring does not appear elsewhere; in the Lord of the Rings itself, Tolkien twice uses the word corma, in which case the title should have be Heru i Cormaron. The Sindarin equivalent would be Hîr i Chyrf, but we don't actually know if Sindarin had the word corf = corma.
I can't say which movie is my favorite, since I haven't seen The Return of the King yet! I'm hoping that will be my favorite. :)
I think that all the actors and actresses who had to use Elvish did very well. I particularly liked Liv Tyler's enunciation. Many of the singers who sang Elvish on the soundtrack did quite well too.
There are so many characters in Tolkien's world that I like that it is hard to choose a favorite. I would like to be as wise as Gandalf; but often I feel more like Bilbo.
Q. I really enjoyed the article on your lingual accomplishments in the November 2003 edition of Muse. I, too, have been inspired by fantastic languages. (Fantastic like fantasy.) In the third grade, I scoured my Ella Enchanted book and made a phrase book of all Gnomish, Elvish, and Giantish. (Is Giantish a word? O, well, I mean the language of giants.) I even tried giving language classes at recess to my friends! I have always found inspiration in fantasy and language. I enjoy translating mythical languages from novels and have created a few new alphabets that I am teaching my friends.
A. I am glad that you are inspired and interested in fantastic languages. In compiling phrase books, you are doing the same thing that I used to do when I was ten or eleven. If you continue to be interested in these things as you get older, you might consider taking some classes in any foreign language (the first language I took was Latin) or, when you get to college, in linguistics. I think you would enjoy them.
David Salo Shows How Much He Really Knows
Q. I was very glad to see articles on Elvish and the Lord of the Rings movies. I would like to congratulate you on a job (mostly) well done. ... The thing that really irritated me was the "Lard of the Rings" set of cartoons beginning on page 7 and continuing throughout the magazine. This cartoon made a mockery of the drama and fire of the real LotR, ruining all the characters and eviscerating the story. The movies, even with all their flaws, make a better representation. ...
Namaer le gerthaer
P.S. I'll leave that last remark as a puzzle for any really driven detectives. Here's a hint: "Namaer" is the Quenya word "Namarie" (farewell), translated into Sindarin to fit the rest of the sentence.
P.P.S. I ought to put accent marks, but that's practically impossible in an e-mail.
P.P.P.S. Oh, and "gerthaer" is plural. Check in the Silmarillion for its singular.
A. Namaer is almost possible, but if in a compound the sound m comes between two vowels, and was not preceded by n (as in Annûn+minas > Annúminas), then the m turns into a v sound, so you should get navaer. Compare na+medui "at last" > na vedui. Medui is related to words like Methedras "Last peak" and ambar-metta "end of the world", and other words meaning "end" and "last".
I wonder if you are thinking that Gerthaer should be the plural of Gorthaur, the Sindarin name for Sauron? Actually, the plural of a singular word whose last syllable contains the diphthong au would contain oe, not ae: consider Nibin-Noeg "Petty-dwarves", the plural of Niben-Naug (or somewhat shortened, Niben-nog). You'll find this word in Unfinished Tales.
Also, the change of a or o to e in syllables preceding the final only happens when the last syllable contains one of the front vowels i or y, or the diphthong ai (which was originally ei). This is because you have to move your tongue to the front of your mouth before producing the sounds of i, y, or ei. But the diphthongs ae (earlier ai), oe (earlier oi) and ui all start with vowels produced in the back of the mouth, so you don't need to change your tongue position.
The plural of Annui "Western" is Annui, not Ennui. The plural of Balrog (older *Balraug) should be Balroeg, not Belroeg. And the plural of Gorthaur should be Gorthoer, not Gerthaer.
I can't agree with calling the staff at Muse saurons, even if you didn't like their cartoon! I hope in time you can think of them more kindly! :) Of course, what you actually called them was fortresses of the sea (gerth aer), so I suppose that's not so bad.
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This page was last updated on 7 October 2004.
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