Petri Tikka enviou uma notificação à lista Elfling no último dia 31 avisando sobre duas novidades em seu site, Men Eldalambínen:
- Lista de palavras do Parma Eldalamberon 17: Tikka já contribui para a lista de palavras do Helge Fauskanger há algum tempo, e essa é a primeira vez que ele lança uma parcela dessa lista separadamente. Ela contém (quase) todas as palavras contidas no PE17 sobre Quenya e é considerada “finalizada” pelo autor. Compositores, verifiquem as duas listas antes de escrever qualquer palavra!
- A Finlandecização do Quenya: Foi um artigo escrito por Tikka para a conferência Omentielva Minya, e publicado no volume 1 do Arda Philology. O nome original é The Finnicization of Quenya, que espero ter traduzido corretamente. Petri é finlandês, e é uma das autoridades sobre o relacionamento entre o Quenya e a língua finlandesa. O artigo defende que o Quenya teria, mesmo em sua forma mais tardia, uma influência do finlandês mais forte do que aparenta a primeira vista. Em contraste, leia o artigo “São os elfos fino-úgricos?” do também finlandês Harri Perälä, que sugere que essa influência decresceu ao longo dos anos até ser quase nula no Quenya tardio.
Se vocês estavam preocupados em não ter o que ler sobre as línguas de Tolkien, acabaram de achar sarna para se coçar! 🙂
If I understand you correctly (I am merely using an internet translator!), I did not mean that my wordlist was polished by saying that it was finished. It merely contains all the “new” words from PE17, and most of the new attestations. The caution that you give of verifying the original source applies as well to Helge's quettaparma. Of course, in some extent it applies more to my list. It is now mostly obsolete, except for those who want to easily find words specifically from PE17.
What I meant to say was that you, back in September, did launch the list of new words, containing those that Helge had not covered yet. A word-by-word translation of a key phrase there: “The list contains (almost) every word contained in PE17 about Quenya and is considered 'finished' by the author.” Back then you said at Elfling “I have finished gathering up my list of Quenya words from Parma Eldalamberon 17,” so I believe I didn't misrepresent your words.
Even though auto-translators are awful, it actually did actually translate that sentence correctly (almost exactly as you said!). It seems that I misinterpreted your words. I was reading too much info from the context where you recommend to check the sources. That is, of course, a general warning. Anyway, I once chatted with a Brazilian who began to teach me some Portuguese, and I taught him some Finnish, but I somehow lost contact with him. So until I start to properly study your beautiful language, I will still have to use internet translators to read your wonderful web-site. A linguist should know how to decipher them. 😉
Hello Petri,
The “source checking” I mentioned up in the article was more of a “check Helge's list, and then check Petri's list” rather than a “check your PE17s regardless of what they say.” There are a few reasons for that, the major one of them being that nobody in Brazil, except a very few unknown individuals must actually possess PEs. I myself only have photocopies of a couple of issues that someone was kind enough to send me.
Another reason would be that people who come here are not primarily concerned with proper scholarly work. I do remind them all the time that Helge's and Thorsten's work are not proper Quenya nor Sindarin, but rather a selected snapshot, a constructed paradigm, that never really existed in Tolkien's mind, and that going to the sources is important once you know enough of those paradigms to find your way through the linguistic papers. Even so, many opt to remain exclusively involved with Neo-Elvish, and so I must help them. Given that the primary Neo-Quenya paradigm in Brazil and Portugal (and even Mozambique) is the “Fauskanger paradigm,” as I call it, your work seemed to fit in that paradigm very well, given it is a source for Helge's wordlists.
I do give them an occasional reminder: it's important to check the sources. I wrote one or two articles on that, and I translated the Negation in Quenya article by Bill Welden so they'd get to know how a real Tolkien linguistic work looks like (i.e. a mess).
I had always known it, but I really noticed how jumbled and ever-changig Tolkien's ideas on Elvish are when I gathered the words from PE17. That is why my list, and Helge's as well, is only a major approximation to the actual state of things. Luckily Helge occasionally notes the changability of things, but that really isn't the purpose of his wordlist. It isn't a dictionary, after all, and I'd be very happy if someday that could be done for Quenya (as Hiswelóke for Sindarin, though it hasn't been updated in a while). At least after all the linguistic papers have been published, perhaps when I'm sixty years old or something…
As we all should know, Tolkien never finalized Quenya and Sindarin in his mind. That isn't because of a lack of ideas, but on the contrary, the excess of ideas. For Neo-Quenya and Neo-Sindarin purposes one must pick and choose from this multitude of variagating notions. Are they not the same as Tolkien's actual languages? A language where no one knows how to say yes or no isn't a real language (you can't communicate with it). In this respect, Neo-Quenya and Neo-Sindarin are actually more real languages than Tolkien's unfixed state of mind. As long as it is based on Tolkien's grammatical and lexicographical ideas, it is only an articial selection from his various thoughts. So my conclusion is that Neo-Elvish is neither the same nor different. Same, because it uses Tolkien's actual ideas, different, because it fixes them to make them usable languages. I'd question if an unusable language is a language at all, and I know Tolkien's languages were usable were for him, if only for one day at a time until it changed.
Well, I don't know if I expressed myself very clearly and if it helped anyone, but there's some of my thoughts on Neo-Elvish. There might not be any difference in thought between you and me, or between any groupings in the Tolkien linguistic community. It might just depends on your definition of language. Maybe, maybe not. Lá…
I don't know if Neo-Elvish is so akin to Tolkien's Elvish. I'd reduce it to roughly 33% of it, because you've to consider that it becomes your Elvish too. I've a firm belief that with the influence of Portuguese I'd create a very different Elvish than you would with the Finnish language influencing yourself.
In short, Neo-Elvish is made of three elements: Tolkien's works, personal choices made by paradigm creators, and your own personal knowledge and your mother language's influence over your speech and writing.
That is, of course, the way things generally are with languages. If you do not know a language sufficently well, and even if you do, it gains aspects of your own native tongue. Because there is a limited number of actual texts in Quenya, “foreign” influence can't be helped. But with sufficent study and as more resources become available, these can (in princple) be reduced considerably. At the very least you can become aware of your own idiom influencing Neo-Elvish.
At the end of the day, there might be so many equally valid variations that just picking and choosing would not be enough. One would have to engage in actual language re-construction. That is where the element of influence from other languages (and linguistics in general) would have to come in play, as long as one is fully aware of it.
When I speak of Neo-Elvish, I do not generally refer to the actual state of things. I'm refering to how things should be. An ideal Neo-Elvish takes into consideration all of Tolkien's writings on Elvish, and this ideal becomes more possible as more papers are published. Although I disagree with Mr. Hostetter on many things in his essay “Elvish as she is spoke”, I think that his conclusion on how Neo-Elvish could be practiced is enlightening. Studying and immersing yourself in Tolkien's actual writings on and in Elvish makes one aware of the inner consistency of his languages, making one able to forge a genuinely Tolkien-based Neo-Elvish.
There is one area which is always in my mind when it comes to writing in Neo-Elvish that causes problems because of the influence of one's idiom: word construction. If a word comes from a Germanic origin in English, and a latin origin in Portuguese, should you reconstruct it using the Germanic or the Latin etymology?
There are other pitfalls. I.e. enyal- “to recall” seems logic in English. But “rechamar” is not used in that sense in Portuguese. “To remember” would be “lembrar” in Portuguese, and “to remember to remember” would be “relembrar”. So, for a Brazilian like me, the en- prefix would not make sense (although Gabriel from Ardalambion BR insists that, for him, it does make sense; but he's a linguist, we shouldn't trust him, 😉 ).
And since we're at enyalie, Portuguese can't use a gerund as a noun either.
One could also use the stem REN “recall, have in mind” (PM:372) and make up a verb _*ren-_ (cf. also _Mairen_, fem. name). Somebody once suggested this, and I have used it occasionally. That would at least more clearly refer to “having in mind” i.e. “remember” than “recall”, whose main connotation in English is “to bring back from memory”. Incidentally, there are no seperate words for “recall” and “remember” in Finnish. They are both _muistaa_. The reason why I have considered the difference is that _enyal-_ is clearly based on English “re-call”, so it's connotation is probably also similar.
I do believe it is evident that Tolkien had a fairly extensive vocabulary for Quenya and Sindarin. Parma Eldalamberon 17 has removed several gaps that we've had on this matter. I have a hunch that in the end there will be only a few gaps left in the basic vocabulary. The problem will rather be, again, selecting. But in the mean time and if any gaps will remain, I'd suppose that basing the coinages on the Proto-Indo-European etymology (if one can be found) would be the safest bet. That and Proto-Finno-Ugrian of course. 😉
I forgot to take into notice that the etymology can be different from one branch to another. Then it's, again, pick and choose. On the other hand, there is one thing that helps: the fictional history and culture of the Elves. It requires some creativeness, but this might produce more authentic words than only copying from Indo-European etymologies. Bill Welden has suggested this option, and I think it should be taken into consideration.