The basic building blocks for words in Primitive Elvish were “roots”, also known as “bases” or “stems”, which Tolkien usually designated by putting them in ALLCAPS or by using square root symbol √ (and sometimes both). A “root” consists single vowel (called the base vowel or sundóma) and one or more consonants, in 4 possible […]
There was a mysterious malfunction preventing people from moving from lesson 16 to 17 for the Gelio Edhellen! 100 course, and I finally figured out the problem! There was an option that sounded great on the quiz-set-up that I selected: “Do not store user answers in the database to save DB space.” “I want to […]
Yet another conflux of words, this time “parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, boy/girl and baby” On the Quenya side, we have Q. nostari “parents” from LotR, so we really have no choice but to use nostar for “parent”. We also have ᴹQ. “male and female parents” ontare/ontaro from the Etymologies, which may also remain legitimate, as well as […]
I’ve released version 0.7.0 of Eldamo: https://eldamo.org/ In this release, I’ve finished up my work on incorporating neologisms into Eldamo for the time being. I will still capture and add individual neologisms as I see them. I fixed the issue where neologisms would appear when searching and browsing in “Academic Mode”. Unfortunately there was a […]
Several weeks ago I posted about Primitive Elvish consonants. This posts discusses the primitive vowels. Like its child languages, Primitive Elvish has the five basic short vowels i, e, a, o, u. Unlike the child languages, it has 7 long vowels, with the addition of ę̄ (sometimes written ǣ) and ǭ. These two long vowels […]
Here is another exploration of Eldarin words, this time “father/mother, son/daughter, sister/brother” “Father” is dead easy. The words Q. atar, S. adar from the root √ATAR were established early on and Tolkien used them pretty consistently. “Mother” is trickier. Tolkien established √AM as the root for “mother” very early on the Quenya side, but its […]
If we really want to understand Primitive Elvish roots, we first need to understand what sounds were used in the Primitive Elvish language. Tolkien like to arrange his sound systems into tables of “series” and “grades”. The series were organized in columns by the area in the mouth where the sound was formed (front, middle, […]
I have five more quizzes added to five more lessons! Lesson 15: Nouns with Adjective Phrases Lesson 16: Past Tense TA-verbs and I-verbs Lesson 17: Stop Past Tense TA-verbs and I-verbs Lesson 18: Definite Prepositions Lesson 19: Gerunds Have fun studying! As usual, feel free to let me know of any errors, typos, awkward sentences, […]
Would you like your article on one of Tolkien’s languages to be posted here? I am making that possible, and this is why! Something that has troubled me for a while now about all of the discussion on Tolkien’s languages moving onto social media is that while social media is really great for stimulating conversations, […]
Finally, I can focus on the quizzes! And, I figured out how to upload all of the quiz questions quick and easy into the database, so it’s going a lot faster! Here are the links: Lesson 13: Class Plural -ath Lesson 14: Past Tense A-verbs Again, let me know by posting comments on this post […]