Now that I’ve wrapped up Quenya Grammar (for now), I’m starting a new series on Sindarin. Like the Quenya series, this information will eventually be collected in Eldamo:
The series will be similar to the Quenya one, in that I intend to examine both the Sindarin of the 1950s and 60s as well as its conceptual development from Gnomish and Noldorin of the 1910s through 1940s, with suggestion for possible Neo-Sindarin use. The posts here will be first drafts, for collecting feedback from the community at large, before their eventual “permanent” inclusion in Eldamo. The posts will discuss topics in some detail, connecting them to the phonetic history of the language as appropriate, and isn’t really aimed at beginners. There are already a number of “Beginning Sindarin” courses out there. My aim here is to produce more “Intermediate Level” Sindarin material.
As with everything involving Tolkien’s languages, it is difficult to arrive at any “final” conclusions, given that much his linguistic notes remains unpublished and the ones we do have access to are subject to multiple interpretations. This is even more true of Sindarin than it is for Quenya, since Tolkien wrote less about the Sindarin language and its predecessors than he did on Quenya, and his ideas seem to have been more fluid for this Welsh-like Elvish language. There is also the fact that my own knowledge of Sindarin is weaker than my background in Quenya, so the material here should be taken with several large salt grains.
In light of this, these posts will have the following disclaimer on the Realelvish web site:
This article is preliminary research on the part of its author (Paul Strack) and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the owner of this site. Since the source material is complex and its interpretation can be subjective, multiple conclusions are possible.
This doubly true given the preliminary nature of these posts. Based on my experience with the Quenya posts, it is quite likely that some of my initial posts will contained flawed information based on faulty reasoning. I welcome any feedback on what I post here.