Your Teacher

Lovely Duck

Hello! I am dreamingfifi, your teacher. I grew up on a small ranch in Montana, where it is true: we do have internet and cable television.

I am not actually a duck. The duck is Aewen. I met her in Seattle Harbor with her large family of ducklings. I like to use her as a symbol of family and learning.

Ever since I was little, I have been interested in languages that aren’t very useful for communicating with the people around me. The chickens, turkeys, dogs, goats, sheep, and I spoke together fluently long before I used any human sounding language. I spoke a language of my own creating when dealing with the humans around me until I was almost four years old, when I learned English.

I still can speak the languages of my chickens and turkeys fluently. Did you know that the typical “Bok bok bok!” that people attribute to chickens is actually the hens’ egg laying song? That a rooster’s crow is an establishment of his territory (meaning, “if you can hear me, you are in my territory!”), not a wake up call? That a turkey’s “Gobble gobble gobble!” is actually an expression equal to our “What the hell was that?” Now you know.

Like the languages of animals, I started studying Tolkien’s languages when I was pretty young, at 15. Now I am 29 and have a degree in linguistics at the University of Montana. I went about studying it the long way, making many mistakes, working through trial and error. When I was 17, I finally started studying the work that already had been done on Tolkien’s languages, and found that I had been getting a lot of things wrong. I had to relearn Sindarin.

What I hope to do is to help people skip those years spent fumbling around, trying to figure it out for themselves. I hope to introduce the works of the masters. I hope to show people how I see Sindarin.

Because of my interest in languages, I’ve now got a bachelor’s degree in English-Linguistics (a combination of linguistics and English literature) and I use that knowledge to improve my lessons and hopefully get more people interested in linguistics.

8 Comments

  1. torin | | Reply

    no bad words im 10

    • dreamingfifi | | Reply

      Words on their own can’t be bad. If you use a word to hurt someone, then it is a bad word, but a word by itself cannot be bad. Therefore, the words that people usually call “bad words” aren’t actually bad. They’re only bad if you use one to hurt someone else. You can use any word to hurt someone else, therefore every single word in our language is a possible bad word. What you use language for is much more important than what that language is.

  2. alexandereverette | | Reply

    Hey I’m new to the site, and I have no idea what I’m doing. Is there a FAQ page or something similar explaining how things work? Thanks.

  3. Eruntanon | | Reply

    Is there a way to email you directly? I’ve looked all over the page but cannot seem to find any way of actually enrolling.

  4. Miluiel254 | | Reply

    Thanks for providing this!

  5. Miluiel254 | | Reply

    Thanks for providing this! It’s great.

  6. falcon10101 | | Reply

    Hey, thanks, this site is awesome. I’m currently also studying French. Could it interfere with Sindarin (trying to get two languages to stick in my head and be separate)?

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