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Old 09-10-2015, 03:05 AM   #14
Arvegil145
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jallanite View Post
Tolkien was a writer of fiction. His Elvish languages were fictional. They were a first a private invention as a hobby, and then developed, so far as they were developed, as background material for the fiction he wrote.

There is no way in which any fictional language can be automatically updated. Forms in any fictional language depend on whatever the author of the language invents and on whatever rules the inventor creates. Tolkien never set down anything like a complete grammar of either Quenya or Sindarin. And Tolkien might at any time change any of his rules, or invent a new rule.

In letter 347 in Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien occurs:
The names in the line of Arthedain are peculiar in several ways; and several though S. in form, are not readily interpretable. But it would need more historical records and linguistic records of S. than exist (sc. than I have found time or need to invent!) to explain them.
The same is true for many other oddities of the Elvish languages.
Arvegil145 asks, “meril (rose) is valid in Sindarin, but what would be the Quenya equivalent?”

I see no reason to believe that the Quenya cognate would not also be *meril, but see no reason to think that such a Quenya form existed, or necessarily had the same meaning as its Sindarin cognate. Tolkien gives several cases where a supposed cognate form does not exist in the other Eldarin language or exists with a different meaning.

Arvegil145 asks, “But what about the hyphens before and after "i" in the name of Meril-i-Turinqi?”

Hyphens are elsewhere used by Tolkien to indicate that the hyphenated form is a single name in the form presented. The form i is in later Quenya translated ‘the’ in the poem Namárië in the phrase i falmalinnar ‘the foaming waves-many-upon (pl.)’ So Meril-i-Turinqi might be literally translated as ‘Flowers, the Queen of’. Again, this is only a guess.

Read the essay http://www.elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf for the disgust that such guesses have raised in one commentator on Tolkien’s Elvish.

Thanks for the input - but what, for example, would be an "updated" version of, say, "Tavrobel" (I have been tempted to replace with "Taurobel"), or Gereth and Evranin (and Evromord), and such from the "Lost Tales"

One more question - what would be a Quenya translation of "Queen of Roses" (like, for example, Elentári translates as "Queen of Stars")
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