Noob Needs help

[danb]

hey guys im new and was wondering if someone could teach me Quenya. I have msn. skype. and teamviewer. i would just like to speak with someone who can teach me.

[Mnemosyne]

danb, I would recommend Helge Fauskanger's excellent website, Ardalambion, which has a 20-lesson Quenya course here.

A word (or three) of caution, though: first of all, because Quenya is an incomplete language, there is, in a sense, no such thing as "learning" it, the way you'd learn (say) French or even Esperanto. Second (though you may already know this), it really does work like a foreign language, meaning that it has a completely different underlying grammatical structure to it than English. (On the other hand, whenever you learn more about a foreign grammar, you end up learning something new about your own!)

It's been a while since I've been through the course, but if you're willing to work through it and need a buddy or a different way of explaining things, you can send me a private message. But I don't have the time to teach someone a language that I myself only know a smattering of.

[danb]

thanks for that info... all i really want to know though is like how to write in Quenya and say basic stuff

[Mnemosyne]

"Quenya" is the name of the language, not the alphabet, which is Tengwar. That is super easy, especially if you are okay with downloading the fonts and the conversion software that makes the diacritical marks for you (in Tengwar, the vowels go above the consonants).

As far as saying basic things... there were some old internet phrasebooks back from when the movies came out, but I haven't seen them in ages... much more fun to delve into the real thing.

[Alfirin]

That brings up a question I've had for some time. Is what those courses and phrasebooks teach Quenya, or Sindarin? that is is it old/high Elvish or new/modern/Grey Elvish? I had one of those hard copy books some time ago, and when it classified the Elvish quotes in LOTR, almost all of them were marked as being in Sindarin (Quenya seemed reserved for the more noble and educated. I sort of Compare the situation to that of people in Japan, who speak and write modern Japanese for day to day things, but also learn Classical Japanese in school so they can read older works) , so I assumed that Sindarin, was what most people practice when they learn to "speak Elvish". Or do most people learn both?

[Pitchwife]

Alfirin, Quenya and Sindarin aren't so much 'old' and 'modern' forms of the same language as distinct languages, about as different from each other in sound and grammar as, say, Latin and Welsh, although they're both descended from the same ancestor language, Primitive Quendian (just like both Latin and Welsh can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European). But I suppose you can say that Quenya is more 'classical' in so far as it's less changed from PQ than Sindarin is, and also it has at the time of LotR become a language of lore and ceremony rather than a living language - again, think of Latin in medieval and early modern Europe (actually, Tolkien occasionally called it 'Elf-latin', drawing attention to the analogy).