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British School Offers Elvish Lessons
Adair writes "A school in Birmingham, England is offering its students weekly after-hours lessons in Sindarin, a conversational form of Elvish invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and based on Welsh sounds." It won't be long now until the Klingon to Elvish translation books are produced.
Welsh has lots of vowels. The secret is that 'w' and 'y' are vowel sounds in Welsh. Its actually fairly phonetic so learning to pronounce Welsh place names isn't too hard, even if "cwmtwrch" initially looks as terrifying as Polish.
There's no such language as 'Indian'. There are 18 different "official" langauges in India. Hindi is the "national language", but is the first language of only something like 30-40% of the population.
When you write the language, the vowels do not (usually) have their own character. Based on the "mode" you are writing in, you mark the vowels on the character before or after the vowel sound.
Nope, they've stopped working on new languages a while ago. There are many frustrated speakers of minority languages on the google translation boards, complaining about the fact that google refuses to add new languages, even though they'd get volunteer translators.
Lund University http://www.lu.se in Sweden had or has a course in Klingon..
I have a friend who attended and it sounded like a lot of fun, especially If you are already studying languages..
Elvish might not be as much fun but it is probably even cooler..
Will code a sig generator for food
Here at UT (as in Texas, not Tennessee), we've had a course on the linguistics of ALL the Middle-Earth languages since last year.
I've put some time myself in learning Sindarin and Quenya. Not to a conversational level, but enough to be able to say simple phrases and understand them. Enough to understand a lot of the dialog in the movies, and to translate most place-names in LotR and the Silmarillion as I (re-)read them.
I can also read and write Tengwar, the Elvish writing system (at a slow pace). There are a number of resources available on the web at the moment for all this.
http://www.ardalambion.com/
is one of the best, with links to other resources on the web.
http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/language.htm
is also a good resource.
What's more, every year more of the professor's material on those languages is published, and more knowledge of those tongues is acquired so that the information gets refined. Actual teaching of the language is great, as others said it increases interest in languages in general, which is good.
Before looking seriously at Elvish, I learned English, German, and Latin (my first tongue was French). I can usually figure out written material in Italian and Spanish. So my interest in Elvish was NOT alone but only part of a general interest in languages, and learning the basis of those made-up languages made me aware of certain concepts of language which are not always readily apparent in real-world languages, but yet are useful for a deeper understanding of them.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
LIN 312 is a linguistics class on the languages of middle earth.
It's a real class for which you get real credit.
course description
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Now, in actuality, there are photos of some of the original manuscripts for the Silmarillion and "lost tales," and J.R.R. Tolkien really did pen them in Feanorian characters, in the same sort of phonetic English that you see in the trilogy's mastheads. You can read along if you're careful. There are a fair number of ligatures, like S+T, not described in the LotR appendices, but which are pretty easy to figure out.
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From kli.org:
The Klingon language is something truly unique. While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe. These factors begin to explain the popularity of the warrior's tongue. Klingon was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the Star Trek movies. He invented not just a few words to make the Klingons sound alien, but a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
For starters, go here.
It's from The Undiscovered Country, you dolt!
Where is this language documented?
...). Most significant is volume 5 from the History of Middle-earth: "The Lost Road and other Writings", which includes The Etymologies, ie. more than fifty pages of elvish roots, and the way they evolved in words in the various elvish tongues (all elvish tongues, and Quenya and Sindarin in particular, are related. All come ultimately from the "Common Elvish"). What's more, most of the names in Tolkien's world have a known meaning.
Have a look at this page. The first significant pieces of information concerning elvish languages (Quenya, Sindarin, etc.) were published in the Lord of the Rings, appendices E and F to the third volume in particular. Since then, many readers wrote letters to Tolkien, asking for more information, and he answered. Some info was thus published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Then you have the posthumous works (The Silmarillion with a linguistic index by Christopher Tolkien, based on his father's notes, The Unfinished Tales, the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth,
As for now: Christopher Tolkien (Tolkien's son) sent photocopies of most of his father's papers that are related to the languages of Middle-earth to a group of people who had been editing a fanzine (Vinyar Tengwar) on this topic for several years, with the authorization for them to publish all the material. Thus more and more information is being published concerning Tolkien's languages. "Small" works are published in Vinyar Tengwar, while more comprehensive ones are published in Parma Eldalamberon (most notable are issues 11, 12, 13 and 14. Issue 11 includes the so called "Gnomish Lexicon", Gnomish being an "early version" of Sindarin, and issue 12 the "Qenya Lexicon", Qenya being an "early version" of Quenya, though this is an over-simplification). There are thousands of pages waiting to be published, including detailed grammatical descriptions, etc.
Where is the dictionary, verbs conjugations, grammatical constructs, gender treatments etc etc?
The website Ardalambion given in another comment will give you this kind of information, though it represents the view of its author (Helge Fauskanger), which are sometimes subject to controverse. There is a comprehensive Sindarin dictionary compiled by Didier Willis, which you can download on his website Hisweloke (DragonFlame 2.0 is the best way to get the latest version, but it's a Windows program. However, it uses QT and is licensed under the GPL so anyone is welcomed to port it to Unix).
To what degree can complex and subtle nuances be expressed in this one-man made up language?
Tolkien himself wondered how much poetry, etc. an invented language could really reach (see The Monsters and The Critics). But he was of course technically able to build quite complex sentences, with subtle nuances, etc. "one-man language", yet the work of more than half a century (he started devising these tongues in the second decade of the century, and refined them until his death in 1973). However, it's virtually impossible for anyone else to compose a "new" complex elvish sentence, ie a sentence about which one could say "this is true elvish". One reason for that is that Tolkien always changed his mind, his languages were not fixed in any way (though he felt "bound" by the published material). But even if all the published material was "consistent", there would still be huge lacunes in the available knowledge. This may change when more material is published in Vinyar Tengwar / Parma Eldalamberon... But note that most "experts" don't consider "movie-elvish" as genuine. Some even call this neo-Sindarin "mishmash"...