<commit_before># Elvish Is Dead; Long Live Elvish

In January of 2002, I received an issue of _Muse_ magazine whose cover story was titled in an unfamiliar language: _Ma quetelyë [sic] i eldalambë?_—meaning, I soon discovered, "Do you speak Elvish?" The language was Quenya, invented by <NAME> and used in his epic novel _The Lord of the Rings_, and although the magazine focused on the film adaptation of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ (which had just been released the previous month) I was inspired, in accordance with an ancient tradition that I may or may not have made up at that moment, to read the book before watching the movie. I had attempted the journey into Middle-earth twice before, out of a vague curiosity and a feeling that I was missing out on a cultural touchstone, but this time I had a stronger motivation. If anyone ever asked me "Ma quetelyë i eldalambë", I wanted to respond (in Quenya, of course) "Yes!"

Fast-forward thirteen years, and I still don't know how to say "yes" in Quenya. No one does. It's a paradoxical fact that the Elvish languages, held up by Tolkien and his critics alike as the element that, more than any other, made Middle-earth feel "real", are full of holes and inconsistencies that thwart even trivial attempts to converse in them. During those thirteen years, through many attempts to learn Quenya (and, later, Sindarin, Tolkien's other main Elvish language), I discovered this, and came at last to comprehend that the task I had set for myself was not possible.

But despair not! Before you hit the back button on your browser and forget your dreams of learning Elvish forever, you should know that this story has a happy ending. I will get there in time. The turning point comes when I realize that I had made an error, a rather fundamental one, that prevented me from seeing the way forward. But not so hasty! First, let me describe what I was doing for those thirteen years that I was trying and failing to learn Tolkien's languages.

It certainly seemed *possible*, at the beginning at any rate, to learn Quenya and Sindarin. My lack of progress was due to no fault in my instructors' teaching ability, nor to lack of aptitude on my part. It was due to the fact that I kept giving up, over and over again. I would learn a bit of Elvish, try to use it in a sentence or maybe a longer composition, and become increasingly frustrated by it. Although my instructors and fellow students reassured me that my grammar was correct, the sentences I produced didn't *feel* right. They were clumsy and ugly and entirely different from the passages I loved from _The Lord of the Rings_, despite being built from words found in dictionaries that cited Tolkien's works. And so I repeatedly concluded that the languages were not actually as I had first thought them to be; that I had ascribed to them a type of beauty that they did not in fact possess.

In between bouts of learning Sindarin and Quenya (I alternated between the two, with the changing winds of my aesthetic preference), I struck out on my own, sketching new invented languages and dabbling in many real-world ones. I always came back to Tolkien's languages, though. My obstinance, together with the evidence of the Elvish phrases in _The Lord of the Rings_, made me unwilling to believe that my first impressions had been false. After many years of this cycle, I convinced myself that the languages I loved were illusions and that there was no real purpose to learning them anyway, and put my studies on the shelf indefinitely.

The "indefinite" period turned out to last only about a year, for Tolkien's languages again caught my attention from a slightly different angle. I had bought a copy of David Salo's _A Gateway to Sindarin_ after skimming the preview on Google and discovering, to my great delight, that it contained the complete series of sound changes between Common Eldarin and Sindarin. I had long known that the secret ingredient in Tolkien's linguistic concoctions was *time*: he did not simply make up Quenya or Sindarin words at random, but created words in a common ancestor of both languages, according to strict derivational rules. He would then simulate, also according to regular rules, the development of those words through the entire history of Elvish speech, until he arrived at the forms that Frodo might have heard in Rivendell or Lothlórien. It was through these sound shifts that the rich and unique flavor of each language was achieved. Seeing them spelled out with mathematical clarity in Salo's book, I saw my path clear before me: I would use Salo's work to construct a computer program that would carry out Tolkien's simulation of language change on a massive scale. My program would derive not only the Sindarin and Quenya forms of each primitive root, but all the intermediate forms as well, and check them for correctness against every word of every form of Elvish that Tolkien ever penned. The result would be a computational model of the Eldarin language family, inescapably consistent and demonstrably correct with respect to the words that Tolkien actually wrote. I felt certain that such a model was achievable, and also certain that it would yield the most accurate possible description of Tolkien's languages.

I did not realize the hubris of this endeavor for several hours. One of the first sources I combed for ancient Eldarin words was _The Etymologies_, a posthumously-published wordlist describing how hundreds of Elvish words changed over the history of Middle-earth. At some point I read Christopher Tolkien's introduction to it, and my ambitions were quickly quenched by the statement that "finality and a system fixed at every point were not [J.R.R. Tolkien's] underlying aim". I read on and my heart sank further. Within the single document that constitutes the manuscript for the Etymologies, there are layers upon layers of struck-out entries and revisions, pencilled notes, cryptic jottings, illegible words, and a copious variety of spelling conventions. Only then did I begin to understand that the data for Quenya and Sindarin are not merely fragmentary, they are not even self-consistent. Tolkien's languages are characterized, in the real world as in the fictional one, by constant and rapid change.

---

I hope to make Sindarin accessible to any lover of Tolkien's works. This cannot really be done by creating a "Teach Yourself"-style course in the language, because such a course will inevitably stray towards non-Tolkien examples and misleading comparisons between Sindarin and English (or whatever language the course is written in). As <NAME> points out in "Elvish As She Is Spoke", these faults are serious; they obscure the difference between Tolkien's own Sindarin and fan-made Sindarins, leading to circular reasoning (e.g. arguing that a particular grammatical construction is "correct" based on non-Tolkien examples) and clumsy word-by-word translations.

It might be possible to develop a variety of Neo-Sindarin that could be used for conversation, but that goal is impractical in more ways than one. For all the attempts that have been made to develop Sindarin and Quenya into "usable" Neo-Elvish forms, they have no community of fluent speakers, so if you learned to speak one of the Neo-Elvish languages there would be almost no one who could understand you. And any Neo-Elvish sufficiently complete to be "usable" would necessarily be unfaithful to Tolkien's thoughts on the languages and his intentions for them. (cite Letters cf. Hostetter and English and Welsh re: the effects of daily usage)

So a traditional "Learn to Speak Sindarin" course is not my aim. But neither do I want to write a formal grammar—I doubt most of my readers would want to read it, and we don't know enough about Sindarin to write a comprehensive grammar anyway. Instead, I want to attempt something subtly but significantly different from a normal language course: rather than have the primary question be "How do you say X in Elvish?", I want to first ask "What can we say in Elvish, based on the examples from Tolkien's works?" This approach is likelier to yield a description of Sindarin that is true to Tolkien's intentions. The language described in this way will be sparse, but still expressive. Ultimately, if you read all the articles on this site, you will not be able to speak Sindarin the way you currently speak English, but you _will_ be able to speak Sindarin the way Gandalf (for instance) speaks it in _The Lord of the Rings_, and that is perhaps better.
<commit_msg>Complete draft of 'Elvish is dead'<commit_after># Elvish Is Dead; Long Live Elvish!

In January of 2002, I received an issue of _Muse_ magazine whose cover story was titled in an unfamiliar language: _Ma quetelyë [sic] i eldalambë?_—meaning, I soon discovered, "Do you speak Elvish?" The language was Quenya, invented by <NAME> and used in his epic novel _The Lord of the Rings_, and although the magazine focused on the film adaptation of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ (which had just been released the previous month) I was inspired, in accordance with an ancient tradition that I may or may not have made up at that moment, to read the book before watching the movie. I had attempted the journey into Middle-earth twice before, out of a vague curiosity and a feeling that I was missing out on a cultural touchstone, but this time I had a stronger motivation. If anyone ever asked me _"Ma quetelyë i eldalambë"_, I wanted to respond (in Quenya, of course) "Yes!"

Fast-forward thirteen years, and I still don't know how to say "yes" in Quenya. No one does. It's a paradoxical fact that the Elvish languages, held up by Tolkien and his critics alike as the element that, more than any other, made Middle-earth feel "real", are full of holes and inconsistencies that thwart even trivial attempts to converse in them. During those thirteen years, through many attempts to learn Quenya (and, later, Sindarin, Tolkien's other main Elvish language), I discovered this, and came at last to comprehend that the task I had set for myself was not possible.

But despair not! Before you hit the back button on your browser and give up forever on your dreams of learning Elvish, you should know that this story has a happy ending. I will get there in time. The turning point comes when I realize that I had made a _mistake_, a rather fundamental one, that prevented me from seeing the way forward. But not so hasty! First, let me describe what I was actually doing for those thirteen years that I was trying and failing to learn Tolkien's languages.

It certainly seemed *possible*, at the beginning at any rate, to learn Quenya and Sindarin. To be sure, there were missing pieces of the puzzle, but the authors of the courses I was using seemed to have filled in the blanks pretty well. My lack of progress was due to no fault in my instructors' teaching ability, nor to lack of aptitude on my part. It was due to the fact that I kept giving up, and later beginning again, over and over. I would learn a bit of Elvish, try to use it in a sentence or maybe a longer composition, and become increasingly frustrated by it. Although my instructors and fellow students reassured me that my grammar was correct, the sentences I produced didn't *feel* right. They were clumsy and ugly and entirely different from the passages I loved from _The Lord of the Rings_, despite being built from words found in dictionaries that cited Tolkien's works. And so I repeatedly concluded that the languages were not actually as I had first thought them to be; that I had ascribed to them a type of beauty that they did not in fact possess.

In between bouts of learning Sindarin and Quenya (I alternated between the two, with the changing winds of my aesthetic preference), I struck out on my own, sketching new invented languages and dabbling in many real-world ones. I always came back to Tolkien's languages, though. My obstinance, together with the evidence of the Elvish phrases in _The Lord of the Rings_, made me unwilling to believe that my first impressions had been false. After many years of this cycle, I convinced myself that the languages I loved were illusions and that there was no real purpose to learning them anyway, and put my studies on the shelf indefinitely.

The "indefinite" period turned out only to last about a year, for Tolkien's languages again caught my attention from a slightly different angle. I had bought a copy of <NAME>'s _A Gateway to Sindarin_ after skimming the preview on Google and discovering, to my great delight, that it contained the complete sequence of sound changes between Common Eldarin and Sindarin. I had long known that the secret ingredient in Tolkien's linguistic concoctions was *time*: he did not simply make up Quenya or Sindarin words at random, but created words in a common ancestor of both languages, according to strict derivational rules. He would then simulate, also according to regular rules, the development of those words through the entire history of Elvish speech, until he arrived at the forms that Frodo might have heard in Rivendell or Lothlórien. It was through these sound shifts that the rich and unique flavor of each language was achieved. Seeing them spelled out with mathematical clarity in Salo's book, I saw my path clear before me: I would use Salo's work to construct a computer program that would carry out Tolkien's simulation of language change on a massive scale. My program would derive not only the Sindarin and Quenya forms of each primitive root, but all the intermediate forms as well, checking them for correctness against every word of every dialect of Elvish that Tolkien ever penned. The result would be a computational model of the Eldarin language family, inescapably consistent and demonstrably faithful to Tolkien's works, that would unite all of the disparate data and make them one. _One program to bring them all and in the darkness bind them._ I felt certain that such a model was achievable, and also certain that it would yield the most accurate possible description of Tolkien's languages.

I did not realize the hubris of this endeavor for several hours. One of the first sources I combed for ancient Eldarin words was _The Etymologies_, a posthumously-published glossary describing the changes wrought upon hundreds of Elvish words by the long ages of Middle-earth. For the sake of thoroughness, I read <NAME>olkien's introduction to it, and was a bit taken aback by his statement that "finality and a system fixed at every point were not [J.R.R. Tolkien's] underlying aim". Somewhat disheartened, I read on, and my discouragement turned to horror. I learned that within the manuscript for the Etymologies—the ultimate source for most of the Elvish words I had ever learned—there are layers upon layers of struck-out entries and revisions, penciled notes, cryptic jottings, illegible words, and a cornucopia of spelling conventions. Only then did I begin to understand that the data for Quenya and Sindarin are not merely fragmentary, they are not even self-consistent. Tolkien's languages were characterized, in the real world as in the fictional one, by constant and rapid change. And that means they are dead, more dead than the most scantily-documented dead languages of our own earth, because even in the mind of their creator they never took a fixed and final form.

_But wait,_ I said to myself. _Isn't consistency of form one of the lauded characteristics of the elvish in_ The Lord of the Rings_? and don't the Quenya and Sindarin words from Tolkien's works show clear and systematic relationships to each other? If Tolkien was able to settle on a consistent form of his languages long enough to write_ The Lord of the Rings_, maybe the situation's not as bad as it seems._ And so I continued to write my program and made reasonable progress, though my messaianic delusions were thoroughly quenched. I also decided to do a lot more research on Tolkien's life and creative process, and through this I eventually discovered that the situation was not, in fact, very bad at all.

But all in due time. First we must come to the turning-point of the story: my discovery of the *mistake*. For a long time I had worked at learning Elvish, though it was a casual sort of work, undertaken in moments of boredom and solitude. Writing the program was a different beast entirely. It consumed all of my time, to the point where I had to seriously question why I was making the effort. Previously I had told myself that I was learning Elvish in order to use it in poetry or in my own private writings—an explanation that I maintained despite having produced exactly zero lines of text in any Elvish language. This seemed now like a transparent rationalization for an activity that was profoundly not rational. I knew in my heart, and finally admitted to myself, that even if my program miraculously derived a complete grammar of every Elvish language, and the ghost of <NAME> appeared in a cloud of lembas crumbs and blessed it with a silver wand, my use for the languages would end there. I had never really wanted to write so much as a sentence in Elvish; I merely liked the idea of being able to.

It appeared plain to me that Tolkien also liked the idea—in a letter he said that he would have preferred to write _The Lord of the Rings_ in Elvish. And yet, examples of Elvish prose by Tolkien's hand are as thin on the ground as monkeys in France. Why would Tolkien labor his entire life over his languages, and hardly ever use them, except to derive names and write a very few poems?

For the answer, we need look no further than another letter, in which Tolkien wrote that "the word comes first and the story follows". And I believe that this adequately explains the lack of Elvish prose among Tolkien's papers. You see, in order to write _The Lord of the Rings_ or even a less ambitious work in Elvish, Tolkien would first have to come up with a plot, and then he would have to invent the words that would allow him to set it down on paper. But that sequence would be antithetical to his actual creative process, in which the story was secondary and subservient to the language that inspired it. A word invented to serve a story would be a poor, lifeless thing. And, (as I thought clear from my inability to produce satisfactory Elvish text) a word pressed into service by the needs of a story is little better. This, then, was the *mistake*: I had insisted on trying to *use* Tolkien's languages, when they were never meant to be used, and this had led to my perennial dissatisfaction with them. Once I realized this, the way forward became clear to me.

Well, clear<em>er</em>, anyway. I still had to figure out how one could appreciate a language without using it for anything. <NAME>'s article _Elvish As She Is Spoke_ finally clarified the matter for me. I did not have to forgo use of the Elvish languages entirely. Rather, instead of deciding on what I wanted to say and then writing it down in Elvish, I could examine the use of Elvish in Tolkien's works and build phrases and sentences from the patterns evidenced there. Lest the difference between the two procedures remain unclear, I should point out that the latter approach tends to produce sentences that *might conceivably be uttered by a character from Tolkien's mythos*, not merely ones that are "grammatical" according to some non-Tolkien person's analysis. And this recalls a central thesis of Tolkien's work: that language and mythology are inextricably intertwined. You cannot have Middle-earth without Elvish, nor Elvish without Middle-earth. Remove the language from the mythos and it withers and dies.

---

The story is now fully told, up to the point where I started making this website. My aim here, as you can probably guess, is not to present a completed grammar of any of Tolkien's languages. I hope merely to make Sindarin *accessible* to any lover of Tolkien's works. As the story of my experiences hopefully makes clear, this cannot really be done by creating a "Teach Yourself"-style course in the language, because such a course will inevitably stray towards non-Tolkien examples and misleading comparisons between Sindarin and English (or whatever language the course is written in). As <NAME> points out in "Elvish As She Is Spoke", these faults are serious; they obscure the difference between Tolkien's own Sindarin and fan-made Sindarins, leading to circular reasoning (e.g. arguing that a particular grammatical construction is "correct" based on non-Tolkien examples) and clumsy word-by-word translations.

So a traditional language course is not my aim. Instead, I want to attempt something subtly but significantly different: rather than have the primary question be "How do you say X in Elvish?", I want to first ask "What can we say in Elvish, based on the examples from Tolkien's works?" This approach is likelier to yield a description of Sindarin that is true to Tolkien's intentions. The language described in this way will be sparse, but still expressive. Ultimately, if you read all the articles on this site, you will not be able to speak Sindarin the way you currently speak English, but you _will_ be able to speak Sindarin the way Gandalf (for instance) speaks it in _The Lord of the Rings_, and that is perhaps better.

_Cuio i lam edhellen anann!_

—<NAME>, November 2015

*For other perspectives on whether it is possible to "learn Elvish" and what that even means, please see:*

- [_Elvish As She Is Spoke_ (by <NAME>, PDF download)](http://www.elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf)
- ["Tolkien's Secret Vice" (by <NAME> of _Ardalambion_)](http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/vice.htm)
- ["So you want to learn Elvish?" (by <NAME> of _Parma Tyelpelassiva_)](http://www.science-and-fiction.org/elvish/learn_elvish.html)

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03268183274591477, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0005492744999313407, 'mean_word_length': 4.563534504710975, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 17, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 17, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 2, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '2309698', 'n_tokens_mistral': 5385, 'n_tokens_neox': 5101, 'n_words': 3684}