Meneldilme wrote:
It's also helpful to write þ as even after the sound change it's still written with þúlë in Tengwar.
Indeed, and Tolkien sometimes uses þ in his Quenya sentences, like
á þak' i fende, mekin "Close the door, please!" (PE22:166).
Curufine wrote:
Are any of you working on any projects?
Way too many (as is usual). I've postponed my indexing of PE18 so that I can work on PE22, which arrived on the 22nd. I just finished writing up a list of all the phrases within PE22 (mostly in the documents from the 40s and late 40s, with very few in the c. 1950 one, and a bit in 1969's), which comes to around 7 pages in Word with font size 14, single-spaced, one phrase per line (with translations omitted): as far as
phrases go, quite a lot of Qenya + Quenya, with some Common Eldarin, a bit of Sindarin, and a tiny amount of Old Noldorin. Once I tweak the formatting I'll probably upload it to my tumblr (I rediscovered my Tolkienian one!) and the Google+ group where we've been discussing some of the material in PE22. After that's finished, I'll start working on indexing the whole thing (not just phrases), which is going to be a royal pain, given the large amount of vocabulary and conjugation charts. With all those words to cite, it might as well be a mix of one of the earlier lexicons and the declension charts in PE21. I imagine the index will take quite a while, and if he's doing one David Giraudeau will probably finish his before mine - though I doubt he'll include all the conjugations and rejected forms (and he might just focus on Q(u)enya), so that's a given. Once I finish PE22's (whew) and PE18's, I'll move on to PE16's, and after
that I'm going to go through all the VTs and PEs and compile an updated list of all the cross-references within them to unpublished documents, pointing out which (and where) have since been published in later volumes (partially or in full), and which still remain unpublished. That should take a while as well.
Other than that, I was working on a post for the Tolkien Society on Facebook on dating the appearance of 1st pl. clusivity in Elvish (probably Leeds-era, as far as I can tell right now), though that's become rather more detailed than it needs to be. I've also been meaning to finish writing up schematics of the currently attested Noldorin/Beleriandic/Sindarin pronouns (standalone, suffixes, etc.), as we were arguing about them on G+.
Most of my time lately has been dedicated to going through PE22 again and again, analyzing and quoting forms for discussion on G+, especially some Sindarin brain-wrackers. I think the Quenya is easier to comprehend (given that there's so much more of it, in overwhelming and contradictory abundance), but the little Sindarin we get (well, the verb conjugation anyway) is throwing us for a loop.
Meneldilme wrote:
As far as Quenya is concerned, my only project is my website.
If you mean the Quenya verb conjugations, do you have a copy of PE22? It has a large amount of information on the various verb classes and their differing conjugations, though the revisions throughout the decades (40s, late 40s, ~1950, and ~1969) aren't exactly in sync for how to conjugate the tenses (or sometimes, which tenses exist, like the various past continuous, pluperfect, past future, future perfect and whatnot, which only show up in certain stages). Some of it contradicts the forms we have, and some of it corrects/modifies assumptions/theories we've had, which up to now haven't been as class-based (e.g. which verbs take future in
-uva, -úva, and
-auva - or occasionally other forms for historical-phonological reasons).
Jax Nova wrote:
Is it always an i on the end to pluralize something? (Nori, tapari)
For the most part in later Quenya, nouns and adjectives ending in
-e get pluralized in
-i, though there are some examples of
-er nouns which don't seem to follow an explicable pattern, especially when we have both forms attested for the same word (like
esse). ?Most? nouns ending in vowels are pluralized with
-r, as are verbs, though earlier in the languages (internally, in Middle-earth) this wasn't always the case. I'll have to dig out PE21 to brush up on that. Adjectives ending in
-e tend to pluralize in
-i, and
-eä as
-ië, at least in later (external) Quenya, though there's a difference between
sindë pekkuvor "grey squirrels" and
sindar "(the) grey ones". We also have a "partitive plural" in Quenya,
-li, which is more like "some" or "many", e.g.
tas kennen nótime eldali "I saw a few elves there" (PE22:155), as well as
kirya karie "'ship-making,' making a ship/ships" and
karie kiryali "making some ships" (PE22:120). We also see pluralization with
-i for nouns/adjectives ending in a consonant.
There are of course exceptions, and historical cases with certain developments (e.g.
rusco, pl.
rusqui because it's from original
ruscu-, or other words with "stem forms" like
Silmaril, Silmarilli, and ones like
quén, pl.
queni), but I've just given a general overview (not comprehensive). Earlier Qenya had other forms, like
úmëa, pl.
úmëai, and suffixing/infixing
-l, but I won't get into that.
Edit: I had forgotten to mention
-ië into
-ier.