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I was cured all right.

Perian is Sindarin and means hobbit, but I'm not quit sure, why Gondor people call them like this..

I thought Pheriannath was plural of Perian, but I'm not too sure...

I looked on The Encyclopedia of Arda. It just says the Dúnedain called them "Periannath" or "halflings". except in the book it says Ernil i Pheriannath for "Prince of the Halflings".

?

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well i know for sure that per- is a sindarin prefix for "half". so i presume that
it just means "halfling"

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Perian means halfling, as has been said. The plural is Periannath; 'halfings'. It is what the dunedain call them, though the word itself is elvish.

The Dunedain spoke (and I assume many still know the language in the Third Age) Sindarin and had close dealings with the elves, and many words in Gondorian might be similar or directly adopted from Sindarin.

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^ I was going to say that I didn't think Gondorians spoke Sindarin, but all the languages are pretty similar.

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The people of Gondor descend from the Dunedain, who spoke Sindarin, so the language was not strange to them. But you're right, many languages originate in Quenya or Sindarin because the elves were the first to speak and to name things.

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Right, most languages descended from one form of elvish or another (Though somehow I doubt Khuzdul was derived from elvish) but the languages of men would have been long sundered from the Elvish tongues, and so would be considerabley different.

Yep, one type of plural is Periannath, another type is Periain... but in a Sindarin context you can find mutations for various reasons, and so Ernil i-Pheriannath is also correct (note the mutations found in Welsh, for a Primary World example). You can also find Periannath in the books in an English context, in Appendix B, Tale of Years: Year 1050: "... The Periannath are first mentioned in records, with the coming of the Harfoots to Eriador."

Interesting. Why so many plurals?

Kind of like Crowd, Gathering, Group etc... ?

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Interesting, I agree! Here we have two plurals with different meanings: Periannath refers collectively to the Hobbit folk, while periain is an "indefinite number of Halflings" [JRRT, footnote to letter 347, 1972]

And Pheriannath is just a mutated form of Periannath (sounds different at the beginning) in the Sindarin context for "Prince of the Halflings". Appendix F informs that in the time of the war of the ring, the elven-tongue was "... known to only a small part of the peoples of Gondor, and spoken daily by fewer. These dwelt mostly in Minas Tirith and the townlands adjacent, and in the land of the tributary princes of Dol Amroth." In The Road Goes Ever On Tolkien explains -ath as a group plural "embracing all things of the same name, or those associated in some special arrangement or organization..." which is why we can have not only elenath "all the visible stars of the firmament", but Argonath as well, meaning "pair of royal stones."

For those interested in some language bits anyway!

Hello! It was very interesting to read. To be continued?

thanks for the info

In "The Return of the King," "Perian" is just the Gondorian word for Hobbits. When Pippin calls Merry a Perian, he's referring to his friend’s race.
It shows how people from different places might have their own names for things.