Posted: February 14, 2000 at 22:43:47: by Tar-Elenion
: : How correct are the word-stocks presented in the (HoME 1-4)? I : : know that The etymologies presented in THE LOST ROAD (HoME 5) : : are used by linguists as are, I believe, the vocabularies found : : in vols. 6-12. In other words, are the Quenya and Sindarin : : words found in the first four volumes canonical or not?: There are no Quenya and Sindarin word lists or dictionaries in THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH. "The Etymologies" documents slightly older languages called "Qenya" and "Noldorin". I don't know how the linguists distinguish between these older languages and the Quenya and Sindarin of the published works, since there is a great deal of overlap. : The words used in THE BOOK OF LOST TALES are from even earlier languages. The languages of 'QENYA' and 'NOLDORIN' from the etymologies become the mature 'QUENYA' and 'SINDARIN' of LotR with a few changes (some words found in the etymologies can be thought of as archaic forms of the Q. and S. spoken in the Third Age), and are generally considered as attested to for those particular languages. [It should be noted that Q in 'QENYA' represents the same letter/sound as QU in 'QUENYA'; ie they represent the anglicization of the KW sound (which is reprsented by a single character in the Tengwar) in Eldarin speech. Both words are pronounced KWENYA]. The words found in BOLT could be considered particularly archaic as they often have many letter combinations that are not found in the more mature forms of KWENYA and SINDARIN and changes were made to the root forms in many cases. They are however the word roots that eventially evolved into QUENYA and SINDARIN often with much revision by JRRT. As words they are 'correct' in themselves but if you wish to use them to complement the mature forms of Q. and S. you may need to compare them to later forms. I would think they are 'canonical' if there is no contradictory information from a later source provided. I think there are some linguistic sites listed on this site where you may get better and more accurate info.
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