2XqfBtfU52N — G+ LoME Archive

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (14:37)

Hallo everyone!
I’m here for the first time and I’m impressed with your linguistic skills. Forgive me my poor English, Sindarin and so on.
I’m interested in everything middle-earthen and I sometimes think about things that I’m too stupid to think of. ;-) For example, lastly I’m in the search of Sindarin pronouns. Doing it I came back to Ae Adar Nín.
The word di used in the text is, as I found, usually considered to be the 3rd person plural pronoun in the Dative case. It’s unlike the other known pronouns which form Dative with an- i.e. enni, anim, ammen. It only resembles le, if we assume that in phrases: le nallon and le linnathon it is Dative (I cry to you, I shall sing for you) and not Accusative (I call you, I’ll sing about you).
We also have two words for forgiving: diheno and goheno. We can discuss whether divine forgiveness is different from that of a human or whether there is need to distinguish forgiving guilties from forgiving the guilty ones.
But let’s come back to the word di standing right behind goheno. It seems to me that it may belong to it, like it belongs to diheno. Can we say treneri bent (to tell a story) interchangebly with neri tre bent and ortheri ngyth (to overpower foes) with teri or gyth? If so, diheno can be split in the same way and another prefix could be attached to it resulting in goheno di, and all that to avoid connecting prefixes with each other - perhaps godiheno wouldn’t be allowed in Sindarin.

Below you can see my attepmts to figure it out:
ar (and) di-heno (ab-solve) ammen (to-us = us; maybe something like: send to us release of) i úgerth (the bad-deeds) vin (of ours) sui (like) mín i (ours who = we who) go-henam di (withal-solve ab = also absolve) ai (those who, compare: quenya yar) gerir (make) úgerth (bad-deeds) ammen (to-us)
PS. Maybe that was a bad idea but I’ve used word absolve and not forget because it’s made heno look like it meant get.

What do you think? Maybe lambengolmor can instantly destroy this theory - for every lesson I will be grateful. I still do not have a reasonable idea on mín
in the prayer - Gandalf, why the… Genitive?

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (14:57)

Indeed, the idea of di in gohenam di 'escaping' from dihenam was proposed before, by Thorsten Renk in his treatise of Sindarin mutations system http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/mutations.html . I do believe it is possible, though as a practicing translator the idea of two distinct verbs 'to forgive' with slightly different meanings pleases me more. Comparison of di with caro den rather leads me to believe in a supposed 3rd person pronoun *te (pl. ti, acc./oblique ten, pl. tin) which in contraposition with known so, se, sa of the Etymologies, knowledge of the 'demonstrative' roots SA/TE and comparison to Quenya (where there are se/sa but te as well, first prominent in pronominal endings as well as when animate/inanimate distinction is important; and the second is more common as a separate word) — I'm inclined to believe this te to be a marker of indefinite 'he/she/one', of no personal importance and/or faraway position towards the speaker. Hence, caro den i•innas lín = 'do them thy will', '[let] be done [to] them thy will' and gohenam di ai gerir úgerth = 'we forgive they to-which do misdeeds' where ai = an + in — a dative of the relative marker i. On the contrary, ho/he/ha are used as close demonstratives (hain echant, 'them' which are right here and previously mentioned) or when gender distinction arises (hon 'him', hen 'her' etc.) Of course, various interpretations are possible, but the Quenya knowledge leads me to a belief there are indeed T-consonant 3rd person derivatives in Sindarin and they are to be distributed not in some way we expected, for in Q., they distribution lost its close/far demonstrativness at all.

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (15:18)

Oh, so I'm tracing tracks already discovered.
Knowledge of Quenya is needful when studing Sindarin and scarce information of verb rection make the thing more difficult.
As for the T and S pronouns in Quenya, in Quettaparma Quenyallo there is mentioned 'hé' meaning 'him (the other him, not 'sé'), but maybe that was completely out of use in the time of LotR.

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (15:29)

On the contrary, hye is a late Quenya idea, from VT49. It's from root KHY, otherwise unattested and possibly endemic to Quenya. We know ta, pl. te from LotR-compatible sources (á laita te, laita te, elsew.), but las early as PE17 Tolkien introduces sa/se, with a possible distinction being S for singulars, personal inflexions and gender distinction, T for plural and far-demonstrative.

Matt Dinse Jun 07, 2015 (15:31)

As far as Sindarin pronouns go, the verb endings in PE17 seem to be only one paradigm out of many. In VT50, Hostetter quotes several different versions of the same pronoun in different documents: and those are only covering those from the 1950s! Presumably in the 1960s and after the pronoun paradigms continued to change. So there will still be more information on various Sindarin pronoun charts in the future.

As for hé, VT49:14-15 mentions hé in "a text on reflexives dating to c. 1965", saying that it was "used for a 3rd person of second reference which was not the subject of a 3rd person sentence, or was not the same as the 3rd person of first reference in a sentence with 1 or 2 person subject." An example is given: " melinyes (or melin sé) apa la hé (or lanye hé) 'I love him but not him (the other, etc.)'"

In a text from 1968 or later, Tolkien used hye for this (meaning "other person", but "also used as a 3rd person entering account [who is] not subject of the original verb"), which Wynne notes is probably related to hya "or", noting the stem khy- "other" and some CE and Quenya derivatives. Tolkien gives an example of hye usage, with "A struck B, and B fled" = "he struck him and he fled", where A = sé and B = hye.

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (15:57)

+Matt Dinse Nevertheless, there are, as for now, no indications of using hye cognates in Sindarin or even about the existence of the root outside High-Elven. The inflexional charts are consistent in null/-r formation of 3rd person, which is of no consequence to guess the pronouns. The attested hain in Moria gate inscription is the only sure variant of such a preposition, an obvious form of hansa; it is glossed 'those, them, the things previously mentioned', but 'those' is definitely more a render into better English than an exact translation; the underlying meaning is 'these ones', 'ones here at the speaker and/or mentioned before', and it is definitely used in object position, not being a pure demonstrative, for this one is exemplified in the very same sentence as i•thîw hin < sen < *sina, Q. sina 'this'. In 'Túrin Wrapper', ed is a possible candidate for a 3rd person pronoun, with possible connection to Q. ta, with Ae Adar Nín presumable composed some years later and developing it into an almost-exact one.

+Remi Korben All of this actually leads to a question whether Sindarin pronouns are inflected for dative at all; for there are definite attested uses for oblique forms in dative meanings, not only le, but den as well, if we are to take it as 3rd person, but only fossilized ammen and enni for actual dative. Is it possible these are the only two forms employed by Sindarin, and others are rendered by accusative?

Matt Dinse Jun 07, 2015 (16:11)

+Александр Запрягаев, I agree about the current status of khy- derivatives in Sindarin. I quoted the documents on hé and hye because +Remi Korben mentioned hé while questioning its date, and I only saw your post clarifying that topic after I had submitted mine.

As for han and sa, we also have sana wende from the 1955 version of Nieninqe - but you're probably already aware of that.

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (17:24)

+Matt Dinse No, I didn't. It seems I still have some Parmar to surprise me! Anyway, the structure of 3rd person pronouns seems in Eldarin not of primitive origin, but developed from demonstrative pronouns (same in Russian, which takes inflexional forms from demonstrative pronouns and even parallels Quenya by using two opposing stems: former far-demonstrative for nominative and former relative/close-demonstrative in other cases). In this case, the particular S/T distribution is not expected to be fully logically derived from original meanings, as well as be similar in different non-contacting languages which only doubtedly possessed explicit 3rd person separate pronouns at protostage.

+Remi Korben Also, there is another thing that's been bothering me recently: ai in the same prayer was first written as ayath. Might indicate a sort of class-plural, hence pointing to this word as the actual subject of gerir úgerth — and reminding once too well about aen in KL, possibly being a conceptual follower of it (form change reflecting two incompatible fractions)! This way, David Salo's speculations of an indefinite 'ones, they' are backed, gohenam di ai gerir úgerth being nothing more that 'we forgive ones doing misdeeds', with possible ai < ae + i(n) relative contraction and di is once again better interpreted as a postfix for over-loaded *go-díhenam (though I cannot exclude the other possibilities; the actual sheet of paper is too overcrowded with jottings to make sense of which forms are actually abandoned; maybe, di is a Tolkien's reminder to himself, 'consider dihenam for gohenam', and nothing else).

For my original proposal there is one more backup: dîn in same KL which is used in far-demonstrative connotation, 'his (of one far from speaker)'; a possible opposition for 'his/hers (close)' could well be *hîn, though it inevitably clashes with 'this' is plural.

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (20:08)

I wish all the linguistic material was published now or at least before my life is over.

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (20:36)

I still know little of internal and external history of Tolkien's languages and I often try to deduct the meaning from the context. 'aen' always seemed to be for me a special form of the verb 'to be', something like Quenya 'nai' - is that totaly unresonable?
And still in the matter of pronouns: could 'enni' be the only Dative for 1 prs. sg., there being 'ni', and 'im, în, anim' be the general reflexive pronouns for any person, like Q 'immo', wouldn't it evolve to 'im'?

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (20:45)

+Remi Korben aen as a cognate of nai — that's Carl Hostetter's initial hypohesis. Helge and David supported the idea of aen being a passive marker/indefinite pronoun, 'they, ones will call him Fullwise'. It could be an untranslatable subjunctive marker, and there is no information to solve the mystery (it was mentioned by Hostetter somewhere that no remaining Noldorin and Sindarin documents shed any light on this).

We are explicitly given the paradigm of emphatic pronouns im/ech/est (e) for 1st/2nd/3rd persons; im is, furthermore, from imbe. I guess, it's fair to conclude that anim/anech/anest are reflexive ones, that is, 'for myself', etc. Enni couldn't be the only for a simple reason we know ammen as well, and it is clearly glossed 'to us', and us alone, in all contexts. One may wonder, why not annin then?
în is reflexive 'one's own' (Russian свой), that's clear from the context, where it's counterposed to dîn.

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (20:54)

I can't remember where it was but I've seen someone somewhere stating that despite what it stands for in the book 'im Narvi' should be read 'Narvi alone/himself' not 'I, Narvi". That's what my doubts came from.

Александр Запрягаев Jun 07, 2015 (21:47)

+Remi Korben Tolkien writes 'I, myself' in PE17:041 and provides the non-emphatic ni for 'I', but he only states the point of emphasis, not real self-reference (cf. French Moi, je…) There is definitely no meaning 'alone' in im pronoun_per se_ (of course, it is implied by Narvi, so he chooses a stronger form).

Remy Corbin Jun 07, 2015 (22:16)

+Александр Запрягаев Thank you very much. It starts making more sense to me. But there's one more thing that I'd like to know: does the dative require '-n'? Should 'for you' be rather 'achhen' like 'ammen' or 'achhe' like 'enni'? (I suppose 'ce

Matt Dinse Jun 08, 2015 (04:10)

I'm more rusty with Sindarin than Quenya, though I'm not aware of "chh" appearing anywhere. We have compounds like roch + hîr, which seem to have become assimilated to rochir (before simply becoming rohir). We do have "cch" in Aracchír from an early development of "t+kh" (later Arothir), but I think in this case if there were to be a parallel to ammen with an- and n it might be *~~angen~~. ~~tye~~ ~~is from~~ ~~kye~~ ~~(√ki), and Sindarin~~ -g ~~would also be from~~ -k or ~~-kj~~ (since IIRC primitive kj became c in Sindarin_). We have gi attested, and gen in lammegen (compare lammenin).

Alternately, I'm not sure if the mutation in *achen would be more appropriate than *angen - someone else will have to comment on that.

+Александр Запрягаев , we do actually have ónen an >> ōn anim >> ōn annin in PE17:147. So maybe it could be possible to have coexisting enni, annin, anim and *engi, angen, anech (or *echi, achen, anech? I don't know).

Tamas Ferencz Jun 08, 2015 (08:56)

Excellent discussion, folks!
BTW, going back to the original question: prefixes moving away from their verbs is a standard feature of Hungarian, so I don't find the idea outlandish, but as +Александр Запрягаев says we could also very well have two versions of the same verb with slightly different meaning.