Ej4QoMacHkT — G+ LoME Archive

Fiona Jallings Apr 10, 2015 (22:32)

Working on the Sindarin Dual Plural some more, based on some helpful comments by you guys. I'm having difficulty with words that would have ended with a stop... I don't think that at any point in the history of Sindarin a word could end with two stops. That's making my progress a little slower - is the -U dual form older than Quenya? The only place - off the top of my head - that I can think of the -u dual appearing is in the 1st person inclusive pronoun, but that may be a bit of a stretch. do we have any evidence of a vowel inserted.... as far as I can tell, in Sindarin and Quenya, that's not the case.

Your Sindarin Textbook - Lesson 2

More Plurals. Sindarin has a colorful past with plurals, as in, it's had many of them, and most are discarded and only remembered in a few old words. Others, however, are still be used. Vowel Reduction. But first, a quick note about vowel length. When a word gets more syllables, its vowels and ...

Paul Strack Apr 11, 2015 (00:22)

I am pretty sure the u-dual was used in primitive Elvish based on Tolkien's note on Let:427, but I am guessing it was lost in Sindarin along with other primitive final vowels. It may be that Sindarin generalized the t-dual to fill the void.

Paul Strack Apr 11, 2015 (00:32)

Wait, I thought of an example. S lhaw ears very likely developed from primitive dual *(s)lasu

Fiona Jallings Apr 11, 2015 (18:52)

Oh cool! I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, you're probably right. Then the diminutive suffix -ig was used to make the singular "ear" again.

Paul Strack Apr 11, 2015 (18:58)

This derivation from a primitive dual is attested in the source material, see Etym:LAS² (if you want to site a source).

Paul Strack Apr 11, 2015 (19:08)

I found another fossilized Sindarin dual gwanûn or gwanûr "pair of twins":

http://eldamo.sourceforge.net/content/words/word-4205058149.html

Given the Quenya cognate onóna "twin (singular)", I am guessing this developed from primitive u-dual *gwa-onōnū, but in this case all signs of the original dual have vanished.

EDIT: Make that primitive *wo-nōnū = "together-born-pair"

Fiona Jallings Apr 11, 2015 (20:35)

Alright, I'll add this to the lesson. You don't need it for grammar, because it's no longer a productive morpheme in Sindarin, but it's an interesting bit of history.