I’m so excited, I’ve been jittering myself into exhaustion. After being asked for so many years to do it, after 9 months and 3 editors and lots of help from you, I have turned your Neo-…
Yay it finally arrived (took longer than expected to arrive, VT was here quicker) :D Started reading right away and so far it's very enjoyable! Thanks so much for writing this! Will definitely recommend it, know some less linguistic Sindarin students from the Minecraft Middle-earth project that may be interested
Yay! Please write a review and rate it wherever you got it so it will rank higher on searches and people can find it more easily. Also, if you write a review and post it on your blog, I can link to it on the book's page.
Ah yes I'll definitely review it, when I am done reading it! I am currently reading it rather quickly to get a bit an impression, also doing that on the train in the mornings and as it's a bit tricky with it being so crowded i'm skipping the exercises for now.
It's been very interesting so far and I could already gather some new bits of knowledge, such as distinguishing vocalic mutation into Prestanneth and lenition, so far I used the term lenition for both variants... I love how thoroughly you cover each topic and really rather fill the gaps than circumvent them!
One small thing I'd like to critize so far tho: On (hardback edition) page 45 where it is about stress of longer words. It starts with the sentence "If the word is 2 or 3 syllables long then the first syllable gets the stress." This sentence imho is a bit misleading, it sounds very final, like 3 syllable words always are stressed on the first syllable, and only words with 4 and more syllables may have the stress on the second-to-last-syllable. I think if I would not have known this rule before I may have misread that.
I wonder why you decided not to cover the scripts / Tengwar...? As you introduce the dialects from the start already it may have been at hand to link those to the different modes of the Tengwar. Also especially for the non-linguistic readers you aim for it may be great to be able to "show off" and use their knowledge about elvish in using the exotic script and not only the language. Sure the scripts are a lot easier to learn, but still it feels like the book only contains half of the entire picture ;)
Also, do you intend on issueing any translations? As elvish students are so dispersed I bet this book will fall into many people of different languages (like me from Switzerland), and especially the very detailed pronounciation guide and the exercises to transcript english words to the IPA may be very hard if the reader is not 100% sure how he is supposed to pronounce these english words.
Re: pronunciation Yeah, you missed the part where I talked about how in 3 syllable words (and longer) the stress always falls on the second or third from last syllables, depending on whether the second to last syllable is heavy.
Re: Tengwar There were several reasons for that. First, I want to decouple the concepts of translation and transcription. Second, we rarely need to use tengwar or cirth online, because writing in it is super clumsy and usually requires uploading and hosting pictures. Third, the easiest to use font doesn't work in Microsoft Word, which is what I used to make the book. Fourth, to teach tengwar and cirth, it requires a lot more space to practice writing, and that doesn't fit in a 6x9 book very well. Lastly, I wanted the paperback book to be under 20$. I didn't come to this decision lightly. So, there's a free tengwar workbook available on my website that you can print out instead.
Re: translations No idea. If it sells really, REALLY well, then it's possible.
Pronounciation: You missed my point; of course you do explain that the stress can fall on the second-to-last syllable, but that one sentence above appears before that part and it reads like "all 3-syllable words are stressed on first syllable, regardless of the statements that follow below". It's really a minor thing, in the end it's clear, but when reading that one sentence I was like "Wait, hang on, that does not sound right".
What do you mean with the Tengwar font not working in MS Word? I am doing transcriptions into Tengwar and Cirth almost daily using word.
And for the technical things: Nowadays it's possible to load any fonts into a webpage, so it'd be very well possible to i.e. make a Forums or a messenger using Tengwar ;)
Re: pronunciation Okay, so you found the wording confusing. I introduced the simple rules first, then the exceptions.
Re:fonts But not on social media, where we don't have the ability to install fonts.
Tengwar Telcontar, the font I prefer to use, doesn't work in Microsoft Word. Dan Smith's fonts work, but they are super clumsy to use. I'd rather just be able to type than have to be checking a reference chart constantly.
As now many people have touchscreen devices and virtual keyboards are in use on millions of smartphones and tablets it should be relatively easy to create virtual keyboards that make it unnecessary to look up keycodes etc., but using the QWERTY keyboard remains clumsy unless someone comes up witha new, simple layout
Ah yes of course, Tengwar Telcontar; I gave it a try once in an editor it does work (I think it was OpenOffice Text editor) and while the concept seems fantastic I stuck with the clumsy fonts, due to the much larger variety (and Tengwar Annatar italic being by far the most popular font for Tattoos). I do still insert them via Insert-->Symbol, but I don't mind really, but I do want to make myself a Tengwar keyboard at some point and try how fast I can get with that.
+Tamas Ferencz I just recently checked the page of the Unicode consortium and tried to find the Tengwar proposal but I think I just failed to find the full list of suggestions... I guess there's no change since I checked like five years ago?
Severin Zahler May 29, 2017 (09:20)
Tamas Ferencz May 29, 2017 (10:44)
Paul Strack May 29, 2017 (19:03)
Fiona Jallings Jun 01, 2017 (02:32)
Александр Запрягаев Jun 05, 2017 (10:54)
Fiona Jallings Jun 05, 2017 (17:32)
Severin Zahler Jun 21, 2017 (11:00)
Fiona Jallings Jun 21, 2017 (14:34)
Severin Zahler Jun 22, 2017 (08:11)
It's been very interesting so far and I could already gather some new bits of knowledge, such as distinguishing vocalic mutation into Prestanneth and lenition, so far I used the term lenition for both variants... I love how thoroughly you cover each topic and really rather fill the gaps than circumvent them!
One small thing I'd like to critize so far tho: On (hardback edition) page 45 where it is about stress of longer words. It starts with the sentence "If the word is 2 or 3 syllables long then the first syllable gets the stress." This sentence imho is a bit misleading, it sounds very final, like 3 syllable words always are stressed on the first syllable, and only words with 4 and more syllables may have the stress on the second-to-last-syllable. I think if I would not have known this rule before I may have misread that.
I wonder why you decided not to cover the scripts / Tengwar...? As you introduce the dialects from the start already it may have been at hand to link those to the different modes of the Tengwar. Also especially for the non-linguistic readers you aim for it may be great to be able to "show off" and use their knowledge about elvish in using the exotic script and not only the language. Sure the scripts are a lot easier to learn, but still it feels like the book only contains half of the entire picture ;)
Also, do you intend on issueing any translations? As elvish students are so dispersed I bet this book will fall into many people of different languages (like me from Switzerland), and especially the very detailed pronounciation guide and the exercises to transcript english words to the IPA may be very hard if the reader is not 100% sure how he is supposed to pronounce these english words.
Fiona Jallings Jun 22, 2017 (08:35)
Yeah, you missed the part where I talked about how in 3 syllable words (and longer) the stress always falls on the second or third from last syllables, depending on whether the second to last syllable is heavy.
Re: Tengwar
There were several reasons for that.
First, I want to decouple the concepts of translation and transcription.
Second, we rarely need to use tengwar or cirth online, because writing in it is super clumsy and usually requires uploading and hosting pictures.
Third, the easiest to use font doesn't work in Microsoft Word, which is what I used to make the book.
Fourth, to teach tengwar and cirth, it requires a lot more space to practice writing, and that doesn't fit in a 6x9 book very well.
Lastly, I wanted the paperback book to be under 20$.
I didn't come to this decision lightly. So, there's a free tengwar workbook available on my website that you can print out instead.
Re: translations
No idea. If it sells really, REALLY well, then it's possible.
Severin Zahler Jun 22, 2017 (10:41)
What do you mean with the Tengwar font not working in MS Word? I am doing transcriptions into Tengwar and Cirth almost daily using word.
Severin Zahler Jun 22, 2017 (10:42)
Fiona Jallings Jun 22, 2017 (15:54)
Okay, so you found the wording confusing. I introduced the simple rules first, then the exceptions.
Re:fonts
But not on social media, where we don't have the ability to install fonts.
Tengwar Telcontar, the font I prefer to use, doesn't work in Microsoft Word. Dan Smith's fonts work, but they are super clumsy to use. I'd rather just be able to type than have to be checking a reference chart constantly.
Tamas Ferencz Jun 22, 2017 (16:59)
Tamas Ferencz Jun 22, 2017 (17:08)
Severin Zahler Jun 23, 2017 (07:41)
+Tamas Ferencz I just recently checked the page of the Unicode consortium and tried to find the Tengwar proposal but I think I just failed to find the full list of suggestions... I guess there's no change since I checked like five years ago?