Post K8P7fVmEGho

Александр Запрягаев May 04, 2015 (20:06)

Something special for this day. As +Björn Fromén hinted to me, there are multiple ways to theorise upon a single example of Elvish poetry; +Roman Rausch does agree in this topic. It is just as plausible that actual linnyd employed not (or not merely) accentual patterns but quantitative ones: with a scheme of long and short syllables, not stressed vs. unstressed. This time, I attempted a trickier verse (at least for me, but possibly hinting that it's really complicated to compose any quantitative poetry in Sindarin whatsoever). Thus, if this is not a linnod, I honestly don't know what it is (I even tried to reproduce the contraposition of the original one).

Gwistiel aenad o chuil, ú-besso únad o chin.

[Whatever from life having changed, affect [you] nothing about yourself.]

gwista- 'change (trans.)' (cf. Q. (w)vista-)
aenad 'if anything, whatever' (cf. Q. aiquen 'whoever')
únad 'nothing' (ú + nad 'thing, it')
I suggest that a pronoun in a prepositional construction is mutated as the preposition orders; I don't think a grammatical lenition should be performed for the case is never accusative. Hence o chin instead of ** o gin.

Tamas Ferencz May 05, 2015 (23:59)

I have always believed linnyd are true plpentameters in the Greco-Latin tradition, quantitative. Somehow it never occurred to me that they could be accentual. Strange.

Александр Запрягаев May 06, 2015 (11:40)

+Tamas Ferencz For myself, linnyd were always explicitly accentual. Speaking a language without any phonematic distinction between long and short vowels, where a vowel is long exactly when stressed, with a further heavily developed tradition of accentual verse, I noticed the stress pattern in Ónen i•Estel… at once, but had to be pointed to the quantitative scheme to find it. And of course, all other known Sindarin verse examples are purely accentual (their pattern breaks dramatically if we count the long syllables), and it is strange for me to have two incompatible verse systems in the same language, so I tend to believe the accentual interpretation (which also greatly expands the possible number and variation of lines). Comparing with Quenya yields nothing, for it employs an alliterative verse, there are no poems in Goldogrin and all known Noldorin is explicitly accentual. (Funny to mention that in Jackson's movie they pronounce it the way it becomes a trochaic tetrameter!)

Tamas Ferencz May 06, 2015 (11:51)

+Александр Запрягаев
te two systems aren't reconcilable for me, as my native language has both (Hungarian)

Björn Fromén May 06, 2015 (23:47)

At least when he wrote "A Secret Vice", Tolkien saw no problem with quantitative and accentual verse coexisting in Quenya.

Александр Запрягаев May 07, 2015 (10:01)

+Tamas Ferencz +Björn Fromén Good for the languages, then. I'm all for versatility of verse.