Merin Essi ar Quenteli! – News & Updates

Just a warning (and hopefully so I don’t get a lot of panicked e-mails) The Sindarin textbook is getting some revisions to its structure and database – so things are going to be wonky for a few hours while I do updates.

The updates to the textbook are as follows:

Chapter 5 (prestanneth chapter) is being re-organized. It now has 5 lessons. The plurals section has been split into 2 lessons, the first focusing on the normal plural, and the second on all of the archaic forms and various plural suffixes. The prefix/preposition lesson has been broken into 2 parts as well, and moved to after the prestanneth lesson. One half focuses on the prepositions and prefixes, the other focuses on negation and superlatives/comparatives.

Chapter 7 (verbs) I moved the negation section to Chapter 5, seeing as it made more sense to introduce it earlier. I moved the Analogy lesson to Chapter 8.

Chapter 8 (dialects) has grown a lot larger than I thought I’d make it in the beginning. It started out with a l=plan for 3 lessons, but I added the Analogy lesson, heavily trimmed down because you already know how to make the past tense at that point, no reason to go over it again, and made it an Old versus New Sindarin lesson, going over various ways to show what era the speakers are speaking during. I thought that I’d focus on Beleriand, the Exiles, and the Gondorians, but I ended up needing to differentiate also between Western and Eastern 2nd and 3rd age Sindarin, so I added in a lesson about that too.

Other than that… I’m writing online quizzes that should prepare you for the homework. They aren’t done, and I still need to rewrite a ton of homework assignments – but these things don’t mess with the database, so they won’t be a part of this update, beyond the few that I have done already being posted.

See you on the other side of the update! Here’s to hoping it all goes well!

I’m making a series of Sindarin online quizzes that will accompany the textbook! They’re still in the rough stages of development, but here’s what I have so far:

Vowels
Diphthongs
Consonants
Multi-syllable Words

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

I’ve been making some rapid edits to the textbook over the past week.

I just finished replacing the poorly hand-drawn Tengwar, Tîw, and Cirth from Chapter 2 of Your Sindarin Textbook.

I also did some more research on Angerthas Daeron… and realized that I’d been using it like a dwarf trying to write Elven words by ear. Yeah, major-league screw up there. So, the material in Chapter 2 lesson 2 is greatly improved.

Due to some fantastic feedback that I’ve been getting at the Languages of Middle-earth, a Google+ community with some hard-core Tolkien-language fans, I’ll be doing a lot of editing in the coming weeks. I’ve fixed a problem in the Negation chapter: u- the verb means only “to not do”, not “to not be”, as I had assumed it could mean both as it does in Quenya.

More corrections to come!

Márienna!