welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the noble tongue, Sindarin.
how have I gone this long doing a conlang review series without talking about Tolkien’s
languages? I mean, seriously, the languages made by JRR Tolkien are in the elite group
of conlangs that people outside of the conlang community have actually heard of, though perhaps
not by name. so I feel it’s only fitting for the final conlang review I make this year
to be one of Tolkien’s works. a perfect halfway point for Conlang Critic Season Three.
Sindarin is one of the two languages people mean when they say “Elvish language”,
the other being Quenya. I would say that Sindarin was created for The Lord of the Rings series,
but really it’s the other way around. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were created
so that Tolkien had a reason to have created as many languages as he did.
the family of elf languages that appears in Tolkien’s books began in the 1910s in the
form of a language called “Gnomish”, or “Goldogrin”. this language was the basis
of another elf language called “Noldorin”, which in turn was the basis of Sindarin.
in fiction, the Elvish languages are related to each other, sharing a Primitive Quendian
common ancestor. Sindarin is the most spoken Elvish language at the point the Lord of the
Rings series takes place. despite the prominent role Sindarin has in The Lord of the Rings
series, it’s the less well documented of the two most popular Elvish languages. so,
I guess in order to get a real sense of what the Elvish languages are like, I’ll have
to do that other one later.
not yet though.
my primary source of information for this review was Helge Fauskanger’s very extensive
analysis of the original Sindarin corpus, hosted on his website, Ardalambion.
Sindarin’s consonants are:
m n ng /ŋ/ p t c /k/
b d g /ɡ/ f, ph /f/ th /θ/ s ch /x/ h
v, f /v/ dh /ð/ hw /ʍ/ w i /j/ lh /ɬ/ rh /r̥/ l r
Sindarin was heavily influenced aesthetically by the Celtic languages, and most directly
by Welsh. this consonant inventory is pretty much a subset of the Welsh consonant inventory.
really, all it’s missing from Welsh is a palatal sibilant and some voiceless nasals.
also, that velar fricative is usually pronounced as a uvular fricative, which is probably because
of the uvular fricative in, you guessed it, Welsh.
the Celtic influence on Sindarin phonology isn’t just found in the inventory; it extends
into the deeper, more structural aspects, most notably consonant mutation.
essentially, what consonant mutation means is that words that begin with some specific
consonants change in predictable ways in some environments, typically after grammatical
particles. so, in Sindarin, after a particle ending with a vowel, for instance, the voiceless
stops /p t k/ become voiced /b d ɡ/, and the voiced stops /b d/ become fricatives /v
ð/, with /ɡ/ simply disappearing altogether, through an intermediary [ɣ].
other changes happen after particles ending in nasal consonants, stops, and liquids. this
sort of thing happens in Insular Celtic languages, and the way it works in Sindarin is pretty
similar to how it specifically works in Welsh, judging by this one chart on Wikipedia.
anyway, Sindarin’s vowels are...
EDGAR: Now hold on a second, there is definitely more to it than that!
MITCH: is that Edgar from Artifexian?
EDGAR: Good morning, Misali! I think it’s worth pointing out how consonant mutation works
in Insular Celtic languages in a bit more detail, don’t you?
MITCH: I guess, but I don’t actually know that much abut Celtic languages to begin with.
EDGAR: Well, given that I learned a little bit of Irish in school, I’d be glad to to explain
a thing or two about how consonant mutations work.
MITCH: sure, that would be great! take it away, Edgar!
EDGAR: Consonant mutation in Irish happens through either lenition (an séimhiú) or
eclipsis (an t-urú).
The séimhiú occurs in these environments and has the effect of mutating these initial consonants
into these consonants. Basically, stops become fricatives, plus some extras.
Side note: all Irish consonants, apart from /h/ come in two forms: a broad, velarised
form, and a slender, palatalised form. Hence the doubling on this list.
Regardless, the séimhiú is signalled in the orthography by placing a ‘h’ after
the initial consonant. So, for example …
cat ‘cat’ mo chat ‘my cat’
The urú works the same way. Eclipsis occurs in these environments and has the effect of
mutating these initial consonants into these consonants. Basically, voicing voiceless stops and turning
voiced stops into nasals.
This is signalled in the orthography by placing the new consonant before the old consonant.
So …
cat ‘cat’ ár gcat ‘our cat’
And it’s not only consonants that get affected, vowels too through a thing called n-, t-, or h-prothesis.
Basically, in certain circumstances t, h or n go before an initial vowel.
óg (young) -> Tir na nÓg (Land of youth) uisce (water) -> an t-uisce (the water)
éin (birds) -> na héin (the birds)
Now, I cannot emphasis just how cursory of an overview this is, so please, please, please check
out the links in the description to read up more on the epicness that is Irish.
Welsh, being another Celtic language, does something very similar to Irish. Its consonant
mutations are know as the treiglo. There are three main types: the soft mutation (treiglo
meddal), the nasal mutation (treiglo trwynol), and the aspirated mutation (treiglo llaes)
all of which cause these mutations.
And, like Irish, many environments trigger these mutations. Links in the description.
For example, he possessive ‘my’ triggers nasal mutation
cath ‘cat’ fy nghath ‘my cat’
That should have been a voiceless nasal but I cannot even … so moving on … the possessive
‘your’ triggers soft mutation
cath ‘cat’ dy gath ‘your cat’
And the possessive ‘her’ triggers aspirated mutation
cath ‘cat’ ei chath ‘her cat’
Note the different orthographic strategies here. Irish inserts letters, Welsh replaces
letters. So if Irish where written like Welsh it wouldn’t be
an bhean ‘the woman’ (with a h)
but rather
an vean (with a v)
And like Mitch already pointed out Sindarin is essentially riffing off of Welsh, which,
as a proud Irishman, makes me a little sad but as a fan of the greater Celto-sphere makes me exceedingly
happy!
MITCH: thanks, Edgar!
EDGAR: Thank you for having me. Hey, you should come back to my channel some time!
MITCH: oh yeah, we could talk about numbering systems again, that was fun.
EDGAR: I mean, we are definitely already doing that. You hadn’t even decided
that I should be in this video until weeks into the process of writing our second number
systems collaboration.
MITCH: hey, stop ruining the illusion!
EDGAR: Oh, okay, person who is absolutely having a conversation with me in real time right
now. I should probably let you get back to the review.
MITCH: right. see you later!
EDGAR: Until next time, Edgar out.
okay, where were we? oh, that’s right.
Sindarin’s vowels are:
i iː y yː u uː ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː
ɑ ɑː
apparently, a witch cursed me for a thousand years preventing me from ever properly pronouncing
a front rounded vowel. [y]? [y]? am I even close?
anyway, unlike the consonant inventory, this is not directly from Welsh. the long vowels,
when they appear in single syllable words, are sometimes pronounced even longer than
usual, as overlong vowels, which is some good flavor.
it would be a disservice to not discuss phonaesthetics somewhat. Tolkien famously once said, quote,
“Most English-speaking people... will admit that ‘cellar door’ is beautiful, especially
if dissociated from its sense and from its spelling. More beautiful than, say, ‘sky’,
and far more beautiful than ‘beautiful’.”
I always assumed that Tolkien was the first person to point out that “cellar door”
is a nice sounding phrase, that is, as long as you say it like /sɛlədɔː/, but the
Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper wrote about it about sixty years earlier.
regardless, Tolkien cared quite a bit about phonaesthetics, and he wanted to be sure that
his Elvish languages were euphonious. this is why Sindarin’s aesthetics are borrowed
almost wholesale from Welsh. Tolkien loved the way that Welsh sounds, saying that in
Welsh, cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.
Sindarin is written with a script called the Tengwar, which are best described as a featural
abjad.
the Tengwar fictionally were invented by an elf named Fëanor for writing different Elvish
languages, and, as is to be expected, they work slightly differently for the different
languages they’re used for. for the purposes of this review, I’ll just describe how Sindarin
uses the Tengwar.
the Tengwar are written from left to right, with most individual letters representing
consonant sounds. vowels are mostly written with a diacritic on the following consonant.
indicating vowels using diacritics instead of separate letters is the key characteristic
of abjads and abugidas, with the main difference being that in abugidas there’s an assumed
vowel if there isn’t a diacritic and in abjads no diacritic either means that there
isn’t a vowel or it’s just ambiguous what the vowel is.
anyway in both abjads and abugidas the vowel diacritic usually goes on the consonant before
the vowel it represents, not the consonant after, which makes the way the Tengwar do
it pretty cool!
also, if there isn’t a consonant after the vowel, there’s this letter used as a “vowel
carrier”, and long vowels are written as their corresponding short vowels on a “long
vowel carrier”.
now, while I’d say that the fact that the Tengwar are this cool unique type of abjad
is the most interesting part of the system, the part people usually bring up when they
talk about the Tengwar is how it’s a featural writing system.
and here to discuss what it means for a writing system to be featural is Josh from NativLang.
hello, welcome! thanks for being on the show!
he’s not actually here. I mean, could you imagine?
you already know what a featural writing system is. you know, when similar letters represent
similar sounds? yeah, that.
a featural writing system implies that its creators had a decent understanding of phonetics,
which is unlikely to happen in a civilization that doesn’t already have written language.
so it’s unsurprising that in fiction the Tengwar were not the original writing system
for the Elvish languages.
of course, when Sindarin appears in the books, it’s usually transliterated into the Latin
alphabet, and the way it’s Romanized is... well, it’s something!
so, it’s not a straightforward direct mapping of Tengwar to Latin letters. it’s also not
a fully phonemic transcription either. some things are written differently to reflect
important information that isn’t indicated in the actual orthography.
like, those overlong vowels that show up in monosyllables are written with circumflexes,
as opposed to the normal long vowels which are just written with accutes. some things
are written differently if they’re the result of consonant mutation, like /f/ which is usually
written with , but if it’s from a mutated /p/, then it’s written with instead.
/f/ is also written with if it appears at the end of a word, for some reason. the
letter at the end of a word is used for the sound /v/. I assume this is purely for
aesthetic purposes, because there isn’t any other reason I can think of.
speaking of aesthetics, the sound /k/ is Romanized with the letter , in all contexts, including
before front vowels, which is another clear nod to the Celtic languages.
Sindarin grammar is complex and extensive, and also not completely regular. many rules
have exceptions, in a way that’s completely believable. Sindarin feels lived in.
most of the complexity comes from the consonant mutations I talked about earlier. this chart
doesn’t really show the full picture, this is just how it works in general.
anyway, nouns in Sindarin decline for number, singular and plural, and also at one point
in its fictional history there was a dual too but modern Sindarin just has singular
and plural. it usually works by changing vowels to mark the plural number.
the way that vowels change in the plural is somewhat, but not entirely, unpredictable.
quick example, sometimes vowels behave differently in the final syllable of a word. the plural
of “edhel” is “edhil”.
so the first /ɛ/ stays the same in the plural, but the second /ɛ/ becomes /i/.
this way of marking grammatical information by changing a word’s vowel immediately made
me think of Indo-European ablaut, which you might remember from the last episode. English
has a few nouns where the difference between singular and plural is indicated with vowels,
like “goose / geese”.
for no particular reason I decided to look up how Welsh handles grammatical number and
wouldn’t you know it nouns are often marked for number by changing their vowels.
this isn’t, like, the default in Welsh, like it is in Sindarin. most random examples
I threw at Google Translate came up with plurals indicated with suffixes.
there’s also some where there’s both a suffix and the vowel changes.
still, I think I have a pretty solid idea of where this aspect of Sindarin came from.
also dealing with number, the definite article i causes the following noun to undergo consonant
mutation, with its initial consonant becoming “soft”. the definite article for the plural
number is “in”, which causes a nasal consonant mutation. so, the different forms of a word
like parf can appear quite different.
notice that under nasal mutation, the n that caused the mutation disappears, further disguising
what’s actually going on.
adjectives go after nouns, and agree with number, being marked for number with the same
vowel gradation process that nouns are marked with.
the way verbs work in Sindarin is never explained in any of the canon material. however, it’s
possible to reverse engineer a full system from the examples. Helge Fauskanger credits
David Salo for the analysis of Sindarin verbs described on Ardalambion, which I will now
briefly summarize here.
verbs are generally marked for number and person using suffixes.
for some verbs, specifically those ending with -a in their stem form, this is extended
into a fully suffix-based verb system which can be neatly summarized in a table.
this is, of course, an oversimplification. like, sometimes a verb suffix comes with more
of that ablaut-like vowel gradation.
you know, stuff like that. really, nothing about Sindarin is as straightforward as any
summary will imply.
verbs that don’t end with -a get a bit more complicated, and a lot more ablaut-like.
this is also where things get the most speculative, so take everything here with 64.8 milligrams
of salt.
so, a lot of these suffixes, specifically these ones,
cause any /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ in the verb to become /ɛ/. so, tôl, teli.
the vowel is long in the third person singular present here because for single syllable verbs
that fit this pattern that’s how the third person singular present is marked.
this is the simpler part of the way these verbs work. the more complicated part is the
past tense. these suffixes all start with a nasal /n/, which has some interesting behaviors.
so, sometimes, but not usually, the suffix can just be added to the stem directly.
the default behavior, however, is that it’s an infix, with the nasal /n/ placed before
the final consonant of the verb stem, with the rest of the affix used as an actual suffix.
in its fictional history, various word final consonant sequences underwent some phonological
changes, so this infix has some neat effects.
oh, and remember how word final /v/ is Romanized with for basically no reason? well, this
means that verbs that end with /v/ in their stems have some especially strange forms,
like the word for “to lick”, for example.
Sindarin vocabulary is serviceable. I usually think vocabulary in general is the least interesting
part of a conlang, what individual words for things are doesn’t matter as much as underlying
systems.
what usually makes up for that in a fictional language is how reading what words exist in
a given language can help you get a feeling for what the culture that speaks that language
must be like.
there is no single comprehensive canon Sindarin dictionary. the best you can get are lists
that have been compiled by fans. the one I found the most useful was Hiswelókë’s
Sindarin dictionary.
reading through a list of Sindarin words, I felt a way I rarely feel when I’m researching
a conlang. I felt as though I had been transported to a magical fantasy world, and that I was
choosing to spend my time there reading a dictionary.
I at no point reading these definitions said to myself, “ah yes, now THAT’S an elf
word!”, it just felt like I was reading a list of words in a foreign language and
what they mean.
and, in a way, that makes sense, right? like, Sindarin wordlists were compiled by fans analyzing
the official canon corpus in a way more analogous to how dictionaries for natural languages
are written than it is to how modern conlang dictionaries are written. you don’t get
a sense of the reasoning behind anything, there’s just words and how they’re used.
I have no idea what this says about the quality of Sindarin. this aspect feels like a natural
language more than it feels like a fictional language, so that’s good, right? but if
there had been a canon full length Sindarin dictionary written by Tolkien with some actual
flavor to it, there’s no way I’d complain that it feels unrealistic.
really, it’s just that there isn’t enough Sindarin text out there. I mean, there’s
no way this culture that values archery as a skill has a word for “bow” but not one
for “arrow”. there’s necessarily things missing, and I don’t know how much of that
missing material is truly missing and how much of it was actually thought out and just
never published.
you know what there is information about is how numbers work!
Sindarin uses base twelve, written using these twelve digits from zero to eleven.
at least, that’s what I thought but psyche! it’s actually base ten! the digits for ten
and eleven? not actually used for Sindarin! they’re for other languages written with
the Tengwar that use base twelve, but not Sindarin.
well, since apparently Sindarin doesn’t actually use dozenal, this is a lot less interesting
than I thought it was going to be. sorry about that! there are some like, kinda dozenalish
things here, like the numbers that have unique words go up to twelve, and there’s a word
for a gross, but other than that it’s all decimal under the hood. what a letdown!
so uh, fun behind the scenes fact: when I started researching for this episode I was
like “oh man, Edgar Artifexian would totally love this. there’s Celtic influence, there’s
a featural writing system, and I’m pretty sure I heard somewhere that it uses base twelve!”
and then as I kept researching I decided to ask Edgar if he wanted to show up in the video
and talk about consonant mutation, as you saw before. and boy, sure am glad I didn’t
ask him to show up to talk about the dozenal numbering system instead!
the following text appears as the inscription on the Doors of Durin in The Fellowship of
the Ring, written by JRR Tolkien.
Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: pedo mellon a minno. Im Narvi hain echant: Celebrimbor o Eregion
teithant i thiw hin.
all in all, Sindarin is an incredibly important conlang. it arguably inspired the entire modern
constructed language community. it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s pretty dang
good. the only real criticism I have is that it leans a bit too heavily on its natural
language inspiration, and yet even then it’s hard to call that a bad thing.
one thing is that I wish Sindarin was more accessible. this is absolutely not Tolkien’s
fault, of course, but if it weren’t for the hard work and dedication of the Lord of
the Rings fandom and every fantasy nerd’s strong desire to catalog things, the rich
details of Sindarin would be spread thin across countless appendices and posthumously published
documents.
so, hey, thanks, The Lord of the Rings fandom, for doing all the hard parts of this episode
for me. the very least I can offer in return is a positive review, right? Sindarin is pretty
good. it’s very rich in detail, and very believable.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Poliespo.
and also thanks to Edgar from Artifexian. I’d tell you to check out his channel, but
you’re all already subscribed to Artifexian so I don’t need to do that. be on the lookout
for that second numbering systems collaboration we’re doing on his channel though, that’s
gonna be pretty soon.
man, I usually don’t have this much stuff to say at the end of a video. is there anything
else?
oh, I guess there’s one thing.
this video will be the final episode of Conlang Critic in 2019. the Poliespo episode will
be in January 2020. however, those of you who have been keeping track of things will
know that I’ve been trying to make at least one big video every month. I’m not taking
December off. in fact, my next video is the most effort I’ve ever put into anything
in my entire youtube career. I’d hate for you to miss it.