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 <f>, but if it’s from a mutated
/p/, then it’s written with <ph> instead. /f/ is also written with <ph> if it appears
at the end of a word, for some reason. the letter <f> 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 <c>, 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 <f> 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.
