Post by Emiphin on Dec 24, 2013 12:42:41 GMT
Sindarin relies a lot on context to discern a sentence's meaning. It seems like in Sindarin, most filler words of English don't exist. Words like "the, a, an, who, which, that, where, is, are, of, being" are often implied either by no word or just "i". Here's a few to take note of
- "i" can either mean "the", "that/which/who", or "where". Naturally if "i" is followed by a noun, then it means "the (noun)" but if its followed by a verb or something else, then it is "that/which/who (verb)". If there's a verb before it and then a noun after it, then it means "(verb) where the (noun)".
- "adh" can either mean "and" or "with". If the word following "adh" is a noun, then it doesn't matter much whether it means "and" or "with". For example "I come to see Arwen and Aragon." The implication is that you mean to see them together: with one another. If the word following "adh" is a verb or some other phrase, then it only means "and", such as in "I fought the orcs and cut their heads". It would be erroneous to say "I fought the orcs with cut their heads".
A potentially ambugious phrase would be: "Find the man and the princess" if the two are not in the same place. In English this is ambiguous because its not clear if it means to find "the man and the princess" all as a single object, or if it means to find the man and find the princess, as two separate commands. The man and the princess could be in entirely different cities, so if the English speaker means the former and tries to translate that to Sindarin, you won't ever find "the man with a princess".
What the english speaker really means is "Find the man and (find) the princess". So then I think, we can avoid the ambiguity by translating it that way in Sindarin: "Find the man and find the princess". - "That night, joy wasn't desired." in this sentence the word desired, according to Dreamingfifi is "anírannen". This means "I desired" but she suggests a new find makes it usable in this way as a descriptive word "desired". I've yet to conform this, as what seems to make more sense to me is to use the third person "it". For example: "That night, joy (it) wasn't desired." Because really, "wasn't desired" refers to "joy" as the subject. Any time the a word is gonna be used like "desired" outside of a pronoun, its referring to some sort of noun. So the subject is an "it"...no? More on this later, I guess.