Forums:URGENT: Roots and words.

Tolkien Gateway > Forums > URGENT: Roots and words.

Guys, I believe that it is high time we had a proper compilation of the primitive Elven roots, both from The Etymologies, the Addenda/Corrigenda published in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, and the Elven mini-lexicon at the end of the Silmarillion.

I know it is a painstaking task, but this whole thing is a knowledge base, right? We have to take the time to do this. Recently I was able to acquire a copy of the Lost Road, so I now have access to the whole range of roots, stems, and words. Frankly, I was astounded at the huge amount of information in there- and also, how little of it is up here. Maybe we should get a team together? Transcribe say, two roots (and all corresponding info) a day, and post them up here. Each. We could get done quite quickly, but I need volunteers. We could quite easily make a full Elven-corpus, as it is, with Quenya, Sindarin, Telerin, Ossiriandic, Doriathrin, etc. Simply because we have access to all of it. Maybe an interactive Etymological engine. I know Morgan's got a lot of info up here too in his own dictionaries. Would it really take that long to establish a language-base here? If we had 50 people willing to do this, and we each did 2 roots a day, we would be done in less than a week. Dunno, actually, haven't counted how many there are. But definitely not more than five days.

OBVIOUSLY... we won't get fifty people. And that's okay. It can be over time. Willingly we could do more. But really, i think it is a rather splendid idea to get together a full knowledgebase, user-friendly,practical as well as abstract, for those who understand linguistics and those who don't. I want to make this better than what we have at Ardalambion,with lookup functions for all the Elven-tongues, and English too.

What do you say? who is willing? we need as many people as possible, but they must be committed enough to copy out around 2 entries from the book every day. Also, you must have access to the material.And finally (if we do get a team together) maybe the admins could make us a seperate, veiled-off section on this site for us to work on and compile stuff. Would all this be possible? —Unsigned comment by Reallyfat (talk • contribs).

I'm glad to see your enthusiasm, Reallyfat! While I basically agree with your idea, you have to remember that the work is more tedious than one can imagine. Two years ago I had rather much free time, and wrote ca. 20 or 30 linguistic articles about primitive Elven roots. The problem is that it often takes many hours to write a good article, checking information in PE, VT and HoMe 5 (you also have quite many roots in War of the Jewels, and some other writings). In other words I sadly don't think it's possible to get a team of volunteers together to do this on a regular basis. But if you're excited to get started, there's nothing holding you back! :-) --Morgan 17:12, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I have some reservations, eg. I am sure we must resolve in some subective interpretations, such as deciding if a root is related to another or not, or whether we should update it to comform with a word Tolkien later updated (see for example, ocamnar). Other than that, I am with you. Sage 17:55, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, as far changing, obsolete, and similar roots I agree 100%. And Morgan, my plan was not to write articles, but to establish a database. Kind of like you have done with your dictionaries. But a full, searching/finding, in depth dictionary.

So, what do you say? Are you in too? Really, it is as simple as opening up the etymologies and transcribing in two entries every day.

Sage, if you are 'officially' in, shift over to my talk page, and we can begin assignments there. I also hope that an admin (Ederchil, we need you) will soon be able to offer us a better place on the site for putting together the work.

Thanks.—Unsigned comment by Reallyfat (talk • contribs).

Well this sounds rather interesting if you ask me, although I'm mainly interested in Noldorin and I truly must say that I have no idea how much time I would have available to spend on this. ~denDAY 22:04, 3 July 2013 (UTC)