Kierosilmäisyys

 

Apropos my choice of nomenclature for Tolkien's two elven languages Quenya and Sindarin: Apparently, Tolkien had modelled Quenya after the Finnish language; many people have written about the linguistic "relationship" between the two. Personally, I don't see any real resemblance of Quenya to Finnish. Quenya uses many voiced consonants and there seem to be alot more of these in the Estonian language. I won't get into too much detail but I have actually made a chart comparing the phonomorphologies of Quenya and Finnish, with devastating results. But that was my point. The similarities are few and one wonders what connections Tolkien himself saw between the two languages. At any rate, ''kvenjä'', “looks” most Finnish, to me. Now, I know very little of the intricate rules of vowel harmony but, from what I've gathered, most Finnish word ending in -enjV (V = any vowel) usually have an ''ä'' at the end. The same decision-making processes apply to the name ''sindarja''. Sindarin, with the ''-in'' suffix, is given a typical Indo-European adjectival ending. Furthermore, the basic etymon here is ''sindar'', meaning ''grey elves''. So I felt a good Finnic suffix for this would be ''-ja''. First of all, it goes along well with ''kvenjä''. Secondly, it is an element found in some native-Finnish appellations: e.g., ''Karjala'' which in English is Karelia and the ''-ia'' ending seems to fit. I know I've got '''alot''' to learn about Finnish (and countless other things), but, for now, this is the best I can do.—[[Käyttäjä:Kierosilmäisyys|Kierosilmäisyys]] 16. joulukuuta 2005 kello 00:20:13 (UTC)