down-time.org blog

A friend’s daughter asked me about learning to speak elvish, and after an hour of looking at links this is the commented list I came up with:

As I’ve looked further it doesn’t seem like elvish is complete enough as a language for having conversations with your friends. At least not without making up a number of words to accommodate modern topics.

I know I’ve had a lot of fun with the elvish characters, however. Speaking elvish seems like too much work for the payoff I’m looking for. My main goal is to be able to write my journals in elvish, and have something that looks really cool. I had initially been trying to learn Japanese, because the artistic design of the word/letter symbols appealed to the artist in me. Elvish, when I discovered it, seemed like a much easier road. I read a lot and looked at a lot of sites before I came to this conclusion. If you’re interested, here’s my list.

Learning Elvish:

Elvish in ten minutes:
This is my recommendation for where to start. It’s a quick and easy system for writing english in elvish characters.
http://www.starchamber.com/paracelsus/elvish/elvish-in-ten-minutes.html

Elvish names: This is the other side of the whole name thing. It takes the meaning of your name and translates those words into Quenya equivalents. For example: “LUCIA, LUCY (f.) - feminine of LUCIUS (q.v.), thus could Calie, Calme, Calde, Calien, etc.”
http://www.elvish.org/elm/names.html

Quenya seems to be the most complete of the elvish languages from what I’ve read, and so would be the best one to focus on if you were going to try to learn to speak the elvish language.

Basic Elvish words and phrases:
http://www.forodrim.org/daeron/md_parl.html

Quenya Word list:
http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/wordlists.htm

Here is a FAQ (frequently asked questions) that has a lot of good links for elvish stuff:
http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/faq.htm

The elvish languages are Quenya and Sinarin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindarin

The elvish characters are called Tengwar.
Here is the wikipedia entry for Tengwar which will give you a nice overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar

Here are some textbooks that could be used for an introduction. I’ve only poked at them a little bit.
http://www.geocities.com/tengwar2001/pubs.htm

Here is a fairly athoritative site on elvish and other Tolkien languages:
http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/

A Course in Quenya: I have not tried the course, and don’t know how well it compares with the other sites above
http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf/qcourse.htm

Modern elvish: This is a rather wordy article about people taking Tolkien’s elvish, primarily Quenya, and trying to expand it into a usable modern language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Eldarin

Writings in Neo- (or modern) elvish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Eldarin_literature

That whole “Pride goeth before a fall” thing. I’m 37, I’ll be 38 in May. I’m not sure how life snuck up on me, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that I’m no longer young. It’s mostly the whispers of the aches and pains and wierd internal maladies that remind me that entropy is slowly taking it’s toll.

Well, that and I can’t shake off the effects of my foolishness as easily as I used to. Tried to catch the neighbors cat the other day. I totally bungled it, getting my face and stomach scratched up in the process. Was I always this klutzy, or is this a new thing?

I’m going to be helping Non move a big screen TV and it’s wardrobe-ish stand this weekend. It’s in the south bay area and we’re way north of there. So we’ll be doing a bit of driving. The drive should be fun. Hopefully we’ll be able to get into a nice juicy theological argument. Those are excellent for passing the time. I’ve been excercising, trying to get my injured sholder up to the task. It hasn’t been too bad, but I still have to loosen it up before I really do much heavy lifting.

We’ll to be honest the trip was something that just came up. I was excercising anyway. Trying to get my sholder to stop aching when I do stuff. No such luck yet.

Oh, wait. You haven’t heard the story of how I got my sholder injury. I don’t know if you care (why on earth are you reading this if you don’t?) but anyway:

It was probably a good, geeze 17 years ago. I was out biking the hills around northern San Diego. I had this slick racing bike at the time, light as a feather. Tires so narrow you couldn’t imagine how it could be stable to ride. I was on my way back home, coming down a long winding downhill stretch of road. Around one of the hairpin turns the road had a coating of sand. A mountain bike might have taken the turn anyway, but on my razor thin tires there was no chance of sucessfully navigating the turn. Anyone heard of road rash? I’d heard it was really nasty, so I wasn’t going to chance it. I headed into the field that was right there. Again, on a mountain bike that would have been no problem. The other downside was the field was full of laundry-basket sized boulders. I went off the first one I came to like I was Evil Knievel, and then promptly turned upside down. I was on a racing bike after all. Thankfully it wandered away shortly after we shot up into the air, so it didn’t come down on top of me. I did however come down on my right sholder. I presume that’s when I broke my collar bone. At the time I was still immortal, so I didn’t go into the hospital to have it x-rayed. I figured that, since I hadn’t actually come down on one of the many stones the field was full of, I was probably ok. 17 years later I’m no longer quite so sure. A couple of years ago, when I finally decided to do something about the occassional pains I got in my right shoulder I had it x-rayed. To my suprise I found out about the separated collar bone. I can’t find the spot by poking at it, and that’s not where the discomfort originates from (I think). After a round of physical therapy by an incompetent professional we realized that the problem was with my rotater cuff, or something, which I had also managed to injure in the crash.

It sucks loosing your immortality. And, I ride a mountain bike now. Even though I don’t do much off-roading.

Just some idle speculation, and of course production times are estimates:

3 Superman comics. Cost: $9. Total reading time: 45 minutes. Time it took the author(s) to produce: 3 months.

The book Kushiel’s Dart. Cost $3.50 (used). Total reading time 72 hours. Time it took the author to produce: 1 year.

The Xbox360 game Dead Rising. Cost $36 (including the original rental). Total play time so far: 22 hours. (It’s about a 10 hour game, and I’ve played it more than once). Time it took the developers to produce: 3-4 years.

Or perhaps I’m being a bit too logical.

Write about naked girls: PG, maybe since anyone can buy a book with fairly graphic content. Anyone ever heard of a bookseller checking somone’s ID before the purchase of a racy novel.

Draw pictures of naked girls: R, maybe. I’ve seen comics available at multiple comic shops with pictures of topless girls that any minor could purchase.

Produce a video game with topless girls: M or AO (adults only). I think Oblivion got modded and the ESRB re-rated their game as M or something. (I’m tired of looking things up right now or I’d go check.)

The sex scenes in the Kushiel’s Dart book, as well as a great many others I’ve read in the past got me thinking about this. Funny how we view sexual content based on the medium it’s delivered to us in.

To quote a really great movie “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

So I was reading Little Miss Mortis’s blog(AKA Peteythepirate9) and enjoying her poetry, when the word “Faire” struck me. I wasn’t used to that spelling being used that way. Faire makes me think of carnival, where fair could be used for something’s pleasant appearance. I’ve got a Mac, just like Non, so I right clicked on the word and had it look it up in the awesome little dictionary program. That’s when it tells me that it’s also going to pull up references from wikipedia too.

That is so awesome.