A luhta tálunyassë, pan apárien parmanen Amanya eldalambé!
Parma Ñoldorinwai quentelion ya Micael nin tencë ná yerna ar mauya nin sá at-etécië. Sinen, parnen. Ma mára len?
Ahem… Well that was fun. Basically: I’m rewriting the outdated Quenya phrasebook that Michael wrote for me ages ago. In order to do it, I learned Quenya.
As I study Quenya, I am struck by how much more effort Tolkien put into Quenya. The pronouns are more or less complete, the tenses flushed out, and even some modality sprinkled in. And the words! There are so many more words! I’ve had to do very little reconstruction. I feel like I’m being spoiled. Best of all is that Tolkien has made many greetings and farewells for Quenya, as well as a wealth of interjections and conversational bits and pieces. I’ll do my best to work as many as I can find into the phrasebook.
I’m still in contact with Michael, and he helps me find and fix errors in what I come up with, but he’s got his own projects to worry about, so this is pretty much me on my own. Oh, I love agglutinative languages!