These are all sources that people have used for Tolkien's Languages that people shouldn't. If you are uncertain of a source that you have been using, contact us and we will check it out for you.
| Website Title |
The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-earth by R. S. Noel |
| Reason(s) |
This book is outdated by 40+ years. |
| Website Title |
Arwen-Undomiel.com – Elvish (the old version, it since has been updated and now is quite good) |
| Reason(s) |
- The word lists are incomplete, lacking words from the Etymologies or any of the recent publications and have many poorly reconstructed words in them that aren't marked, and the various Elven languages are mixed together, without an labling.
- The pronunciation guide is often incorrect, and tries to use English orthography to show pronunciation. It completely ignores the vowel Y and vowel length. It often ignores or gets wrong the stress patterns in Elven words.
- The person who put it together knows nothing about the Elven languages, therefore the phrases in the phrasebook are plagiarized from random sources, some good, some which are on this list.
- The male name list has a feminine name ending listed as a masculine name ending.
To put it in the web-designer's own words:
In some cases I have added meaningless letters to "Elvish-ize" the names, the most common being "dh" and "th" (Cuguwen [Dove Maiden] doesn't sound quite Elvish, but Cugedhiel does).
Again, this website was that bad until recently. It was taken over by a group of people in the forums, and they let me redo it all. It is no longer an untrustworthy source of Elvish!
This website's old content can be found in many websites, because the author encouraged people to repost her deeply flawed material. This is a list of the websites using her old content:
|
| Website Title |
Tel'Mithrim – The Grey Company |
| Reason(s) |
To quote them:
Q. What's this about an Elven Language?
A. When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the setting for the Lord of the Rings he crafted an entire world to go with it. Included in that world were the grammatical structure and a rudimentary dictionary for a number of Elven Tongues. Since we roleplay Elves online, we took that dictionary, simplified the grammatical structure and expanded the dictionary heavily. It is not cannon Elven as Tolkien wrote it, simply our own adaptation. Which we like better. Thank you very much.
Many people have plagiarized this phrasebook because in the distant past, this was the only Elvish phrasebook on the web and its content kinda looked like Tolkien's Elvish languages. It's so notorious that it has become known as "Grelvish". Here are the culprits:
|
| Website Type |
Random Name Generators |
| Reason(s) |
These are just programs throwing together names or words from Tolkien's work without combining the words properly (sometimes using pieces of names instead of words) and with no care for what the names or words actually mean or who they belonged to.
|
| Website Type |
Random Syllable Generators |
| Reason(s) |
These are just programs playing the "Let's stick random syllables together and call them Elvish!" game. They didn't even try to use any Elvish words, or follow any phonetic rules of Elvish languages.
|
| Website Title |
English-Elvish Translator |
| Reason(s) |
- The "translator" is in Quenya, but it doesn't tell you that.
- It doesn't allow for more than one result, or for a more complete viewing of the definition.
- The phrase translator has absolutely no knowledge of grammar, infact, it was stumped by simple plurals.
|
| Website Title |
Sindarin |
| Reason(s) |
- Grammatical misunderstandings and mistakes from not using the Etymologies and using the movies as canon.
- The grammar is quite incomplete.
- It is woefully outdated. A lot of important publications have happened since this was written. It doesn’t look like anyone is updating the website.
|
| Website Title |
The Sindarin Phrase Book |
| Reason(s) |
- Grammatical mistakes involving adjectives – adjectives follow nouns in Sindarin.
- Fails to use prestanneth, one of the cornerstones of Sindarin grammar.
- Fan-made words aren’t marked.
- Inserts Quenya grammar when they don’t know the Sindarin grammar.
- Doesn’t do the Sindarin copula correctly, so they borrow it from Quenya, without any modification or adjustment for being in a different language.
- Very outdated. It doesn’t include information from any publication later than 2005.
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