Blog 14

Independent Component 1

Literal

a) I, Aaron Hutchings affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 31 hours of work.

b) The book I used as my source was The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder.

c) I have updated my Independent Component log.

d) I read The Language Construction Kit as a guide to both language construction and reconstruction; making Sindarin a usable language requires you to be proficient at both tasks.  

Interpretive

I did a lot of small things, but my goal overall was to get a feel for how we could possibly take a language based around a fairly primitive Medieval society and update it for the 21st century.  Part of that was doing a lot of linguistic world-building exercised like redesigning the 10-key as shown in my photo evidence.  Other exercises were actually sitting down and studying Sindarin in order to get a handle on where our knowledge gaps were, particularly in the area of grammar.  My understanding is that the largest gap we have is in the past tense system.  We don't really know how to indicate whether something happened yesterday or three years ago.  The other large gap is that the syntax is very strange.  It could cause some very severe misunderstandings.  For instance, one can say, "The king will approach" or "Approach the king." by using the exact same sentence.

The Language Construction Kit

That thing in the bottom center.  That's the ten key.

Notes on Sindarin Grammer

Numbers 0-10, their names in Romanized Sindarin and their names in Tengwar, the most famous writing system of the elves. (the name for zero being a reconstruction originally meaning empty)

Applied

Part of researching Sindarin as opposed to Quenya is that there are a lot of academic disagreements about small things since Tolkien left the language unfinished.  In the Tolkien scholarly world, disagreements, arguments, and steel-cage death matches are the social lubricant.  My independent component gave me a firm introduction to many of the academic disagreements that people have been known to spend their entire careers on.  At the end of my hours, I presented a lesson on this to Flores, Gordon, and Ortega.