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Ameron
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Post Future Tense
on: January 01, 2017 11:25
I am currently reading "A Gateway to Sindarin" by David Salo. Despite substantial lack of explanation, I have been able to explain most of what has stumped my by carefully examining previous portions of the book. Nonetheless, there are still parts of this book that I believe to be in error. For example on page 78 it states that in the liquid mutation voiceless stops become voiced stops, while they seem, in fact, to become voiceless fricatives.

Anyhow, to my question. Page 115 has several things that seem important enough to the grammar of Sindarin that I feel I need clarification on. It refers to the suffix -tha which conjugates like an a-stem verb used to form the future tense. In the first person however, the "a" mutates to an "o." As the only difference, it seems, is the final consonant, why would a vowel mutation be induced only here? The only explanation I can concoct is that because the first person ending -n derives from Common Eldarin -ni, an i-affection occured in the ancient form changing "a" to "ai" which then, via some other historical vowel shift, converted to "o." Does anyone have any input on this?

Thanks.

[Edited on 01/02/2017 by Ameron]

[Edited on 01/02/2017 by Ameron]
Lokyt
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on: January 02, 2017 11:21
The problem is explained on p. 113. - it has (according to Salo) to do with vowel length and word accentuation.

BTW, -o- as the stem vowel occurs in 2nd person as well, comprising suffixes -og and -odh; this has already been clarified some years ago (and Salo's Gateway is badly out of date in many aspects).
Tamas Ferencz
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on: January 02, 2017 11:45
Well in at least one place Tolkien seems to say that the a>o change happened in the suffix itself; in his essay Common Eldarin: Verb Structure he says that


In primitive Sindarin the future was expressed in two ways: (a) by adding thā (>OS thō) to the aorist stem: as mathitāni 'I am going to eat', 'the immediate future'; (b) by adding ubā to the bare verbal stem as matubāni 'I shall eat', the remoter future. The element thā is adverbial, and meant originally 'then, next'.


(PE22:131)

Nota bene some years later he revises the whole thing and says that the element tha comes from the reversible root ÞĂ/AÞA and is a verb of agreement "closely resembling in senses and uses English will (when not mere future)". He also states that "S. had no pure future tense, but used the verbal TUL as an auxiliary of the future...".

[Edited on 01/03/2017 by Tamas Ferencz]
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Ameron
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on: January 05, 2017 04:05
Thanks guys!
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