Monta Tervedhis, ie tahlen elleama vel selen silen loestel!

This will be an attempt at explaining the only language from my book that I have taken time to develop, Seanil Elvish. For those of you who don't know, I am working on a fantasy novel, you can read an excerpt here viewtopic.php?f=117&t=3311. The elves don't fully enter the books until the third, if all goes as planned, so I have quite a long time to work on developing the language and my technique for describing it, both of which are in their most incipient forms. There are three different areas of the language that I am going to talk about today, the vocabulary, the grammar, and the alphabet.

I am basing the vocabulary off of three languages that I am blending together, chosen because the first word I ever "translated" to Elvish was the word hope, and I chose the three coolest-sounding languages (for that word). They are Finnish, Norwegian, and Croatian. You may be thinking "WHAT?!?!?! Scandinavian languages for elvish?" yeah, that's what most people think, but it sounds pretty cool. Attached at the bottom of this page is my running alphabet (always subject to change) so take a look and let me know what you think!

The grammar structure is the hardest for me to describe, mainly because I can never get the parts of the sentences straight (I have the basics, but not enough to describe a whole new language), so what I am going to do is write out the sentence for each grammar structure that I have developed so far in Elvish, and then write the literal English translation of that sentence.
Past tense: Arvel teava (tee-AY-vuh) meien (my-EN) mavenel Ovar
English: Killed (past tense version of verb) you I could have.

Present tense: Monta Tervedhis, ie (eye) tahlen elleama (el-ee-AY-muh) vel selen silen loestel (low-STEHL)! (Correct version, all previous greeting lines dropped the word shine... )
English: Many greetings, the Star (of) Life on our meeting shine!

Future tense: Alantíl (ah-lahn-TEEL) meien eidír (eye-DEER) Essíl
English: Surrender I never will

As far as the alphabet goes, I invented that in a brief spell of boredom (which I hope I am not giving to you), so it is entirely made out of the whims of my will... Let me know what you think, and what I need to improve. A pronunciation guide for the elvish alphabet is underway, but I am having trouble writing it (it's finals week... 'nuff said).

Really nice. I really like how your Seanil dictionary was made.

Thank you! Any suggestions for improvement?

None that I can think of right now.

Now that all y'all have the alphabet AND the dictionary, you should try decoding this (and alerting me to all the mistranslations, I know of at least three... ). This came about as a result of two weeks of boredom, and a need to see what an entire page of elvish would look like... Please let me know if any of you in holy worlds can read it... I'm dying to see if anyone other than me can read my language...

Two things:

1. Technically, just so you know, the way to give a reference to a Psalm is as Psalm X:Y, not Psalms X:Y. The reason being that Psalm 135, for instance, is the 135th Psalm, not merely the 135th chapter of the book of Psalms.

2. I tried to decipher your version of Psalm 139:23. Here's what I have so far:

23 mion pail, i hirfsion, ae l

As you can see, I'm completely stuck on the second letter of the sixth verb. What is it? And did I get the rest of it right?

Ok, I will remember that when I rewrite it (normally Elvish writes left to right and bottom to top, I totally spaced out on that...). And no, that is not correct, the elvish for v23 is Meien paríl, Í Híroshen, ae meien... (well, when it is converted to normal characters...) Good luck on the rest! Would you say that my alphabet has too many similar characters? Or is it that my thing is merely unclear? Let me know if there is a better way to write that...

Well, on the one hand, you do have a lot of similar letters. Look, for instance, at the glyphs you have created for B, J, L, M, and N . They are virtually identical, especially the former two to each other and the latter three to one another. Your glyph for T also resembles these five. Your letters for ae and ea are also somewhat similar, particularly when written in cursive. Speaking of which, I think you need to consider how the letters will change when written in cursive, as it appears their distinctions become even more muted there.

Also, on a completely unrelated note, you probably don't need a letter Q and possibly not even C. There's really no reason to have, C, S, and K, unless you assign them to different sounds from those they carry in English, though you can if you want.

Ok, I will keep that in mind as I prepare to write a third draft. Also, most of the letters that sound the same are there in order to differentiate between similar sounding words... I will re-evaluate the pronunciations and see if perhaps some of the letters can be dropped.

Actually, you'll need to keep /s/ separate from /c/ and /k/. /s/ is a different sound, a fricative, while /c/ and /k/ represent the same sound, a stop.

Incidentally, Finnish and Welsh were Tolkien's greatest influences while creating Quenya and Sindarin. (Note: possible misspelling. I'm not exactly a huge Tolkien-language buff. Never could get a grasp on Elvish grammar.)

Sort of. C, S, and K do not all represent the same sound, it's true, but C switches based on context between the sounds of S and K, in English anyway. I'm referring to the English letters here, not their IPA equivalents, BTW. Anyhow, S and K can take over for C, or C can take over for K, but you really don't need all three as C only duplicates the sound of K in some cases and S in others.

Basically, what you said is true only of English (with a few exceptions here or there...mostly in Europe).

I would stress that you should only use these letters in a manner similar to English if you're trying to create a language related to, or similar to, English. Otherwise, this is a phenomena that doesn't usually develop in natural languages.

To the best of my knowledge, Esílis's language is not related to any real-world language and the correspondence of his letters to ours is solely for the purpose of helping us pronounce it. Hence my belief that he could get by just fine with K and S and have no need for Q and C.