I was sat

I've now been in England for one year. Somehow I survived. Perhaps made easier by smuggling brownie mix and Nestle chocolate chips across the border, and by having access to US TV-on-the-internet, I managed to make it through an entire year in the UK. There are many things I could write about living here, but on reflection, nothing made me want to write a blog post until considering the oft heard phrase "I was sat there."

I could, for example, talk about the food. I could wax poetic about a midnight kebab, discuss the subtle lack of any flavor in fish & chips, relate the militant loyalty the English show to their English curry, or express my deep wish that more steak dinners could be had in pie form. But no, nothing makes me realize I'm in a foreign country more than ordering food from a pub and being asked, "Where are you sat at?" I've been here long enough to be used to it, but the briefest pause must have prompted a follow-up: "Where are you sitting?" Ah, that's better.

I could talk about the other funny things they say. An elevator is a lift and an apartment is a flat, and all that... but you've most likely heard that before. I could mention some less well-known and certainly more important translations, like pants are trousers and undies are pants. Exits are ways out and "for here" is have in and "to go" is take away, etc.... all these appear on a running list I started long ago of the unique things you hear on this side of the pond, but top of the list is "I'm sat there."

I could discuss the finer points of how to describe someone you don't particularly like or aren't happy with. What is the distinction between wanker, tosser, and knob? What is the equivalent of asshole, douchebag, and jerk? What is the difference between an American twat (pronounced like swat) and an English twat (pronounced like bat)? (I apologize if you've sat through this blog post only to be offended by my language, but note that I didn't say "if you've been sat," which would be far more offensive to my ears.)

Or perhaps I could try to describe the taste of English "Real Ales," the coziness of an English pub, the smell... there's certainly a lot I could say about that. Pints are larger, and ales are indeed warm and flat to American tastes, but I haven't quite managed to figure out the precise way in which "this ale is quite nice" becomes "I would kill for a Sam Adams" in just a few months. From not knowing the difference between ale and lager, I now appreciate the bounty of American craft-brewed beers, without the hampering "purity standards" that make most European lagers taste exactly the same. But when experiencing these nuanced, beer-hazed musings on a typical Friday pub night, I might be jarred out of my reverie by someone complaining how they "were stood there for an hour" to the realization that no, I am not at home. The people here are different.

Every time I hear something like that, I can't help but wondering, "By whom?"

Look, I'm not a prescriptivist. I care about grammar because it's like the algebra of sentences, and algebra is fun, but I'm sure there's nothing grammatically incorrect with saying "I was sat there" instead of "I sat there" or "I was sitting there." (Yes that's right, algebra is fun!) To me, it seems like "I was sat" implies an unspecified subject - like, for example, "Grandpa sat me down to tell me how the world works." In this case Grandpa is the subject and "I" is the object, and "I was sat and told how the world works" is just refusing to acknowledge Grandpa, the subject. So when people here "were sat at a train station eating a vindaloo pasty," I know, deep in my heart, that "vindaloo pasty" should be the most English thing in that sentence, but I just can't get over the grammar.

So, I have been in England for a year. I've been to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, and London. I traipsed across the South Downs and had an English breakfast in an Oxford college. I was jammy to find a nice gaffe in under a fortnight, and have an app to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. But you will never hear the phrase "and I'm sat there" cross my lips, (unless ironically), because I am an American.

Cheers, Ta, Thank you very much indeed!

Elvish is Easy

The hardest part of writing something in Elvish is figuring out what to say.

Once you've done that, everything else just follows naturally. First, you have to see if there is a reasonable translation. (Remember, it's Elvish, there are no words for spaceship.) Obviously Sindarin is the specific language to go with, as it is the primary language of the elves in Middle-Earth (most of the high elves having gone over the sea into the West) - but if you are going to be particularly poetical or if you want to translate a wizard's spell, Quenya might be worth the effort. Either way, simply look up your words in an online dictionary (Sindarin or Quenya (pdf)) and write them down for later. This is your starting point, but if you simply string these words together you would sound like a crass dwarf. Elvish is anything but crass.

The next step is to consult this guidebook to figure out how to pluralize your nouns, conjugate your verbs, and especially how each word might be changed based on what other word is before or after, known as lenition or soft mutation. This is all really quite simple. If you want to say "friends", change the "o" in mellon to "y" and there you have it: mellyn nin, "my friends". You don't have to change the "e" to "i" because it occurs in the first syllable. If you want to say something about Ents, both "o"'s in Onod get mutated, the first to "e" and the second to "y" to get Enyd (but sometimes the first "o" is not mutated, so you will just have to know when it is right to do it). However, if you are talking about the Ents as a people, instead of just two or more Ents, you don't pluralize any vowels but instead add -rim to get Onodrim. Similarly Amon for "hill" gets changed to Emyn for "hills" as in the Emyn Muil. You get the point. Quite easy.

Now if you want to say "my friends" in the middle of the sentence instead of the beginning - such as in the King's Letter: e aníra ennas suilannad mhellyn în, "he wishes there to greet his friends" - you must add a soft mutation to change the "m" to "mh" (or usually "v", of which "mh" is a nasal variant). Most other consonants are lenited when preceded by a vowel, such as the article i meaning "the": "the friend" becomes i vellon.* Also, p, t, and c become b, d, and g while b and d become v and dh (which is voiced th), and g drops altogether as in Galadriel's opening words in the FOTR movie: a han noston ned 'wilith, "and I can smell it in the air", where the word for "air" is gwilith. This is all very straightforward. Now your set of Sindarin words may bear only a vague resemblance to the initial Sindarin words you had from the dictionary. But you probably shouldn't have tried to mutate your nouns before dealing with the verbs.

* Of course "the friends" becomes i mellyn since the plural article in triggers the nasal mutation which changes in to i before an "m", since of course "m" is already nasal, whereas in + gelaidh becomes i ngelaidh ("the trees"). Obviously.

First figure out what kind of verb you have, whether it is a derived verb (called A-stem because they end in "a"), or the more complex basic verb (I-stem because their present tense ends in "i" though they usually have no suffix), and of course notice whether your A-stem verb has a mixed conjugation or whether it is irregular. As you can see, it should be quite obvious which type of verb you have. Then simply follow the rules and conjugate to your heart's content, paying attention to the pronoun you require. So for example, the present tense of nosta- above is identical to the word itself: nosta, "smell", but to say "I smell" you add the ending -n, which changes the "a" to "o": han noston, "I smell it". This should all go without saying.

I will of course assume that you have all read the pronunciation guide in the back of The Silmarillion and have not been butchering the language by saying mae govannen as "may" instead of the correct "mai". That means it will be quite easy to take your Sindarin sentence and transliterate to one of the runic alphabets, such as the blocky Cirth preferred for stone work, and by the dwarves, or the more elegant Tengwar such as appears on the One Ring. The tengwar are created by combining telcor (stems) and lúvar (bows) based on where the sound is spoken in the mouth and whether it is voiced or voiceless (see figure). Then of course there are additional letters, which can be written both normally or upside-down, but that should pose no difficulty.

Double letters (such as "nn" in govannen) aren't written twice but are instead denoted by adding a special symbol under the letter, and nasalized letters have a symbol over the top. The vowel sounds also have their symbols placed on top (or under) the consonant preceding (Quenya) or following (Sindarin) the vowel. When there is no available consonant carrier, a special short or long carrier is used, based on whether the vowel sound should be short or long. This is all so logical that you have probably derived it from first principles already, but I mention it here for clarity.

Now all you need to do is download some true type fonts for tengwar, of which there are many. If you are going to put your Elvish phrase into your Ph.D. thesis, for example, it will also help to have a LaTeX package that will place your choice of font neatly into your pdf, and all you have to do is type out the Quenya names for all of the letters and symbols that go into your words.

There you have it. Was that so hard?