Jump to content

Sukkit

WFG Retired
  • Posts

    1.064
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Sukkit

  1. Actually I think Tolkien didn't conceive any of his evil guys as inherently unredeemable. For example, after the War of Wrath Sauron is said to have repented sincerely at first, and only shame made him not go to Valinor to be judged. I'm sure there are quite long theological/philosophical discussions about this in Letters.

  2. My opinion on this has always been that "goblin" represents a purely dialectal word for "orc", used only in the Shire, and that Bilbo used in his book, while Frodo would have used the standard Westron word for "orc". I don't think it's reasonable to assume that "goblin" would be a general word for the small orcs, since it's never (IIRC) used in LotR in that way. In my opinion it's better to dismiss the words "goblin" and "hobgoblin" altogether. And as far as I know there's no basis to assume that hobgoblin = uruk either, because all of this is an a posteriori rationalization, and Tolkien didn't think of any of this when he was writing The Hobbit (in his legends he always wrote "Orc").

  3. I've been trying to send Jason a PM but I get an error message. This happened yesterday and again today in two different computers, and it happened too when I tried to PM Anushka:

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 233472 bytes) in /var/www/html/forum/lang/en/lang_email_content.php on line 291

    Do you guys know what's causing this? Thanks in advance.

  4. Titus, I think the problem is that much of what many people expect to be reformed is not actually based on the Bible, but rather on tradition. For example, why not let the clerics marry? They got married in the first centuries of Christianity. It's not a fundamental part of Catholicism.

  5. I bet it will follow the current trend that dictates that during fighting scenes the camera should move in a random, chaotic frenzy so that nothing can be seen clearly, which conveniently saves lots of choreography work while making much of the audience think "Wow, that's action! See how the camera moves!"

  6. If Ratzinger dies soon, the Catholic church will still have another chance to correct their ways. Maybe the last one.

    Sure, John Paul I was charismatic and everything, but if you think about it he couldn't stop the huge crisis of Catholicism. He accomplished nothing in that field. I would say that he even made it worse because of his conservatism. Just take a look at Europe, where even those who call themselves Catholics couldn't care less about what the Vatican has to say about condoms or pre-marital sex, or at Latin America, where Catholicism is losing ground to other forms of Christianity imported from the North. They need reforms badly, and they won't get them with Ratzinger (unless he surprises all of us).

    There are also reports Ratzinger was in the Hitler Youth as a boy. Any credibility to this? I only caught a glimpse of it on TV.

    Others have replied to that, but just in case anyone is making very common wrong assumptions: "German soldiers 1933-1945" does not equal to "Nazis"

  7. Der Vater eines guten Freundes meiner ist tot.

    Would this be correct? Should I use the preposition von (or any other) instead of the genitive? Freundes or Freunds? Should I use the genitive of the possessive mein instead of the genitive of ich, meiner? (The meaning I want to have is "The father of a good friend of mine", rather than "The father of my friend").

  8. Just because we don't know what they mean it doesn't mean that they don't mean anything, even if Tolkien never bothered to "find out" their true meaning. As Tolkien realized, the only way to have coherent patronymics is if they're integrated into a coherent and developed language. Tolkien didn't like Orcs nor their languages, so he didn't do that, but we can, and (IMO) should. Our names should always mean something, but don't expect a translation or anything like that.

    Lots of "mean" here ;)

  9. @Sukkit: Hehe. I would not say that Viva is the perfect place for trying to learn German, though, because the language of that channel is pretty strange and often far away from everydays German like you could hear it on the road. Probably it would be easier to have a look at the news on a public-law TV channel (ARD, ZDF), because they are usually in a very good language and the people aren't talking too fast.

    Believe me, if I got any German channel other than Viva I would gladly watch it ;)

    Some years ago I could watch RTL (I think), but if my memory serves me well it was 24 hours a day of Bavarian folklore.

    Oh, I forgot about the dictionary link. Danke! Es ist sehr gut ;)

  10. Du kannst sprechen über das Internet.

    Yay for extraordinarily simple sentences!

    Last night I spent some time watching the German music TV channel Viva (which is terrible), and there was this show where people sent text messages and they put them on the screen. Of course I hardly understood anything, but my ability to recognize verbs (and tenses), particles, case and gender (especially when der/die/das was present) is increasing ;)

    Also, being a linguistic nerd I cannot help but comment on how my very basic knowledge on Gothic is helping me with some elements of modern German ;)

    For example, I memorized the forms of the definite article by attaching them to the forms of the related definite article in Gothic:

    GOTHIC / GERMAN

    Masc.

    sa / der (not directly related)

    þana / den

    þis / des

    þamma / dem

    þai / die

    þans / die (not directly related)

    þize / der (z > r, a regular switch)

    þaim > den

    Also, most if not all modal verbs seem to come from the 'present-preterite' verbal category of Germanic. They were characterized by the use of the original preterite as present tense, and the creation of a new analogical preterite. It's much easier to learn a verb like 'können' when you know that (although, surprisingly, the German grammar I'm reading does not mention this at all).

  11. Well, you took a difficult start there... I won't even know myself which tense that would be supposed to be... "Futur II" or something equivalent, I guess

    Hehe, I *think* I wanted to use werden as a normal verb and put it in Futur. Then I got distracted by how much I like the form wirst and used it instead of wird ;)

    Es ist gut zu hören, dass noch jemand hier Deutsch lernt!

    Ja! Deutsch ist sehr schön, schöner als Althochdeutsch ;)

    I really need a dictionary. I know I had one but my sister took it when she went to Germany :\

  12. I'm going to top this because I want you guys to keep posting in German. Currently I'm trying to learn the basics of it, but so far I'm still working with the conjugations (frage fragst fragt fragte fragtest fragte grefragt werde wird wirst habe hast hat etc etc ;)), and also with the definite article, personal pronouns, and all the other stuff that we could say constitutes the 'core' of a language.

    I'm also learning a list of irregular verbs, which brings back memories of the times when I was learning English.

    Ich denke nicht, dass mein Deutsch wirst gut werden.

    (Hahaha, I know nothing of syntax yet)

  13. If Tolkien's final choice had been that Orcs are corrupted Men then we would be justified in choosing the 'Orcs are Elves' approach, since for Orcs being originally Men we would have to change the whole Ages of the Sun, the creation of mankind, and everything else - and we can't do that.

    However, if his final choice was that Orcs are Maiar, we can keep the original scenario (regardless of whether or not Tolkien intended to change that too) without any problems. I think that's what we should do.

×
×
  • Create New...