u/HephMelter

Hi everyone. I saw the news of the Tolkien letter that has been uncovered and decided to read the chapter about Treebeard again. A few sentences made me draw parallels :

>But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees [...]. They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them. The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them).

From this, I was shocked by the domination of free-willed people that the Entwives are described as having. Ents herd trees by guiding them, talking from them and learning from them, Entwives give orders and dominate. The Ents are Gandalf, the Entwives Saruman

And just a line after what we saw above, we have this :

>Then when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives crossed the Great River, and made new gardens, and tilled new fields, and we saw them more seldom.

As the Shadow approaches, the Entwives cross Anduin from West to East, going towards Mordor, which has been a cursed land since Morgoth's times, rather than going South to Gondor. Could Annatar, or a lieutenant of his more like-minded to Yavanna's creations, have paid them a visit and introduced those plans in their minds ? Bringing them closer to him in mind and body, then dealing them the final blow and putting them forever under his thumb as slaves ? Maybe bringing some to Nurn, maybe further East, maybe to Angmar to help with food-production, as it was north and in the mountains and can't have been very fertile. Angmar was founded in the middle of the Third Age, and the gardens of the Entwives had become the Brown Lands since before the Last Alliance. In the same passage as before, Treebeard says that

>I remember it was long ago – in the time of the war between Sauron and the Men of the Sea – desire came over me to see Fimbrethil again. Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labour; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people. We crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there.

This war between Sauron and the Men of the Sea is from the Second Age. Which one, whether Ar-Pharazôn's attack that humbled Sauron or the Last Alliance, I don't think we can determine, even though the Last Alliance is commonly accepted. But it is merely the latest point possible

Hi there, Frenchman here.

Whats the deal with "oi" ? Cognates and derivatives use mostly [e] in its place, as did the original Latin. I seem to remember it got diphthongated to [we] then [wa] in French, pretty late in the timeline. But why the "oi" digraph, and why the archaic "roy" writing ? Did it already diphthongate earlier, and then revert back to [e] ? When ? Why ?

Yet another unclear title for a post because I must be concise. Here, I call "hidden wars" all acts of sabotage directed towards parts of a country's industrial output (nowadays, we see drones attempt to shut down airports by flying overhead, the cutting of undersea cables, cyberattacks on strategic data bases...), as long as :

- such attacks are repeated through time

- their instigator has plausible deniability, at least diplomatically speaking at the time

- such events are not retaliated against with military force against a state actor

Has there ever been a pattern similar between countries in history ? The only parallel I can make is with corsairs, but those were mostly called upon during war times, and their letters of marque made their authority lose this playsible deniability. Maybe pirates who had earned a pardon if they would only attack enemy ships, but Im not sure how much those would stay different from corsairs

Were laryngals able to be syllabic, or was *ph2ter a single syllable? Or was there another vowel near the laryngeal, which got coloured by it and that we can't reconstruct ?