tolkienlanguages1-9 Exercise 3: Strength and Difficulty ======================================================== A sample answer. Strength: the revising shows a language with real depth. Tolkien refined the family history, moving from Gnomish and Noldorin to Sindarin, and the languages gained a story of their own. Example: the name swap, where the old Noldorin became Sindarin. Difficulty: no single stage is final, so a learner cannot assume that a word or ending from one source is valid in another. Example: a word from the Etymologies may belong to a stage that never became Sindarin, so it has to be checked before use.