Middle Primitive Elvish
salap
root. lick up, *sip
Derivatives
Variations
- SÁLAP ✧ Ety/SÁLAP
Beware, older languages below! The languages below were invented during Tolkien's earlier period and should be used with caution. Remember to never, ever mix words from different languages!
The first iteration of this root was unglossed ᴱ√SḶPḶ in the Qenya Lexicon of the 1910s with derivatives like ᴱQ. salpa “bowl” and ᴱQ. sulp- “lick, sup, lick up, sup up” (QL/84). It also had derivatives in the contemporaneous Gnomish Lexicon such as G. salf “bowl, basin” (GL/66), as well as G. thlib- “sup, lap up, suck” (GL/73). Later versions of these verb forms appeared in Early Noldorin Word-lists of the 1920s as ᴱN. lhif “drinks” and ᴱQ. sulpe “sips, tastes” from primitive ᴱ✶slp- along with (unused) variant ᴱ✶slq- (PE13/148-9). The verb ᴱQ. sulpe “drinks” was also mentioned in the Early Qenya Grammar of the 1920s, again as a derivatives of sḷp- (PE14/58).
In The Etymologies of the 1930s, the root reappeared as ᴹ√SALAP “lick up” with derivatives ᴹQ. salpa- “lick up, sup, sip” and N. salff “broth” (Ety/SÁLAP; EtyAC/SÁLAP). But in the Quenya Verbal System of the 1940s Tolkien had the TALAT-stem verb ᴹQ. sulpa- “to lap up, drink greedily” (PE22/114), hinting at a root ✱ᴹ√SULUP. Assuming ᴹ√SALAP and ᴹ√SULUP coexisted, they must have been etymological variants, since the vowel variations that resulted from primitive syllabic ḷ were no longer a feature of Elvish.
Neo-Eldarin: For purposes of Neo-Eldarin, I’d use √SALAP = “sip” and √SULUP = “lap”.