Sindarin has several ways of expressing genitive (“of”) relationships between nouns. In one note from the late 1950s or early 1960s, Tolkien said Old Sindarin had three ways of expressing a genitive:
The dative, or indirect object, can be marked in two ways in Sindarin. First, it can be marked by word order alone, with the indirect object following the direct object:
Like English, the direct object of a phrase generally follows the verb in Sindarin. Unlike English, the direct object undergoes soft mutation to mark it as an object, a process I refer to as (grammatical) lenition. Examples include:
Like Quenya, Sindarin once had a dual inflection, used for pairs of objects, but in Sindarin this dual has fallen out of use:
