May 2020

The Quenya Grammar series is done for now. The content is collected in the Eldamo site, which is downloaded as usual:

https://eldamo.org/

See:

https://eldamo.org/content/grammar-indexes/grammars-q.html

I've released Eldamo 0.7.7:

https://eldamo.org/

The main change in this release is the collected and complete(ish) Quenya Grammar:

https://eldamo.org/content/grammar-indexes/grammars-q.html

A subordinate or dependent clause is one that is not a sentence on its own, but modifies the larger context in which it appears: “the man who came here yesterday was very angry”. Many subordinate clauses begin with relative pronouns, as in the previous example: “who”.

Tolkien wrote a series of essays on Elvish numbers in the late 1960s. One of those essays, Eldarinwe Leperi are Notessi (ELN), gave a set of numbers that many Neo-Quenya writers now use (VT48/6):

Like most head-initial languages, Quenya uses prepositions to express various relationships between words: i falmalinnar imbe met “on the foaming waves between us” (LotR/377), or ilye mahalmar “above all thrones” (UT/305), ve maiwi yaimie “like gulls wailing” (MC/222).

Like many languages, Quenya has adverbs whose primary function is to modify verbs, in much the same way that the primary function of adjectives is to modify nouns. In English, there is the suffix “-ly” which can be used to turn adjectives into adverbs, as in “the quick man ran” vs. “the man ran quickly”.

In Tolkien’s later writing, Quenya did not have a direct equivalent of English’s comparative “-er” suffix. In linguistic notes from 1966-67, Tolkien said that “A is brighter than B” is expressed using the preposition lá “beyond”: A (ná) calima lá B (PE17/90), where the copula ná- “to be” is optional as usual.

Adjectives in Quenya generally (but not always) precede the noun they modify and generally (but not always) are inflected into the plural when they modify plural nouns. As Tolkien described it in Common Eldarin: Noun Structure from the early 1950s: