Passive participles in Sindarin (and Noldorin) are reasonably well attested. For half-strong and derived verbs, its formation is straighforward: add -en to the past tense, with the final -nt become -nn- medially as usual. The clearest Sindarin example of this is the half-strong verb covad(a)- “(make) meet” with past tense covant, passive participle covannen “met” (PE17/16, 158).

This post skips a small introductory entry.

The present active participle in Sindarin generally uses the suffix -ol. Tolkien briefly mentioned this suffix in some notes on negation written in 1959:

In addition to tense, Sindarin verbs are also inflected with subject suffixes in the first and second person. The full set of suffixes (and their conceptual development) is discussed in the entry on subject suffixes. The treatment of 3rd person is somewhat unusual, however. The 3rd singular inflexion has no pronominal suffix, as in: agarfant beth “he spoke words” (PE17/126).

The Sindarin imperative is surprisingly straightforward: simply add -o to a basic verb, or change the final -a of a derived verb to -o, in order to indicate a command. Examples are numerous:

There is no future tense in Gnomish or Early Noldorin, perhaps because the Welsh present tense can also be used to describe the future: strictly speaking the Welsh “present tense” is really “non-past”, just like the English simple present. The first mention of a distinct future form is in Quendian & Common Eldarin Verbal Structure (EVS1) from the late 1940s:

The Sindarin past tense seems to function similarly to the English past tense, but its formation is more complicated and we have relatively few examples to work from. The Sindarin past tense seems to be marked by a variety of morphological features, not all of which apply in every case:

The Sindarin simple present tense seems to be based on the ancient Common Eldarin aorist tense.

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Sindarin (and it’s conceptual precursors) have two major classes of verbs: basic verbs (based on an unadorned primitive verbal root) and derived verbs (produced with some kind of verbal suffix). In the literature, these two classes are sometimes called i-stem verbs and a-stem verbs after their present tense forms, which frequently have i or a respectively. For example, this terminology appears in David Salo’s book, Gateway to Sindarin (GS/111), though I am not certain he first coined these terms.

This post skips another small bridge entry introducing verbs.