Tolkien generally referred to nouns ending in a vowels as “vocalic” nouns, for example on PE14/42 (1920s) and PE21/76 (1950s). Nouns can end in any of the five vowels: i, e, a, o, u. Since many noun inflections begin with a consonant, such inflections simply add the suffix to the final vowel of the noun:
Posted out of order because I wanted to write up noun cases before noun classes. Things will be in the correct order in the next Eldamo release.
The comitative case is one that Tolkien abandoned in his later writings. Indeed, the function of this case is not entirely clear, though its name implies that it indicates an “accompanying” noun. In its first appearance, the comitative case used the suffix -iko (PE16/113), and in this form it may have appeared in some sentences from the earliest drafts of the Markirya poem, as suggested by the editors of PE16 (Gilson, Smith, Wynne, Hostetter and Welden):
This noun case is one that Tolkien abandoned in his later writings. In the Early Quenya Grammar (EQG) he called it the “Manner” case (PE14/46, 78), but in declension tables from the late 1920s through 1930s he often labeled it the “Adverb” case (PE16/113; PE21/4, 53) and in a couple places he called it the “Comparative” case (PE21/42, 46).
I would like to gather ideas for neologisms covering spatial positional/relational adjectives, which are rather sparsely attested, and often cause a headache for NQ writers. These are adjectives that specify an objects position with regards to a center point, axis, or plane.
I am thinking of this set, listing the attested words:
medial/middle/central: endea, en(t)ya
internal/interior: mitya
external/exterior: ava, ette
superior/upper:
inferior/nether: EQ úva
anterior/frontal:
It is a frequent way of natural languages to make a noun in the sentence more specific by using several adjectives/qualifiers before the noun: the ugly big black smoke-spitting articulated lorry. One can also observe that the order or position which these qualifiers take before the noun follows some sort of regularity which is inherently "felt" by the speaker: we say little red riding hood but would (probably) not say riding red little hood.
I am opening a new category - a so called book - on Aglardh which will collect posts concerning Quenya syntax in a hierarchical manner so that visitors can easily progress from one post to another.
The Quenya instrumental is formed with the suffix -nen and is roughly equivalent to English “with, by (means of)”. It indicates the instrument or means by which an action occurred, and hence cannot be used for “with” in the English sense of “accompanying” or “by” in the sense of “beside”:
Nai nauva Mettarelda merya, ta elloalda herenya, nai nauvalde máriesse tenn' Ambar-metta!
