Quenya

Remember that thing that noa in Quenya meant "yesterday" at some point and then "tomorrow" at another? I have just read on Anatoly Liberman's excellent blog that the same thing was true for "yesterday" in Germanic, and it made me think whether Tolkien did have this at the back of his mind (he was a Germanic scholar after all, including Gothic) and is noa some kind of an insider joke or just a sheer coincidence?

I guess we will never find out, but Tolkien is still capable of eliciting aha-moments like this from me and it's just fascinating.

Could vanda “oath, pledge, solemn promise” come from *WAD being a variant of WED "bind"? That could mean that *vasta- "pledge, promise" could be a variant of vesta- which was repurposed as "wed, marry" and derived from BES later in the game.

Two questions to phonetics masters (ómanduri): PE19/58 gives the primitive word tálgàrta “high boot”, with, as far as I can see, no descendants.

• had *garta survived into Quenya, would *arta be the only conceivable form it would take?
• had the word survived as a compound only, what the resulting form be any different, e.g. *talyarta?

TIA

How do you guys analyze mestanyatse "suffixion"? Is it a verb *mestanya- "to add to the end, extend" with an abstract suffix, or is it somehow a compound of metta/mesta "end" and *yatse "joining" from YAT? Or something entirely else?

There are ~60 Middle Quenya and Late Quenya entries in Eldamo marked as [unglossed] — some probably trivial, others more obscure, or outright impossible to deduct. I had this idea to open this thread to discuss and possibly assign a consensual meaning to them (where possible), which could then be added to the neo section of Eldamo.

If the exercise is a "success" we could extend it to other languages.

Here is the list of unglossed Quenya entries (thank you, Paul, for the Eldamo csv export) - let the glossing begin!:

Induinen is a weird looking noun, isn't it? Does it contain the EQ partitive ending -inen in your opinion? (If so, it would rather qualify to be an adverb "on purpose", wouldn't it?)

In PE22:103 Tolkien mentions the Quenya verb lauta- "abound" and goes on saying that it is used impersonally, as in malta launen "gold abounded to me". Is this truly impersonal though, a subjectless verb, like úlo, or luin? Isn't the case simply that here "gold" is the grammatical subject, but the logical subject is "I"1?

A couple of months ago @Paul Strack posted a short but neat analysis of the attested Quenya particles of uncertainty, their possible shades of meaning and use. Since Discord is a platform we cannot link to, I am copying the text here, for further discussion, and to preserve it for posterity:

ma = interrogative/indefinite (probably true)

qui = neutral hypothetical (may or may not be true)

ai/ce = strong hypothetical (probably not true)