Quenya
Encyclopedia
Quenya (ˈkʷɛnja) is a fictional language
devised by J. R. R. Tolkien
, and used in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth
.
Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi in Quenya. The tongue actually called Quenya was in origin the speech of two clans of Elves living in Eldamar ("Elvenhome"), the Noldor
and the Vanyar
. Quenya translates as simply "language", or in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history "elf-language". In the Second Age
the Wise of Númenor learned the Quenya tongue. In the Third Age
, (the time of the setting of The Lord of the Rings
) Quenya was no longer a living language for the Noldor of Middle-earth. Exilic Quenya was learned at an early age by all Elves of Noldorin origin, and it continued to be used in spoken and written form, but their mother-tongue was another Elven-tongue, Sindarin
.
Tolkien began with devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar four times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary however remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language itself was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language
has been a major source of inspiration but Tolkien also knew about Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish language was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak that language in their own fictional universe since he felt an aesthetic need to provide a historical background for the language itself.
Although Tolkien never published enough vocabularies to make Quenya a conversational language, fans have been writing poetry and prose in Quenya since the 1960s. This involved conjecture and the need to devise new words.
. He later called it Qenya (c. 1915), and even later wrote it Quenya. Tolkien was then already familiar with Latin, Greek
, Spanish
, and several ancient Germanic languages, Gothic
, Old Norse
and Old English. He had invented several crypotographic codes
(one called Animalic), and two or three constructed languages (as Naffarin). But then he discovered Finnish, and was filled with joy. Tolkien wrote, many years later: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." He had started his study of the Finnish language to be able to read the Kalevala
epic.
Tolkien with his Quenya pursued a double aesthetic goal: "classical and inflected". This urge, in fact, was the motivation for his creation of a 'mythology'. While the language developed, he needed speakers, history for the speakers and all real dynamics, like war and migration: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of ‘history’ for Elvish tongues".
Quenya underwent about four major revisions in its grammar, mostly in conjugation
and the pronominal system
. The vocabulary was not subject to sudden or extreme change; except during the first conceptual stage, early Quenya c.1910-c.1920, the language was then called in English Elfin and in Qenya Eldarissa. Tolkien sometimes changed the meaning of a word, but he almost never disregarded it once invented, and he kept on refining its meaning, and countlessly forged new synonyms. Moreover Elven etymology was in a constant flux. Tolkien delighted in inventing new etymons
for his Quenya vocabulary. But after the publication of "The Lord of the Rings" (1954–1955), the grammar rules of Quenya went through very few changes (this is late Quenya 1954–1973).
"Qenya" is used sometimes to distinguish between "early Quenya" and "late Quenya". However, early Quenya was also called Eldarissa by Tolkien. It differs fundamentally from late Quenya, having a different internal history, vocabulary and grammar rules described in the "Qenyaqetsa".
From the onset, Tolkien used comparative philology and the tree model
as his major tools in his constructed languages. He usually started with the phonological system of the Proto-language
and then proceeded in inventing for each daughter language
s the many mechanisms of sound change needed.
In the early 30s Tolkien decided that the proto-language of the Elves was Valarin, the tongue of the gods or Valar : "The language of the Elves derived in the beginning from the Valar, but they change it even in the learning, and moreover modified and enriched it constantly at all times by their own invention." In his Comparative Tables Tolkien describes the mechanisms of sound change in the following daughter languages: Qenya, Lindarin (a dialect of Qenya), Telerin, Old Noldorin (or Feanorian), Noldorin (or Gondolinian), Ilkorin
(esp. of Doriath
), Danian of Ossiriand, East Danian, Taliska
, West Lemberin, North Lemberin, and East Lemberin.
In devising the protolanguage of the Elves, Tolkien appears to have borrowed the five-part plosive system of Proto-Indo-European
, the ancestor of Latin
, Greek
, Sanskrit
, and others; namely, one labial, one coronal, and three velar plosives (palatal, plain, and labial). Below are some of the "Primary Initial Combinations" from the Comparative Tables:
About ten years later, Tolkien changed his mind about the origin of the proto-language of the Elves. He wrote in his Lambion Ontale: Descent of Tongues: "The Elves began to make in the beginning of their being [a language] and it is one with their being, since it was of their nature and the first of all their gift to devise names and words". Quenderin had become the proto-language of the Elven language family, but he kept intact the many roots he had invented for Valarin in the '30s, which became "Quenderin roots". The Eldarin family comprises Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin and Nandorin. The evolution in Quenya and Telerin of the nasalized initial groups of Quenderin is described thus in Tolkien's Outline of Phonology:
The grammar of Quenya was influenced by Finnish
, an agglutinative language
, but much more by Latin, a synthetic
and fusional language
, and also Greek
, from which he took probably the idea of the diglossia
of Quenya with its highly codified variety: the Parmaquesta, only used in certain situations such as literature. The phonology
of Quenya does not follow Finnish phonological rules, or even those of Latin or Greek. The Elvish languages are not a posteriori languages
; many features for Quenya were invented according to Tolkien's taste. The phonology of Quenya ended up somewhat resembling that of Finnish and Italian
, but not exactly fitting either of those, or any other language.
Tolkien almost never borrowed words directly from real languages into Quenya, the major exception is Earendel/Earendil
. Yet the Finnish influence extended sometimes to vocabulary. A few Quenya words, such as tul- "come" and anta- "give", have clearly a Finnish origin. Other forms that appear to have been borrowed are actually coincidence, such as Finnish kirja 'book', and Quenya cirya 'ship'. Tolkien invented the Valarin/Quenderin root KIR- from which sprang his Quenya word cirya. Latin aure, "dawn" and Quenya aure "moment of special meaning, special day, festival day" are unrelated. Quenya aure comes from the Valarin/Quenderin root UR-. And Germanic influence can be seen more in grammar (the -r nominative plural ending is reminiscent of the Scandinavian languages
) or phonology, than in words: Arda
, the Quenya name for "region" (it has other meanings), just happened to resemble Germanic Erde, "earth". It comes from the Valarin/Quenderin root GAR-. According to Tom DuBois and Scott Mellor the name of Quenya itself may have been influenced by the name Kven
, a language closely related to Finnish, but Tolkien never said so.
The most striking feature of Quenya for the English speaking readers is that it is an agglutinative language
, meaning that multiple affix
es are added to words to express grammatical functions. For example, the late Quenya equivalent of Eureka
("I have found (it)") is utúvienyes: utúvie "have found" + -nye subjective "I" + -s objective "it".
In his lifetime J.R.R. Tolkien never ceased to experiment on his constructed languages, and they were subjected to many revisions. Quenya had many grammars with substantial differences between different stages of development. Yet, the Elfin tongue of the 1920s illustrated by his poem "Narqelion" is not easily distinguished from late Quenya poem "Namárië
" of the Lord of the Rings.
Important grammatical texts, alluded to by C. Tolkien in his History of Middle-earth series and described as almost unreadable or quite incomprehensible, have been published in Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon. The Early Qenya Grammar, written by J.R.R. Tolkien c. 1925, was successfully edited and published in Parma Eldalamberon 14.
Tolkien never intended Quenya, or any of his constructed languages, to be used in everyday life as an international auxiliary language
.
The Quenya language was not a fragile construction, tossed from one side to another in the ever changing mind of Pr. Tolkien. He wrote many fine pieces in Quenya, like the poem Namárië
. Tolkien struggled to give to his Elvish languages the feel and taste of natural languages. He wanted to infuse in them a kind of life, while modeling them after a very personal aesthetic taste. He wanted to build languages primarily to satisfy his personal urge and not because he had some universal design in mind.
. New Tolkienian linguistic material continues to emerge, although the pace of publication is irregular.
for the movies directed by Peter Jackson
, require conjecture and sometimes coinage of new words.
. Its older form, first recorded in the sarati of Rúmil is called Old or Ancient Quenya (Yára-Quenya in Quenya). It had evolved from Common Eldarin
, the tongue of the Eldar before their divisions, e.g. those Elves who decided to follow the Vala Oromë and undertook the Great March to Valinor
and Eldamar. Before that, the Eldar Elves spoke the original speech of all Elves, Primitive Quendian
, called Quenderin in Quenya.
Quenya was also used by the gods or Valar
. The Elves even derived some loanwords from that language, which was called Valarin in Quenya, although these were more numerous in the Vanyarin dialect than in Noldorin, probably because of the enduringly close relationship the Vanyarin Elves had with the Valar.
language for every-day use, Tarquesta, and a more educated language for use in ceremonies and lore, Parmaquesta. The Noldor and Vanyar spoke two slightly different though mutually intelligible dialects of Tarquesta: Noldorin Quenya and Vanyarin Quenya. Later Noldorin Quenya became Exilic Quenya, when most of the Noldorin Elves followed their leader Prince Fëanor
into exile from Eldamar and back to Middle-earth, where the immortal Elves first awoke.
According to "Quendi and Eldar: Essekenta Eldarinwa", Quendya was the usual Vanyarin name given to the Quenya language, since in Vanyarin ndy and ny remained quite distinct. In Noldorin ndy became ny. Tolkien explained that: "The word Quenya itself has been cited as an exempla (e.g. by Ælfwine), but this is a mistake due to supposition that kwenya was properly kwendya and directly derived from the name Quendi "Elves". This appears not to be the case. The word is Quenya in Vanyarin, and always so in Parmaquesta."
, who reached Eldamar later than the Noldor and the Vanyar, spoke a different but closely related tongue, usually called Telerin
. It was seen by some Elves to be just another dialect of Quenya. This was not the case with the Teleri for whom their tongue was distinct from Quenya. After the Vanyar left the city of Túna, Telerin and Noldorin Quenya drew closer. Originally, when living in Beleriand, the Vanyar, the Noldor and the Teleri all spoke one tongue: late Common Eldarin
.
, after they had adopted the Sindarin language as their native speech. It differed somewhat from Aman
ian Quenya, mostly in vocabulary (having some loanwords from Sindarin). It differes also in pronunciation, representing the recognition of sound-changes which had begun among the Noldor before the exile and had caused Noldorin Quenya to diverge from Vanyarin Quenya. The change of z (< old s) to r was the latest in Noldorin, belonging to early Exilic Quenya. In grammar, the changes were small since the features of their "old language" were carefully taught.
The rebellious Noldor
who followed their leader Fëanor to Middle-earth
, spoke only Quenya. Elu Thingol
, King of the Sindar
of Beleriand, forbade the use of Quenya in his realm when he learned of the slaying of Telerin Elves by the Noldor (The Silmarillion
, chapter 15). The Noldor at this time had fully mastered Sindarin, while the Sindar were slow to learn Quenya.
of Númenór
and their descendants in Gondor
and Arnor
for the official names of kings and queens (as Aragorn
did by adopting the name Elessar Telcontar) and writings. Quenya in the Third Age had almost the same status as the Latin language
had in medieval Europe, and was called Elven-latin by Tolkien.
The Noldor in Exile valued highly the use of Quenya by others, as can be seen in the way they treat Frodo Baggins
after he greeted them in Quenya: elen síla lumenn' omentielvo.
:
Tolkien based Quenya pronunciation more on Latin
than on Finnish
. Thus, Quenya lacks the vowel harmony
and consonant gradation
present in Finnish, and accent
is not always on the first syllable of a word. A few phonological rules are based on Finnish, such as those for consonant clusters, or final vowels and consonants. The combination of a Latin basis with Finnish phonological rules results in a product that resembles Italian
in many respects, which was Tolkien's favorite modern Romance language.
The tables below list the consonants (Q. ólamar) and vowels of late colloquial Noldorin Quenya, i.e. as Quenya was spoken among the Exiled Noldor in Middle-earth. They are written using the International Phonetic Alphabet
, unless otherwise noted.
According to the Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, there were five major phonetic changes in the Quenya as spoken by the Noldor, reflected in the "full names" of the tengwar:
Only the following consonants have phonemic geminated forms: pp, tt, cc (kk); mm, nn; ss, ll, rr. These occur only medially. The geminated occlusives are aspirated.
The pronunciation of ⟨hy⟩ is [ç] in Noldorin Quenya, a "strong voiceless y, similar but more frictional than the initial sound in English huge". In Vanyarin Quenya ⟨hy⟩ is pronounced [ʃ].
⟨hw⟩ stands for the sound [ʍ], a "spirantal voiceless w. It has more tense with closer lip-aperture and more friction than the voiceless wh of English".
The letter q or qu stands for a group of two phonemes, not one single sound (one phoneme
). It is according to Tolkien: "a slightly rounded 'k' followed by a distinct w."
According to Tolkien : "ty is a very fronted 'k', or a palatalised 't' followed by a fairly distinct 'y'-glide,"
Tolkien stated that ⟨ny⟩ is pronounced as in English "new" (presumably British English [njuː], as opposed to American English [nuː], see reference 1).
In the Vanyarin dialect, ⟨ty⟩, ⟨dy⟩, ⟨hy⟩ were depalatalised to [tʃ], [dʒ], and [ʃ] respectively, similar to Italian. About ⟨py⟩ Tolkien wrote: "In Vanyarin Quenya and among some Ñoldor ⟨py⟩ was sounded with voiceless y, sc. as [pç], which later in Vanyarin became [pʃ]" (cf. Hungarian
lopj [lopç] 'steal').
In the late Ancient Quenya period, when vowels were lost in long compound words, the consonants or groups so created were as a rule changed or reduced:
, Fauskanger compares the sound of the vowels to a Spanish
or Italian
pronunciation. This may be combined to a total of seven possible vowel sounds in Quenya:
According to Tolkien é, and ó, when correctly pronounced by Elves, were just a little "tenser and 'closer' " than their short counterparts: "neither very tense and close, nor very slack and open".
In Old Quenya all of the diphthongs were falling diphthongs. "It is probable that before the Exile Vanyarin and Noldorin [Quenya] in common shifted iu, ui to rising diphthongs", but only /iu/ is reported as a rising diphthong [ju] similar to the beginning of English yule [juːɫ]. On the other hand, ui remained in Exilic Quenya a falling diphthong as reported".
determines where the main stress of a word falls, and is the key element in Quenya versification. Quenya has also a secondary accent.
A heavy syllable (sometimes called a "long" syllable) is a syllable that contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a cluster of two consonants (ll, ld, mm, ss, etc.). Quenya in this respect is unlike Latin. Quenya clusters are not broken. Certain combinations of consonants, e.g. ny, ry, are regarded as heavy. Medially hy and hw are long consonant in Parmaquesta (not colloquially in Tarquesta) and a vowel before them is held to constitute a metrically long syllable.
In Quenya words of two syllables, the stress is on the first syllable. In words of three or more syllables, the stress is on the penultimate syllable if this is heavy, otherwise on the antepenultimate syllable.
rules for late Quenya:
of the Quenya tongue from published data because Quenya is a fictional irregular language (closely modelled on natural languages, like Finnish, and Latin) and not an international auxiliary language with a regular morphology. Tolkien wrote several synchronic
grammars of Quenya, only one has been published: The Early Qenya Grammar, and also several diachronic
studies of Quenya, three have been published: The Qenyaqetsa (dealing with early Quenya or Eldarissa), Outline of Phonetic Development, and the Outline of Phonology.
.
Not all Quenya nouns can have the four numbers; some are pluralia tantum having no singular variant for referring to a single object, as armar "goods (things for sale, or the things that you own)"; some other nouns, especially monosyllabic, use only one of the two plurals judged the most aesthetic by Elves (i. e. Tolkien).
In late Quenya Tarquesta, the plural is formed by a suffix to the subjective form of the noun.
Tarquesta:
. Declining is the process of inflecting nouns; a set of declined forms of the same word is called a declension. Parmaquesta Quenya has ten cases
(some are short variants). These include the four primary cases: nominative
, accusative
, genitive
, and instrumental
; three adverbial cases: allative
(of which the dative
is a shortened form), locative
(also with a shortened form), and ablative
; and an adjectival case.
Primary cases:
Adverbial cases:
Adjectival case:
The declension of the noun in Parmaquesta, has been published in the so-called "Plotz Declension" that Tolkien provided in a letter to Dick Plotz in 1967. This gives the "Classical" declension of two vocalic-stem nouns cirya "ship" and lassë "leaf", in four numbers: singular, pl. 1, pl. 2, and dual. The declension has eight chief cases in three groups that Tolkien labelled a, b, and c. Of these cases, Tolkien named only a) the primary cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and instrumental; and b) the adverbial cases: allative, locative, and ablative. The allative and locative in turn have (unnamed) short forms (except in the loc. dual), of which the short allative form appears to correspond to the dative case. The third group, c, has only one member (and only in the sg. and in pl. 2), which appears to correspond to the adjectival case as described in the essay "Quendi and Eldar – Essekenta Eldarinwa" written in c. 1960.
The declension of cirya and lasse given below is taken from the Plotz Declension and reflect the forms of Classical Quenya. The declensions of ondo "stone", nér "man", and cas "head" are taken from an earlier conceptual period of Quenya (c. 1935).
Quenya adjectives may be freely used as nouns.
Note : the use of the copula ná, when in the present tense, is optional.
Some adjectives are irregular. Here are set the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective mára "good":
The impersonal conjugations provided below were written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the late 1960s, but only in singular forms. There are apparently two main types of verbs in late Quenya: weak transitive verbs, which are usually 'root' verbs, such as car- "make ; do" from the Elvish base or root KAR-, and derivative intransivite verbs with a strong conjugation, whose stems end mainly in -ta, -na, -ya, formed by putting a verbal suffix to a base or root, like henta- "to eye", from the Elvish base KHEN- "eye".
Note that the pronoun is added on the negative verb, not on the main verb, and that the endings are regular.
In Parmaquesta (and in verse) the verb ua- could be completely conjugated.
, a short function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes:
The Present Impertive of the verb auta-, cited above, is á va usually written áva as in Áva márië! "Go (away) happily!".
The prohibitive mood negates the imperative mood. The two moods have in late Quenya distinct verbal morphology. In late Quenya prohibition is expressed by the particle áva.
Used alone the particle is avá (sometimes ává, with two long a) and means: "Don't!" (I forbid you to do as you intend).
Other particles (like kë, ké) are used in the Corpus of published Quenya texts, but their precise functions are not known (e.g. not yet explained by any of Tolkien's published linguistic papers).
Late Quenya verbs have also a dual agreement morpheme -t: Nai siluvat elen atta. "May two stars shine".
In the imperative mood plurality and duality are not expressed. There is no agreement. The verb stays singular.
In Common Eldarin prepositions were postpositions, and later became inflectional endings. Case markings combine primarily with nouns, whereas prepositions can combine with phrases of many different categories. This is why most prepositions in Quenya are used with a noun in the nominative case.
The preposition an is related to the -nna case ending.
In late Quenya, pronouns have both separate or independent forms, and suffix forms. One source is used for the stressed separate pronouns, the other for the rest of the table.
The separate pronouns have both a short (lyé, sé, mé) and long form (elyë, emmë, essë, elwë). Evidence from the published Corpus suggests that long separate forms (a complete list of which have not been published yet) were intensive pronouns, Tolkien named them "emphatic disjunct pronoun", while short independent pronouns could be use normally in place of enclitic.
I love him (or her), can be expressed in Quenya as Melinyes or Melin sé. I love them would be then Melinyet or Melin té (these two forms are reconstructed).
The verbal inflexions are subjective but an -s (singular) and a -t (plural and dual) may be added to the long subjective pronouns as objectives of the 3rd person:
The ancient polite forms became used in ordinary contexts; and so a new honorific form was made in Late Noldorin Quenya (maybe when Fëanor was banished from Tirion) by adding tar, the Quenya word for sir (and madam).
Their forms in Early colloquial Noldorin Quenya are as follows:
Varda ortanë máryat. Varda has uplifted her (two) hands.
So far, according to our published corpus of Quenya texts, mántë is our sole possessive determiner with a plural ending in -ë (< -ai). The usual plural ending is -r, hildinyar, "my heirs". This was probably an older device (Parmaquesta).
The usual structure is subject - verb - object. One can place the adjective before or after the noun that it modifies.
of Quenya is rich in proper nouns.
The word used as a form of polite address to an Elf (male or female) is: Tar. Among the Númenoreans it became "King/Queen" and used as a form of address for a superior, especially a King or a Queen; cf. Tarinya, used by Prince Aldarion to address his father, King Tar-Meneldur.
of Fëanor" but the first one he created c. 1919 are the "Tengwar of Rumil", also called the sarati
. He decided, that prior to their Exile, the Noldorin Elves used first the sarati
of Rúmil to record Ancient Quenya. In Middle-earth, Quenya appears to be rarely written using the "Elvish runes" or cirth
, named certar in Quenya. A Runic inscription in Quenya was engraved on the sword of Aragorn (II), Andúril.
or a velar nasal
, in nc (nk) and ng, and the letter "u" represents either consonant or vowel depending on context, e.g. qu stands for kw, Orqui is Orkwi. Occasionally, Tolkien wrote Quenya with a "Finnish-style" orthography (rather than the standard Latin-Romance version), in which c is replaced by k, y with j, and long vowels written double.
Most of the time Tolkien wrote his grammars and lexicons of Quenya in English using the Latin script for Quenya. But inside his Secondary World Elves, Men and Hobbits of Middle-earth are supposed to use a different script when writing, the tengwar
of Fëanor, seen on the One Ring
and the Doors of Durin in The Lord of the Rings.
is the longest piece of Quenya found in The Lord of the Rings; yet the first Quenya sentence is uttered by a Hobbit: Frodo's greeting to the Elves: elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo. Other examples include Elendil
's words spoken upon reaching Middle-earth, and repeated by Aragorn at his coronation: Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien. Sinomë maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta!. Treebeard
's greeting to Celeborn
and Galadriel is also spoken in Quenya: A vanimar, vanimálion nostari.
Other Quenya poems spoken by J.R.R. Tolkien in public but never published in his lifetime are Oilima Markirya ("The Last Ark"), Nieninqe, and Earendel contained in his lecture A Secret Vice
and published for the first time in 1983 in The Monsters and the Critics
. A fragment (with mistakes) of the poem Narqelion, written in early Quenya or Elfin, was published by Humphrey Carpenter
in his Biography; a facsimile of the entire poem was published in April 1999 in Vinyar Tengwar 40.
See also Douglas A. Anderson
, Carl F. Hostetter: A Checklist, Tolkien Studies
4 (2007).
Fictional language
Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and...
devised by J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
, and used in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth
Middle-earth
Middle-earth is the fictional setting of the majority of author J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, as does much of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....
.
Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi in Quenya. The tongue actually called Quenya was in origin the speech of two clans of Elves living in Eldamar ("Elvenhome"), the Noldor
Noldor
In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Noldor are Elves of the Second Clan who migrated to Valinor and lived in Eldamar. The Noldor are called Golodhrim or Gódhellim in Sindarin, and Goldoi by Teleri of Tol Eressëa. The singular form of the Quenya noun is Noldo and the adjective is Noldorin...
and the Vanyar
Vanyar
In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Vanyar are the fairest and most noble of the High Elves. They are the smallest of the three clans of the Eldar, and were the first to arrive in Aman. According to legend, the clan was founded by Imin, the first Elf to awake at Cuiviénen, his wife Iminyë, and...
. Quenya translates as simply "language", or in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history "elf-language". In the Second Age
Second Age
The Second Age is a time period from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings. Tolkien intended for the history of Middle-earth to be considered fictionally as a precursor to the history of the real Earth....
the Wise of Númenor learned the Quenya tongue. In the Third Age
Third Age
The Third Age is a time period from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings. The history of Middle-earth is to be taken fictionally as a history of the real Earth....
, (the time of the setting of The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
) Quenya was no longer a living language for the Noldor of Middle-earth. Exilic Quenya was learned at an early age by all Elves of Noldorin origin, and it continued to be used in spoken and written form, but their mother-tongue was another Elven-tongue, Sindarin
Sindarin
Sindarin is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his secondary world, often called Middle-earth.Sindarin is one of the many languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called the Eledhrim or Edhellim in Sindarin....
.
Tolkien began with devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar four times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary however remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language itself was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
has been a major source of inspiration but Tolkien also knew about Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish language was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak that language in their own fictional universe since he felt an aesthetic need to provide a historical background for the language itself.
Although Tolkien never published enough vocabularies to make Quenya a conversational language, fans have been writing poetry and prose in Quenya since the 1960s. This involved conjecture and the need to devise new words.
External history
J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first Elven tongue c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, BirminghamKing Edward's School, Birmingham
King Edward's School is an independent secondary school in Birmingham, England, founded by King Edward VI in 1552. It is part of the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham, and is widely regarded as one of the most academically successful schools in the country, according to...
. He later called it Qenya (c. 1915), and even later wrote it Quenya. Tolkien was then already familiar with Latin, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and several ancient Germanic languages, Gothic
Gothic language
Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...
, Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
and Old English. He had invented several crypotographic codes
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
(one called Animalic), and two or three constructed languages (as Naffarin). But then he discovered Finnish, and was filled with joy. Tolkien wrote, many years later: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." He had started his study of the Finnish language to be able to read the Kalevala
Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature...
epic.
Tolkien with his Quenya pursued a double aesthetic goal: "classical and inflected". This urge, in fact, was the motivation for his creation of a 'mythology'. While the language developed, he needed speakers, history for the speakers and all real dynamics, like war and migration: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of ‘history’ for Elvish tongues".
Quenya underwent about four major revisions in its grammar, mostly in conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
and the pronominal system
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
. The vocabulary was not subject to sudden or extreme change; except during the first conceptual stage, early Quenya c.1910-c.1920, the language was then called in English Elfin and in Qenya Eldarissa. Tolkien sometimes changed the meaning of a word, but he almost never disregarded it once invented, and he kept on refining its meaning, and countlessly forged new synonyms. Moreover Elven etymology was in a constant flux. Tolkien delighted in inventing new etymons
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
for his Quenya vocabulary. But after the publication of "The Lord of the Rings" (1954–1955), the grammar rules of Quenya went through very few changes (this is late Quenya 1954–1973).
"Qenya" is used sometimes to distinguish between "early Quenya" and "late Quenya". However, early Quenya was also called Eldarissa by Tolkien. It differs fundamentally from late Quenya, having a different internal history, vocabulary and grammar rules described in the "Qenyaqetsa".
From the onset, Tolkien used comparative philology and the tree model
Tree model
A language tree, or family tree with languages substituted for real family members, has the form of a node-link diagram of a logical tree structure. Additional linguistics terminology derives from it. Such a diagram contains branch points, or nodes, from which the daughter languages descend by...
as his major tools in his constructed languages. He usually started with the phonological system of the Proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
and then proceeded in inventing for each daughter language
Daughter language
In historical linguistics, a daughter language is a language descended from another language through a process of genetic descent.-Examples:*English is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European....
s the many mechanisms of sound change needed.
In the early 30s Tolkien decided that the proto-language of the Elves was Valarin, the tongue of the gods or Valar : "The language of the Elves derived in the beginning from the Valar, but they change it even in the learning, and moreover modified and enriched it constantly at all times by their own invention." In his Comparative Tables Tolkien describes the mechanisms of sound change in the following daughter languages: Qenya, Lindarin (a dialect of Qenya), Telerin, Old Noldorin (or Feanorian), Noldorin (or Gondolinian), Ilkorin
Ilkorin
Ilkorin is a Quenya word, literally meaning "not of Kôr". The Ilkorindi were a group of Elves from J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe. They first appear in The Book of Lost Tales. It was then a name with a broad meaning for all the Elves who "never saw the light of Kôr" and also for their many...
(esp. of Doriath
Doriath
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, Doriath is the realm of the Sindar, the Grey Elves of King Thingol in Beleriand. Along with the other great forests of Tolkien's legendarium such as Mirkwood, Fangorn and Lothlórien it serves as the central stage in the theatre of its time, the First Age...
), Danian of Ossiriand, East Danian, Taliska
Taliska
Taliska is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional languages set in his secondary world, often called Middle-earth.Taliska was based on the Gothic language. Gothic was an early interest of Tolkien...
, West Lemberin, North Lemberin, and East Lemberin.
In devising the protolanguage of the Elves, Tolkien appears to have borrowed the five-part plosive system of Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European phonology
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages...
, the ancestor of Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, and others; namely, one labial, one coronal, and three velar plosives (palatal, plain, and labial). Below are some of the "Primary Initial Combinations" from the Comparative Tables:
| Valarin | Qenya | Lindarin | Telerin Telerin Telerin is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional language set in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth.... |
|---|---|---|---|
| mb | m, umb | m, umb | m, emb |
| nd | n, and | n, and | n, end |
| ŋgj | ny, indy, iny | ñ, ind | g, ang |
| ŋg | ŋ > n, ing | n, ing | ŋg, eng |
| ŋgw | ŋw > nw, ungw | m, ungw | m, emb |
About ten years later, Tolkien changed his mind about the origin of the proto-language of the Elves. He wrote in his Lambion Ontale: Descent of Tongues: "The Elves began to make in the beginning of their being [a language] and it is one with their being, since it was of their nature and the first of all their gift to devise names and words". Quenderin had become the proto-language of the Elven language family, but he kept intact the many roots he had invented for Valarin in the '30s, which became "Quenderin roots". The Eldarin family comprises Quenya, Telerin, Sindarin and Nandorin. The evolution in Quenya and Telerin of the nasalized initial groups of Quenderin is described thus in Tolkien's Outline of Phonology:
The grammar of Quenya was influenced by Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, an agglutinative language
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
, but much more by Latin, a synthetic
Synthetic language
In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...
and fusional language
Fusional language
A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....
, and also Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, from which he took probably the idea of the diglossia
Diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety , a second, highly codified variety is used in certain situations such as literature, formal...
of Quenya with its highly codified variety: the Parmaquesta, only used in certain situations such as literature. The phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
of Quenya does not follow Finnish phonological rules, or even those of Latin or Greek. The Elvish languages are not a posteriori languages
A posteriori (languages)
An "a posteriori language" , according to Louis Couturat, is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed or based on existing languages, as opposed to the a priori languages....
; many features for Quenya were invented according to Tolkien's taste. The phonology of Quenya ended up somewhat resembling that of Finnish and Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, but not exactly fitting either of those, or any other language.
Tolkien almost never borrowed words directly from real languages into Quenya, the major exception is Earendel/Earendil
Eärendil
Eärendil the Mariner is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He is depicted in The Silmarillion as a great seafarer who, on his brow, carried the morning star across the sky.-Etymology:...
. Yet the Finnish influence extended sometimes to vocabulary. A few Quenya words, such as tul- "come" and anta- "give", have clearly a Finnish origin. Other forms that appear to have been borrowed are actually coincidence, such as Finnish kirja 'book', and Quenya cirya 'ship'. Tolkien invented the Valarin/Quenderin root KIR- from which sprang his Quenya word cirya. Latin aure, "dawn" and Quenya aure "moment of special meaning, special day, festival day" are unrelated. Quenya aure comes from the Valarin/Quenderin root UR-. And Germanic influence can be seen more in grammar (the -r nominative plural ending is reminiscent of the Scandinavian languages
North Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages, the languages of Scandinavians, make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages...
) or phonology, than in words: Arda
Arda
In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, Arda is the name given to the Earth in a period of prehistory, wherein the places mentioned in The Lord of the Rings and related material once existed...
, the Quenya name for "region" (it has other meanings), just happened to resemble Germanic Erde, "earth". It comes from the Valarin/Quenderin root GAR-. According to Tom DuBois and Scott Mellor the name of Quenya itself may have been influenced by the name Kven
Kven language
The Kven language is a Finnic language spoken in Northern Norway by the Kven people. For political and historical reasons it received the status of a minority language in 2005 within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, a language closely related to Finnish, but Tolkien never said so.
The most striking feature of Quenya for the English speaking readers is that it is an agglutinative language
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
, meaning that multiple affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es are added to words to express grammatical functions. For example, the late Quenya equivalent of Eureka
Eureka (word)
"Eureka" is an interjection used to celebrate a discovery, a transliteration of a word attributed to Archimedes.-Etymology:The word comes from ancient Greek εὕρηκα heúrēka "I have found ", which is the 1st person singular perfect indicative active of the verb heuriskō "I find"...
("I have found (it)") is utúvienyes: utúvie "have found" + -nye subjective "I" + -s objective "it".
In his lifetime J.R.R. Tolkien never ceased to experiment on his constructed languages, and they were subjected to many revisions. Quenya had many grammars with substantial differences between different stages of development. Yet, the Elfin tongue of the 1920s illustrated by his poem "Narqelion" is not easily distinguished from late Quenya poem "Namárië
Namárië
"Namárië" is a poem by J. R. R. Tolkien written in Quenya, a constructed language, and published for the first time in The Lord of the Rings...
" of the Lord of the Rings.
Important grammatical texts, alluded to by C. Tolkien in his History of Middle-earth series and described as almost unreadable or quite incomprehensible, have been published in Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon. The Early Qenya Grammar, written by J.R.R. Tolkien c. 1925, was successfully edited and published in Parma Eldalamberon 14.
Tolkien never intended Quenya, or any of his constructed languages, to be used in everyday life as an international auxiliary language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
.
The Quenya language was not a fragile construction, tossed from one side to another in the ever changing mind of Pr. Tolkien. He wrote many fine pieces in Quenya, like the poem Namárië
Namárië
"Namárië" is a poem by J. R. R. Tolkien written in Quenya, a constructed language, and published for the first time in The Lord of the Rings...
. Tolkien struggled to give to his Elvish languages the feel and taste of natural languages. He wanted to infuse in them a kind of life, while modeling them after a very personal aesthetic taste. He wanted to build languages primarily to satisfy his personal urge and not because he had some universal design in mind.
Publication of linguistic papers
Two journals Vinyar Tengwar, from issue 39 (July 1998), and Parma Eldalamberon, from issue 11 (1995), are today exclusively devoted to the editing and publishing of J.R.R. Tolkien's mass of unpublished linguistic papers. The editors have not published a comprehensive catalogue of the unpublished linguistic papers they are working on and these papers were not published by Christopher Tolkien in the volumes of his History of Middle-earthThe History of Middle-earth
The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published from 1983 through to 1996 that collect and analyse material relating to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Some of the content consists of earlier versions of already published...
. New Tolkienian linguistic material continues to emerge, although the pace of publication is irregular.
Use of Quenya
Attempts by fans to write in Quenya began in the 1960s, when the total corpus of published Elvish was only a few hundred words. Since then, usage of Elvish has flourished in poems and texts, phrases and names, and tattoos. But Tolkien himself never made his languages complete enough for conversation; as a result, newly invented Elvish texts, such as dialogue written by David SaloDavid Salo
David I. Salo is a linguist who worked on the languages of J. R. R. Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, expanding the Elvish languages by building on vocabulary already known from published works, and defining some languages that previously had a very small published vocabulary...
for the movies directed by Peter Jackson
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy
The Lord of the Rings is an epic film trilogy consisting of three fantasy adventure films based on the three-volume book of the same name by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. The films are The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers and The Return of the King .The films were directed by Peter...
, require conjecture and sometimes coinage of new words.
Internal history
The Elvish languages are a family (or phylum) of several related languages and dialects. The following is a brief overview of the fictional internal history of Quenya as conceived by Tolkien ca. 1965.Ancient Quenya
Quenya developed in the great city of Eldamar, TirionTirion
In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, Tirion upon Túna was the city of the Noldor in Valinor...
. Its older form, first recorded in the sarati of Rúmil is called Old or Ancient Quenya (Yára-Quenya in Quenya). It had evolved from Common Eldarin
Common Eldarin
Common Eldarin, or simply Eldarin, is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional language set in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth....
, the tongue of the Eldar before their divisions, e.g. those Elves who decided to follow the Vala Oromë and undertook the Great March to Valinor
Valinor
Valinor is a fictional location in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the realm of the Valar in Aman. It was also known as the Undying Lands, along with Tol Eressëa and the outliers of Aman. This is something of a misnomer; only immortal beings were allowed to reside there, but the land itself,...
and Eldamar. Before that, the Eldar Elves spoke the original speech of all Elves, Primitive Quendian
Primitive Quendian
Primitive Quendian is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional language set in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth....
, called Quenderin in Quenya.
Quenya was also used by the gods or Valar
Vala (Middle-earth)
The Valar are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. They are first mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion develops them into the Powers of Arda or the Powers of the World...
. The Elves even derived some loanwords from that language, which was called Valarin in Quenya, although these were more numerous in the Vanyarin dialect than in Noldorin, probably because of the enduringly close relationship the Vanyarin Elves had with the Valar.
Parmaquesta and Tarquesta
Tolkien imagined a diglossic Elven society with a vernacularVernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
language for every-day use, Tarquesta, and a more educated language for use in ceremonies and lore, Parmaquesta. The Noldor and Vanyar spoke two slightly different though mutually intelligible dialects of Tarquesta: Noldorin Quenya and Vanyarin Quenya. Later Noldorin Quenya became Exilic Quenya, when most of the Noldorin Elves followed their leader Prince Fëanor
Fëanor
Fëanor is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium who plays an important part in The Silmarillion. He was the eldest son of Finwë, the High King of the Noldor, and his first wife Míriel Serindë...
into exile from Eldamar and back to Middle-earth, where the immortal Elves first awoke.
Vanyarin Quenya
The Tarquesta vernacular dialect spoken by the Vanyar is called Vanyarin. The Quenya as used by the Vanyar incorporated several words from Valarin which were not found in the Noldorin dialect, such as tulka ("yellow, from Valarin tulukha(n)), ulban ("blue", presumably from the same root as Valarin ul(l)u meaning "water"), and nasar (red, original Valarin not given).According to "Quendi and Eldar: Essekenta Eldarinwa", Quendya was the usual Vanyarin name given to the Quenya language, since in Vanyarin ndy and ny remained quite distinct. In Noldorin ndy became ny. Tolkien explained that: "The word Quenya itself has been cited as an exempla (e.g. by Ælfwine), but this is a mistake due to supposition that kwenya was properly kwendya and directly derived from the name Quendi "Elves". This appears not to be the case. The word is Quenya in Vanyarin, and always so in Parmaquesta."
Telerin
The Elves of the Third Clan, or TeleriTeleri
In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Teleri, Those who come last in Quenya were the third of the Elf clans who came to Aman...
, who reached Eldamar later than the Noldor and the Vanyar, spoke a different but closely related tongue, usually called Telerin
Telerin
Telerin is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional language set in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth....
. It was seen by some Elves to be just another dialect of Quenya. This was not the case with the Teleri for whom their tongue was distinct from Quenya. After the Vanyar left the city of Túna, Telerin and Noldorin Quenya drew closer. Originally, when living in Beleriand, the Vanyar, the Noldor and the Teleri all spoke one tongue: late Common Eldarin
Common Eldarin
Common Eldarin, or simply Eldarin, is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional language set in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth....
.
Exilic Quenya
Exilic Quenya refers to the form of Quenya that arose among the Noldor in BeleriandBeleriand
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional legendarium, Beleriand was a region in northwestern Middle-earth during the First Age. Events in Beleriand are described chiefly in his work The Silmarillion, which tells the story of the early ages of Middle-earth in a style similar to the epic hero tales of Nordic...
, after they had adopted the Sindarin language as their native speech. It differed somewhat from Aman
Aman
-External links:*...
ian Quenya, mostly in vocabulary (having some loanwords from Sindarin). It differes also in pronunciation, representing the recognition of sound-changes which had begun among the Noldor before the exile and had caused Noldorin Quenya to diverge from Vanyarin Quenya. The change of z (< old s) to r was the latest in Noldorin, belonging to early Exilic Quenya. In grammar, the changes were small since the features of their "old language" were carefully taught.
The rebellious Noldor
Noldor
In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Noldor are Elves of the Second Clan who migrated to Valinor and lived in Eldamar. The Noldor are called Golodhrim or Gódhellim in Sindarin, and Goldoi by Teleri of Tol Eressëa. The singular form of the Quenya noun is Noldo and the adjective is Noldorin...
who followed their leader Fëanor to Middle-earth
Middle-earth
Middle-earth is the fictional setting of the majority of author J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, as does much of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....
, spoke only Quenya. Elu Thingol
Thingol
Elu Thingol is a fictional character in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He appears in The Silmarillion, The Lays of Beleriand and Children of Húrin as well as in numerous stories in the many volumes of The History of Middle-earth...
, King of the Sindar
Sindar
In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the fictional Sindar are Elves of Telerin descent. They are also known as the Grey Elves. Their language is Sindarin...
of Beleriand, forbade the use of Quenya in his realm when he learned of the slaying of Telerin Elves by the Noldor (The Silmarillion
The Silmarillion
The Silmarillion is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic works, edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977, with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, who later became a noted fantasy writer. The Silmarillion, along with J. R. R...
, chapter 15). The Noldor at this time had fully mastered Sindarin, while the Sindar were slow to learn Quenya.
Use of Quenya by other peoples
Quenya was used ceremonially by the MenMan (Middle-earth)
The race of Men in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, refers to humanity and does not denote gender...
of Númenór
Númenor
Númenor is a fictional place in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. It was a huge island located in the Sundering Seas to the west of Middle-earth, the main setting of Tolkien's writings, and was known to be the greatest realm of Men...
and their descendants in Gondor
Gondor
Gondor is a fictional kingdom in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, described as the greatest realm of Men in the west of Middle-earth by the end of the Third Age. The third volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, is concerned with the events in Gondor during the War of the Ring and with...
and Arnor
Arnor
Arnor is a fictional kingdom in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. Arnor, or the Northern Kingdom, was a kingdom of the Dúnedain in the land of Eriador in Middle-earth. The name probably means "Land of the King", from Sindarin Ara- + dor...
for the official names of kings and queens (as Aragorn
Aragorn
Aragorn II is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, one of the main protagonists of The Lord of the Rings. He is first introduced by the name Strider, which the hobbits continue to call him...
did by adopting the name Elessar Telcontar) and writings. Quenya in the Third Age had almost the same status as the Latin language
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
had in medieval Europe, and was called Elven-latin by Tolkien.
The Noldor in Exile valued highly the use of Quenya by others, as can be seen in the way they treat Frodo Baggins
Frodo Baggins
Frodo Baggins is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium.He is the main protagonist of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. He was a hobbit of the Shire who inherited Sauron's Ring from Bilbo Baggins and undertook the quest to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom...
after he greeted them in Quenya: elen síla lumenn' omentielvo.
Registers
Quenya has a variety of language registersRegister (sociolinguistics)
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
:
- Parmaquesta ("Book-language"): the literary style in which the Elven-scriptures, the "Ainulindalë", and other classical Elvish works were written.
- Tarquesta ("high-language"): the vernacularVernacularA vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
speech with two dialects: Vanyarin Quenya and Noldorin Quenya. - Exilic Quenya or "Low Quenya": the spoken style of the Exiled Noldor in Middle-earth.
Phonology
The pronunciation of the Elvish languages by Elves, Men and Hobbits has been described in a variety of sources by J.R.R. Tolkien. The documentation about late Quenya phonology is contained in the Appendix E of the Lord of the Rings and the "Outline of Phonology", a text written by J.R.R. Tolkien and published in Parma Eldalemberon 19.Tolkien based Quenya pronunciation more on Latin
Latin spelling and pronunciation
Latin spelling or orthography refers to the spelling of Latin words written in the scripts of all historical phases of Latin from Old Latin to the present. They all use some phase of the same alphabet even though conventional spellings may vary from phase to phase...
than on Finnish
Finnish phonology
Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to Standard Finnish, which is based on the dialect spoken in Häme Province in central south Finland. Standard Finnish is used by professional speakers, such as the reporters and the news presenters on television.-Vowels:Phonetically, the...
. Thus, Quenya lacks the vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
and consonant gradation
Consonant gradation
Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various "grades". It is found in some Uralic languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Northern Sámi, and the Samoyed language Nganasan. In addition, it has been reconstructed for Proto-Germanic, the parent...
present in Finnish, and accent
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
is not always on the first syllable of a word. A few phonological rules are based on Finnish, such as those for consonant clusters, or final vowels and consonants. The combination of a Latin basis with Finnish phonological rules results in a product that resembles Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
in many respects, which was Tolkien's favorite modern Romance language.
The tables below list the consonants (Q. ólamar) and vowels of late colloquial Noldorin Quenya, i.e. as Quenya was spoken among the Exiled Noldor in Middle-earth. They are written using the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
, unless otherwise noted.
Consonants
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... Parmatéma |
Dental Tincotéma |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... Tyelpetéma |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain Calmatéma |
labial Labialisation Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve the lips, they are called rounded.The most common... Quessetéma |
||||||
| Occlusive Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
voiced | b | d | ɡ | ɡʷ | ||
| voiceless | p | t | c | k | kʷ | ||
| Fricative | voiced | v | |||||
| voiceless | f | s, θ | ç | x | (ʍ) | h | |
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ŋ | ||||
| Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet... |
r | ||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
l | j | w, ʍ | ||||
According to the Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, there were five major phonetic changes in the Quenya as spoken by the Noldor, reflected in the "full names" of the tengwar:
- the tengwa called harma was renamed aha. ⟨h⟩ was used originally for [x] in all positions (except in hr, hl, and a few words like halla). Later [x] turned to [h] in initial position but retained the pronunciation [x] intervocalically, as in aha [äxä] 'rage'. Only between the front vowels /e, i/ and /t/, /x/ was always (even in Old Quenya) palatalized to [ç], as in nehta- [neçtä] 'to dispossess, to deprive'.
- tengwa þúle (thúle) was later pronounced and sometimes even spelled as súle (cf. seseo in SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
). The change of the sound [θ] (written by Tolkien th and þ) to [s] was never general among the Noldor. FëanorFëanorFëanor is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium who plays an important part in The Silmarillion. He was the eldest son of Finwë, the High King of the Noldor, and his first wife Míriel Serindë...
’s supporters never used it, for their Prince hated it, and the sound [θ] was much used in Exilic Quenya again, just as [ŋ], because [θ] (written th) was a normal and much needed sound in Sindarin. - áze was later pronounced áre. [z] was not used in spoken Exilic Quenya, it was a trilled [r], written ⟨r⟩ (this is called rhotacismRhotacismRhotacism refers to several phenomena related to the usage of the consonant r :*the excessive or idiosyncratic use of the r;...
). When Parmaquesta ⟨z⟩ was used in some antique name, like Ezellohar, it was usually pronounced reading [s], and esp. by those Noldor who used in Middle-earth [θ] in their Tarquesta. This mode of speech was called the "Lisp of the Loremasters" in Low Quenya. - wilya was later pronounced and even written vilya. This change goes back to late Old Quenya, and was often written ⟨v⟩, even in Parmaquesta.
- ñoldo and ñwalme were later pronounced as noldo and nwalme, but their spelling in tengwar stayed the same. Tolkien used ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ŋ⟩, and ⟨ñ⟩ to write the velar nasalVelar nasalThe velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
: e.g. Ngoldo, Ŋoldo, Ñoldo. The change of initial [ŋ] to [n] started among the Elves of the First Clan, the Vanyar, who disliked the sound [ŋ]. Only a few of the Noldor adopted the change to [n]. The influence of Sindarin, which possessed an independent [ŋ] as in ang "iron", helped to preserve initial [ŋ] in Exilic Quenya.
Only the following consonants have phonemic geminated forms: pp, tt, cc (kk); mm, nn; ss, ll, rr. These occur only medially. The geminated occlusives are aspirated.
The pronunciation of ⟨hy⟩ is [ç] in Noldorin Quenya, a "strong voiceless y, similar but more frictional than the initial sound in English huge". In Vanyarin Quenya ⟨hy⟩ is pronounced [ʃ].
⟨hw⟩ stands for the sound [ʍ], a "spirantal voiceless w. It has more tense with closer lip-aperture and more friction than the voiceless wh of English".
The letter q or qu stands for a group of two phonemes, not one single sound (one phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
). It is according to Tolkien: "a slightly rounded 'k' followed by a distinct w."
According to Tolkien : "ty is a very fronted 'k', or a palatalised 't' followed by a fairly distinct 'y'-glide,"
Tolkien stated that ⟨ny⟩ is pronounced as in English "new" (presumably British English [njuː], as opposed to American English [nuː], see reference 1).
In the Vanyarin dialect, ⟨ty⟩, ⟨dy⟩, ⟨hy⟩ were depalatalised to [tʃ], [dʒ], and [ʃ] respectively, similar to Italian. About ⟨py⟩ Tolkien wrote: "In Vanyarin Quenya and among some Ñoldor ⟨py⟩ was sounded with voiceless y, sc. as [pç], which later in Vanyarin became [pʃ]" (cf. Hungarian
Hungarian phonology
Hungarian phonology is notable for its process of vowel harmony, the frequent use of geminate consonants and the presence of otherwise uncommon palatal stops.- Consonants :...
lopj [lopç] 'steal').
In the late Ancient Quenya period, when vowels were lost in long compound words, the consonants or groups so created were as a rule changed or reduced:
- -m > -n;
- any stops > -t;
- -d > -r;
- -th > -t;
- -nd > -n;
- -mb, -ng > -m;
- -ñ > -n;
- any combination with s (as -ts, -st, -ss) > -s;
- any combination with -ht > -t.
Vowels
Noldorin Quenya has 10 vowels (ómar), each of them short and long: a, e, i , o, u and á, é, í, ó, ú. The sound quality of the vowels however is disputed: while Pesch states that the short and long forms of a, i and u would be of the same quality, similar to German languageGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Fauskanger compares the sound of the vowels to a Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
or Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
pronunciation. This may be combined to a total of seven possible vowel sounds in Quenya:
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | u | |
| Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel... |
e | o | |
| Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel... |
ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
a |
According to Tolkien é, and ó, when correctly pronounced by Elves, were just a little "tenser and 'closer' " than their short counterparts: "neither very tense and close, nor very slack and open".
Diphthongs
Late Noldorin Quenya has 6 diphthongs (ocamnar).| Offglide | ||
|---|---|---|
| Front | Back | |
| i | ju | |
| e | ew | |
| a | aj | aw |
| o | oj | |
| u | uj | |
In Old Quenya all of the diphthongs were falling diphthongs. "It is probable that before the Exile Vanyarin and Noldorin [Quenya] in common shifted iu, ui to rising diphthongs", but only /iu/ is reported as a rising diphthong [ju] similar to the beginning of English yule [juːɫ]. On the other hand, ui remained in Exilic Quenya a falling diphthong as reported".
Syllables and stress
In Quenya, just as in Latin, the distinction between heavy and light syllablesSyllable weight
In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line....
determines where the main stress of a word falls, and is the key element in Quenya versification. Quenya has also a secondary accent.
A heavy syllable (sometimes called a "long" syllable) is a syllable that contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a cluster of two consonants (ll, ld, mm, ss, etc.). Quenya in this respect is unlike Latin. Quenya clusters are not broken. Certain combinations of consonants, e.g. ny, ry, are regarded as heavy. Medially hy and hw are long consonant in Parmaquesta (not colloquially in Tarquesta) and a vowel before them is held to constitute a metrically long syllable.
In Quenya words of two syllables, the stress is on the first syllable. In words of three or more syllables, the stress is on the penultimate syllable if this is heavy, otherwise on the antepenultimate syllable.
Phonotactics
Tolkien imagined many phonotacticalPhonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
rules for late Quenya:
- As final consonants, only dentals are tolerated (as in Finnish): n, r, l, s, t and nt.
- Quenya tolerates only the following initial consonants: p, t, c (k); f, th (þ), s, h, hy, hw; m, n, ñ; v, l, r, y, w; hl, hr.
- Quenya tolerates only the following initial groups: ps; ty, ny, ly; x (ks), qu (kw), ñw (> N.Q. nw)
- Quenya does not tolerate triconsonantal (or longer) combinations. The exceptions contain c (k), h, g followed by w, or h, t, th (þ), d followed by y. So, Quenya permits the following 9 triconsonantal groups only: nqu ŋkʷw, lqu, ngw ŋɡʷw, rhw; nty, lty, hty çc in Noldorin Quenya, ʃt͡ʃ in Vanyarin Quenya, sty sc in Noldorin Quenya, ʃt͡ʃ in Vanyarin Quenya (cf. ść vs. szcz in PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
), and lhy. In all other cases y, and w became syllabic i, u after the consonant groups.
- Quenya does not tolerate the combination of two different occlusives. "Where these anciently occurred, as in pt, kt, one of the two, or both, became opened and spirantal."
- In Quenya (as in Sindarin) the combination ft is avoided.
Grammar
Here are presented the grammatical rules of late Quenya known for sure, established from Tolkien's writings c.1954–1973. It is almost impossible to extrapolate the morphological rulesMorphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of the Quenya tongue from published data because Quenya is a fictional irregular language (closely modelled on natural languages, like Finnish, and Latin) and not an international auxiliary language with a regular morphology. Tolkien wrote several synchronic
Synchronic analysis
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at one point in time, usually the present, though a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. This may be distinguished from diachronics, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments...
grammars of Quenya, only one has been published: The Early Qenya Grammar, and also several diachronic
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
studies of Quenya, three have been published: The Qenyaqetsa (dealing with early Quenya or Eldarissa), Outline of Phonetic Development, and the Outline of Phonology.
Numbers
Contrary to many auxiliary languages which have fairly simple systems of grammatical number, Quenya nouns can have up to four numbers: singular, general plural ("plural 1"), particular/partitive plural ("plural 2"), and dualDual (grammatical number)
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun...
.
Not all Quenya nouns can have the four numbers; some are pluralia tantum having no singular variant for referring to a single object, as armar "goods (things for sale, or the things that you own)"; some other nouns, especially monosyllabic, use only one of the two plurals judged the most aesthetic by Elves (i. e. Tolkien).
In late Quenya Tarquesta, the plural is formed by a suffix to the subjective form of the noun.
- For plural 1 the suffix is -i or -r (depending of the type of the noun). In Parmaquesta the -í is (not always) long (the precise rules have not yet been published).
- For plural 2 the suffix is -li (-lí in Parmaquesta).
Tarquesta:
- lasse "leaf", lassi pl. 1 "leaves", lasseli pl. 2 "some/several/a number of leaves"
- alda "tree", aldar pl. 1 "trees", aldali pl. 2 "some/several/a number of trees"
- Elda "Elf", Eldar pl. 1 "Elves (as a kind)", Eldali pl. 2 "some/a lot of Elves"
Noun declension
Quenya Nouns are declinedDeclension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
. Declining is the process of inflecting nouns; a set of declined forms of the same word is called a declension. Parmaquesta Quenya has ten cases
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
(some are short variants). These include the four primary cases: nominative
Nominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
, accusative
Accusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
, genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
, and instrumental
Instrumental case
The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
; three adverbial cases: allative
Allative case
Allative case is a type of the locative cases used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions.-Finnish language:In the Finnish language, the allative is the fifth of the locative cases, with the...
(of which the dative
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
is a shortened form), locative
Locative case
Locative is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by"...
(also with a shortened form), and ablative
Ablative case
In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
; and an adjectival case.
Primary cases:
- The nominative is the subject of a verb. It is also used with most prepositions.
- The accusative is the direct object of a verb. It has the same form as the nominative in Tarquesta, but has a distinct case in Old Quenya, and Parmaquesta.
- The genitive is mainly used to mark origin (e.g. the best painters of France). Its usage sometimes overlaps the ablative, sometimes the adjectival.
- The instrumental marks a noun as a means or instrument.
Adverbial cases:
- The allative expresses motion towards: elenna, 'toward a star, starward(s)'.
- The dative is the indirect object of a verb.
- The locative expresses location or position: Lóriendesse, 'in Lórien'.
- The ablative expresses motion away from: earello, 'from the sea'.
Adjectival case:
- The adjectival case describes qualities, and makes almost any noun into an adjective. It is also used to indicate possession or ownership. This usage sometimes overlaps, in Tarquesta, with the genitive.
The declension of the noun in Parmaquesta, has been published in the so-called "Plotz Declension" that Tolkien provided in a letter to Dick Plotz in 1967. This gives the "Classical" declension of two vocalic-stem nouns cirya "ship" and lassë "leaf", in four numbers: singular, pl. 1, pl. 2, and dual. The declension has eight chief cases in three groups that Tolkien labelled a, b, and c. Of these cases, Tolkien named only a) the primary cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and instrumental; and b) the adverbial cases: allative, locative, and ablative. The allative and locative in turn have (unnamed) short forms (except in the loc. dual), of which the short allative form appears to correspond to the dative case. The third group, c, has only one member (and only in the sg. and in pl. 2), which appears to correspond to the adjectival case as described in the essay "Quendi and Eldar – Essekenta Eldarinwa" written in c. 1960.
The declension of cirya and lasse given below is taken from the Plotz Declension and reflect the forms of Classical Quenya. The declensions of ondo "stone", nér "man", and cas "head" are taken from an earlier conceptual period of Quenya (c. 1935).
| Singular | cirya | lassë | ondo | nér | cas |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | cirya | lassë | ondo | nér | cas |
| Accusative | ciryá | lassé | ondo | nera | cara |
| Genitive | ciryó | lassëo | ondo | nero | caro |
| Instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... |
ciryanen | lassenen | ondoinen | nerinen | carinen |
| Allative | ciryanna | lassenna | ondonta | nerta | casta |
| Dative | ciryan | lassen | ondor | neren | caren |
| Locative | ciryassë | lassessë | ondosse | nerissë | casse |
| Short Locative | ciryas | lasses | ondos | neris | cas |
| Ablative | ciryallo | lassello | ondollo | nerullo | callo, carullo |
| Adjectival | ciryava | lasseva | ondova | nerya | carya |
| Plural 1 | cirya | lassë |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | ciryar | lassí |
| Accusative | ciryar | lassí |
| Genitive | ciryaron | lassion |
| Instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... |
ciryainen | lassínen |
| Allative | ciryannar | lassennar |
| Dative | ciryain | lassin |
| Locative | ciryassen | lassessen |
| Short Locative | ciryais | lassis |
| Ablative | ciryallon | lassellon |
| Plural 2 | cirya | lassë | ondo | nér | cas |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | ciryalí | lasselí | ondoli | ? | cari |
| Accusative | ciryalí | lasselí | ondoli | ? | ? |
| Genitive | ciryalion | lasselion | ondolion | ? | ? |
| Instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... |
ciryalínen | lasselínen | ondolínen | ? | ? |
| Allative | ciryalinna(r) | lasselinna(r) | ondolinta(n) | ? | ? |
| Dative | ciryalin | lasselin | ondolir | ? | ? |
| Locative | ciryalisse(n) | lasselisse(n) | ondolissen | ? | ? |
| Short Locative | ciryalis | lasselis | ? | ? | ? |
| Ablative | ciryalillo(n) | lasselillo(n) | ondolillon | ? | ? |
| Adjectival | ciryalíva | lasselíva | ? | ? | ? |
| Dual Dual (grammatical number) Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun... |
cirya | lassë | ondo | nér | cas |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | ciryat | lasset | ondos | nerut | carut |
| Accusative | ciryat | lasset | ondos | nerut | carut |
| Genitive | ciryato | lasseto | ondu | neru | caru |
| Instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... |
ciryanten | lassenten | ondoinent | ? | ? |
| Allative | ciryanta | lassenta | ondontas | ? | ? |
| Dative | ciryant | lassent | ondur | nerur | carur |
| Locative | ciryatsë | lassetsë | ondoset | ? | ? |
| Ablative | ciryalto | lasselto | ondollut | ? | ? |
Adjectives
According to Tolkien adjectives appear only in -a, -e, -o (rare), and -n (stem nearly always -nd) ; melin "dear", pl. melindi.Quenya adjectives may be freely used as nouns.
Comparison
The comparative forms of adjectives are in late Quenya normally expressed by the use of the preposition lá, much as in French plus:- A (ná) calima lá B.
- A is brighter than B.
- A est plus brillant que B. (French)
Note : the use of the copula ná, when in the present tense, is optional.
Some adjectives are irregular. Here are set the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective mára "good":
| Positive | Comparative | Superlative |
|---|---|---|
| (good) | (better) | (best) |
| mára | arya | i arya + gen. case |
- A (ná) arya B.
- A is better than B.
Verbs
Tolkien wrote: "The inflections of [Qenya] verbs are always pretty regular". According to Tolkien's own terminology, Quenya verbs are either in a personal form or an impersonal form. Usually in linguistics, an impersonal verb is a verb that cannot take a true subject, because it does not represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing. This is not how Tolkien intended the use of "impersonal". An impersonal verb form is a verb to which no pronoun has been attached, as care or carir ; carin "I do" is a personal form (-n).The impersonal conjugations provided below were written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the late 1960s, but only in singular forms. There are apparently two main types of verbs in late Quenya: weak transitive verbs, which are usually 'root' verbs, such as car- "make ; do" from the Elvish base or root KAR-, and derivative intransivite verbs with a strong conjugation, whose stems end mainly in -ta, -na, -ya, formed by putting a verbal suffix to a base or root, like henta- "to eye", from the Elvish base KHEN- "eye".
| Derivative verb (strong) | 'Root'verb (weak) | |||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Stem | henta- | car- | ||
| Aorist | henta | hentar | care (cari-) | carir |
| Present (continuative) | hentëa | hentëar | cára | cárar |
| (Aorist) Past | hentanë | hentaner | carnë | carner |
| Future | hentuva | hentuvar | caruva | caruvar |
| Perfect | ehentanië | ehentaniër | cárië | cárier |
Irregular verbs
Some Quenya verbs have an irregular conjugation. The verb auta- comes from the root AWA-, it means in Quenya "depart, go away, disappear, be lost, pass away". This verb is used in a sentence in The Silmarillion: "Auta i lómë!" The night is passing! (Chapter: Of the Fith Battle).| Mixed conjugation | ||
| Singular | Plural | |
| Stems | auta-, av-, va- (< wa-) | |
| Aorist | ava | avar |
| Present (continuative) | avëa, auta | avëar, autar |
| (Aorist) Past | vánë (< wánë), avantë | váner (< wáner), avanter |
| Future | auva, autuva | auvar, autuvar |
| Perfect | (a)vánië | (a)vánier |
Negation of verbs
As explained by J.R.R. Tolkien, verbs in Quenya are negated by using a "negative verb" ua- in front of the of the verb in the impersonnal tense form:| Negation of verb car- | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quenya | English | Quenya | English | |
| carin | 'I make' | → | uan care | 'I do not make' |
| cáran | 'I am making' | → | uan cára | 'I am not making' |
| carnen | 'I made' | → | uan carnë | 'I did not make' |
| caruvan | 'I shall make' | → | uan caruva | 'I shall not make' |
| cárië | 'I have made' | → | uan cárië | 'I have not made' |
Note that the pronoun is added on the negative verb, not on the main verb, and that the endings are regular.
In Parmaquesta (and in verse) the verb ua- could be completely conjugated.
Moods
In late Quenya moods (other than the indicative) are expressed by particlesGrammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
, a short function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes:
- a and á for the imperativeImperative moodThe imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
mood: A laita të! "Bless them!", Á hyamë rámen! "Pray for us!".
The Present Impertive of the verb auta-, cited above, is á va usually written áva as in Áva márië! "Go (away) happily!".
The prohibitive mood negates the imperative mood. The two moods have in late Quenya distinct verbal morphology. In late Quenya prohibition is expressed by the particle áva.
- Áva carë! Don’t do it! Don't make it!
- Á carë! Do it!
Used alone the particle is avá (sometimes ává, with two long a) and means: "Don't!" (I forbid you to do as you intend).
- nai for the optative mood: nai tiruvantes.
Other particles (like kë, ké) are used in the Corpus of published Quenya texts, but their precise functions are not known (e.g. not yet explained by any of Tolkien's published linguistic papers).
Agreement
The plurial forms (suffix -r in late Quenya) are relatively straightforward, and are used only with a detached plurial subject. "When the emphatic pronoun is used separately the verb has no inflexion (save for number)".- Finwë carë. 'FinwëFinwëFinwë, sometimes surnamed Noldóran, is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He was the first High King of the Elven Noldor to lead his people on the journey from Middle-earth to Valinor in the blessed realm of Aman. He was a great friend of Elu Thingol, the King of Doriath...
is making'.
- Quendi carir. 'The Elves are making'.
- Carinyë. 'I am making'.
- Carimmë. 'We are making'.
- Elyë carë. 'He/She is (really) making'.
- Emmë carir. 'We are (really) making'.
Late Quenya verbs have also a dual agreement morpheme -t: Nai siluvat elen atta. "May two stars shine".
In the imperative mood plurality and duality are not expressed. There is no agreement. The verb stays singular.
- If a plural verb is used as in Á carir it means "Let them do it" referring to persons not present or at any rate not addressed directly.
Copula
The copula in late Quenya is the verb na-. Tolkien stated that it was used only in joining adjectives, nouns, and pronouns in statements (or wishes) asserting (or desiring) a thing to have certain quality, or to be same as another, and also that the copula was not used when the meaning was clear.- Eldar ataformaiti, can be translated in English either "Elves are ambidexters", or "Elves were ambidexters".
- A mára. "A is good." "A was good."
| Copula | 'Exist' (have being) | |||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Stem | na- | ëa- | ||
| Aorist | na | nar | ëa | ëar |
| Present (continuative) | ná | nár | ëa | ëar |
| (Aorist) Past | né | ner | engë | enger |
| Future | nauva | nauvar | euva | euvar |
| Perfect | anaië | anaier | engië | engier |
Prepositions and adverbs
In Quenya there are many similarities in form between prepositions and adverbs. Many Quenya prepositions have adverb-like uses with no complement.In Common Eldarin prepositions were postpositions, and later became inflectional endings. Case markings combine primarily with nouns, whereas prepositions can combine with phrases of many different categories. This is why most prepositions in Quenya are used with a noun in the nominative case.
- an i falmali = i falmalinna(r) "upon the many waves"
The preposition an is related to the -nna case ending.
Conjugated prepositions
Quenya has conjugated preposition formed from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun.- ótar "(together) with you (Sir or Mam)", and ótari "(together) with you (Milords or Miladies)".
- rámen "for us".
Pronouns
As with all parts of Quenya grammar, the pronominal system was subject to many revisions throughout Tolkien's life. The following table of late Quenya is taken from two sources of c. 1965–1973, and do not reflect the pronominal system as it stood when Tolkien invented "Qenya" c.1910, early Quenya.In late Quenya, pronouns have both separate or independent forms, and suffix forms. One source is used for the stressed separate pronouns, the other for the rest of the table.
| Early Noldorin Quenya Forms | Long subjective | Short subjective | Separate | Possessive |
| 1st person singular | -nyë | -n | ní | -nya |
| 2nd pers. imperious/familiar sg. | -tyë | tyé | -tya | |
| 2nd pers. formal/polite sg. | -lyë | lyé | -lya | |
| 3rd animate person singular | -stë | -s | sé | -rya/-ya |
| 3rd inanimate person singular | -ssa | -s | sá | -rya/-ya |
| Impersonal singular agreement | nil | nil | ||
| 1st pers. pl. inclusive | -lmë | vé | -lma | |
| 1st pers. pl. exclusive | -mmë | mé | -mma | |
| 2nd person imperious/familiar plural | -ncë | (?) | -nca | |
| 2nd person formal/polite plural | -ldë/-llë | lé | -lda/-lla | |
| 3rd animate person plural | -ntë | té | -nta | |
| 3rd inanimate person plural | -nta | sa1 | -nta | |
| Impersonal plural agreement | + -r | + -ë/-r | ||
| 1st pers. dual inclusive | -ngwë/-nquë | wet | -nqua | |
| 1st pers. dual exclusive | -mmë/-nwë | met | -mma | |
| 2nd person imperious/familiar dual | -xë/-ccë | tyet | -xa/-cca | |
| 2nd person formal/polite dual | -llë/-stë | let | -lla | |
| 3rd person dual | -sto/-ttë | tú | -twa | |
| Impersonal dual agreement | +-t | +-t |
- Printed sa in the source, it is probably a casual error for sá. But të, not té, was used by the Gondorians: cf. a laita të in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe both forms (sa, sá; té, të) were used in Low Quenya.
The separate pronouns have both a short (lyé, sé, mé) and long form (elyë, emmë, essë, elwë). Evidence from the published Corpus suggests that long separate forms (a complete list of which have not been published yet) were intensive pronouns, Tolkien named them "emphatic disjunct pronoun", while short independent pronouns could be use normally in place of enclitic.
I love him (or her), can be expressed in Quenya as Melinyes or Melin sé. I love them would be then Melinyet or Melin té (these two forms are reconstructed).
The verbal inflexions are subjective but an -s (singular) and a -t (plural and dual) may be added to the long subjective pronouns as objectives of the 3rd person:
- utúvie-lye-s, "You have found it/him/her".
- utúvie-lye-t, "You have found them".
Noldorin dialect
The second person familiar was abandoned in colloquial Noldorin Quenya (before the Exile). The following forms became obsolete:- -tyë, -ncë, -xë, -ccë
- -tya, -nca, -xa, -cca
- tyé, tyet
The ancient polite forms became used in ordinary contexts; and so a new honorific form was made in Late Noldorin Quenya (maybe when Fëanor was banished from Tirion) by adding tar, the Quenya word for sir (and madam).
- You do, sir. Carilyë tar, became Carlitar.
Possessive determiners
The possessive determiners (analogous to English my, his, etc.) are used to indicate the possessor of the noun they determine. They mark the person and number of the possessor, and are inflected to agree with the noun they are attached in number and case. While English distinguishes between masculine and feminine singular possessors (his vs. her), late Quenya does not. As in English, possessive determiners do not necessarily express true possession.Their forms in Early colloquial Noldorin Quenya are as follows:
| | possessed | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| one | two | three or more | |||
| possessor | | first person | singular | -(i)nya1 | -(i)nyat | -(i)nyar |
| dual | -(e)nqua, -(e)mma | ||||
| -(e)nquar, -(e)mmar | |||||
| plural | -(e)lma, -(e)mma2 | ||||
| second person | singular | -tya, -lya | -tyat, -lyat | -tyar, -lyar | |
| dual | -xa, -cca, -lla | -xat, -ccat, -llat | -xar, -ccar, -llar | ||
| plural | -nca, -lda, -lla | -ncat, -ldat, -llat | -ncar, -ldar, -llar | ||
| third person | singular | -rya, -ya | -ryat, -yat | -ryar, -yar | |
| dual | -twa | ||||
| plural | -nta | -ntat | -ntar |
- The i forms, -inya, are used with consonantal nouns: atar, atarinya 'my father'.
- The e forms, -emma, are used with consonantal nouns: atar, ataremma 'our father'.
- Ortanentë mánta. They raised their hands.
- Ortaner mánta. They raised their hands.
Varda ortanë máryat. Varda has uplifted her (two) hands.
So far, according to our published corpus of Quenya texts, mántë is our sole possessive determiner with a plural ending in -ë (< -ai). The usual plural ending is -r, hildinyar, "my heirs". This was probably an older device (Parmaquesta).
Syntax
Quenya allows for a very flexible word order because it is an inflectional language, like Latin. Nevertheless, it has word order rules.The usual structure is subject - verb - object. One can place the adjective before or after the noun that it modifies.
Vocabulary
It is very difficult to know how many Elvish words J.R.R. Tolkien devised, because much of his writing on the subject is still unpublished. As of 2008, about 25000 Elvish words have been published.| English | Quenya | Sindarin equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| earth | ambar, cemen | amar, ceven |
| sky | menel | menel |
| water | nén | nen |
| fire | nár | naur |
| man (male) | nér | benn |
| female | nís | bess |
| eat | mat- | mad- |
| drink | suc- | sog- |
| tall, great | alta, halla | beleg, daer |
| small | pitya, titta | niben, tithen |
| night | lóme | dû |
| day | aure, ré | aur |
Proper nouns
The lexiconLexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
of Quenya is rich in proper nouns.
- EstëEsteThe House of Este is a European princely dynasty. It is split into two branches; the elder is known as the House of Welf-Este or House of Welf historically rendered in English, Guelf or Guelph...
"Rest"; Indis "Bride"; Nessa "Youth"; VardaVardaVarda Elentári is a deity in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium to whom the hymn A Elbereth Gilthoniel is directed..-Character overview:Varda is one of the Valar, a group of semi-divine beings similar to archangels. Also known as "Queen of the stars", she is said to be too beautiful for words; within...
"Sublime"; VoronwëVoronwëIn Tolkien's The Silmarillion, Voronwë was a Noldorin Elf from Gondolin. His name is Quenya in origin, meaning 'steadfast one'...
"Steadfast one".
- Ancalimë "Most Bright Lady"; Curumo "Cunning Man"; OlórinGandalfGandalf is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In these stories, Gandalf appears as a wizard, member and later the head of the order known as the Istari, as well as leader of the Fellowship of the Ring and the army of the West...
"(?)Dreamer"; SauronSauronSauron is the primary antagonist and titular character of the epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.In the same work, he is revealed to be the same character as "the Necromancer" from Tolkien's earlier novel The Hobbit...
.
- AinulindalëAinulindalëThe Ainulindalë is the first part of the fantasy work The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. In Tolkien's legendarium, the Ainur are Eä's divine beings. In Heaven, before Time, they compose a Great Music. This Music is revealed to be the template, or blueprint, commensurable with the entire history...
"Music of the Ainur"; Eldamar "Home of the Eldar"; Helcaraxë; IlúvatarEru IlúvatarEru Ilúvatar is a fictional deity in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He is introduced in The Silmarillion as the creator of all existence . In Tolkien's invented language of Elvish, Eru means "The One", or "He that is Alone" and Ilúvatar signifies "Father of All"...
"Father of All"; Oron Oiolossë "Ever Snow-white Peak"; Ondolindë "Rock of Song"; Turambar "Master of Doom"; ValinorValinorValinor is a fictional location in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the realm of the Valar in Aman. It was also known as the Undying Lands, along with Tol Eressëa and the outliers of Aman. This is something of a misnomer; only immortal beings were allowed to reside there, but the land itself,...
"land of the Vali", sc. Valar; Vingilot "Foam-flower"; Yavanna.
- Mar-nu-FalmarNúmenorNúmenor is a fictional place in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. It was a huge island located in the Sundering Seas to the west of Middle-earth, the main setting of Tolkien's writings, and was known to be the greatest realm of Men...
"Land under the Waves"; Mindon EldaliévaTirionIn J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, Tirion upon Túna was the city of the Noldor in Valinor...
"Lofty Tower of the Elvish-people"; Quenta SilmarillionQuenta SilmarillionQuenta Silmarillion is a collection of fictional legends written by the high fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published after the author's death in The Silmarillion together with four shorter stories...
"Tale of the Silmarils".
Some prepositions and adverbs
- ala: [place] beyond; [time] after.
- ama: up(wards).
- an: towards, upon.
- et: forth, out of [with the complement noun in ablative case]
- haila: [static] far beyond.
- haiya: far, far off, far away.
- han: [addition] beyond ; over and above, in addition to.
- ní: [not touching] beneath, under.
- no: 1. under. 2. upon. 3. after (of place), behind.
- nu: under, beneath.
- ono: 1. in front of, ahead, before [in all relation but time]. 2. after [of time only].
Greetings
Elvish greetings can be expressed both by voice and by hand, and often involve a combination of the two. Elvish greetings are often, but not always, used just prior to a conversation. From the Lord of the Rings it appears that Elves do not have a very elaborate greeting ritual.The word used as a form of polite address to an Elf (male or female) is: Tar. Among the Númenoreans it became "King/Queen" and used as a form of address for a superior, especially a King or a Queen; cf. Tarinya, used by Prince Aldarion to address his father, King Tar-Meneldur.
- Namárië näˈmäːriɛ is a reduced form of Quenya á na márië, literally "be well". It is a formula used in Tarquesta for greetingGreetingGreeting is an act of communication in which human beings intentionally make their presence known to each other, to show attention to, and to suggest a type of relationship or social status between individuals or groups of people coming in contact with each other...
and also for farewell.
- The most usual formula used by the Noldor for greeting each other is (Hara) máriessë! "(Stay) in happiness!".
-
- In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Frodo Baggins used another greeting formula: Elen síla lúmenn(a) omentielmo! or Elen síla lúmenn(a) omentielvo! It was a very old traditional formula in an elevated style and used between two people (or two companies of many people) each going on a path that crosses that of the other: "A star shines upon the hour of the meeting of our ways". Other forms of this formula in the aorist tense were: Elen silë omentiemman! Elen silë omentienwan! "A star is shining upon our meeting."
- It was also used in Telerin: Él síla lúmena vomentienguo!
- The most usual formula used by the Noldor in farewells is Áva márië! "Go happily!" or Márienna! "To happiness!".
Elvish writing systems
Tolkien imagined many writing systems for his Elves. The most well-known is the "TengwarTengwar
The Tengwar are an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional universe of Middle-earth, the tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elven tongues: Quenya, Telerin, and also Valarin. Later a great number of languages of Middle-earth were written...
of Fëanor" but the first one he created c. 1919 are the "Tengwar of Rumil", also called the sarati
Sarati
Sarati is an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion.- External history :...
. He decided, that prior to their Exile, the Noldorin Elves used first the sarati
Sarati
Sarati is an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion.- External history :...
of Rúmil to record Ancient Quenya. In Middle-earth, Quenya appears to be rarely written using the "Elvish runes" or cirth
Cirth
The Cirth are the letters of an semi-artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. The initial C in Cirth is pronounced as a K, never as an S....
, named certar in Quenya. A Runic inscription in Quenya was engraved on the sword of Aragorn (II), Andúril.
Latin alphabet
Tolkien's spelling in Latin letters of Quenya was largely phonemic, with each letter corresponding to a specific phoneme in the language, save for some exceptions. In particular, the vowels varied in pronunciation depending upon their vowel length, the letter "n" represents either a dental nasalDental nasal
The dental nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .-Features:Features of the dental nasal:- Occurrence :...
or a velar nasal
Velar nasal
The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
, in nc (nk) and ng, and the letter "u" represents either consonant or vowel depending on context, e.g. qu stands for kw, Orqui is Orkwi. Occasionally, Tolkien wrote Quenya with a "Finnish-style" orthography (rather than the standard Latin-Romance version), in which c is replaced by k, y with j, and long vowels written double.
Most of the time Tolkien wrote his grammars and lexicons of Quenya in English using the Latin script for Quenya. But inside his Secondary World Elves, Men and Hobbits of Middle-earth are supposed to use a different script when writing, the tengwar
Tengwar
The Tengwar are an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional universe of Middle-earth, the tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elven tongues: Quenya, Telerin, and also Valarin. Later a great number of languages of Middle-earth were written...
of Fëanor, seen on the One Ring
One Ring
The One Ring is a fictional artifact that appears as the central plot element in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy novels. It is described in an earlier story, The Hobbit , as a magic ring of invisibility. The sequel The Lord of the Rings describes its powers as being more encompassing than...
and the Doors of Durin in The Lord of the Rings.
Corpus
The poem NamáriëNamárië
"Namárië" is a poem by J. R. R. Tolkien written in Quenya, a constructed language, and published for the first time in The Lord of the Rings...
is the longest piece of Quenya found in The Lord of the Rings; yet the first Quenya sentence is uttered by a Hobbit: Frodo's greeting to the Elves: elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo. Other examples include Elendil
Elendil
Elendil is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He appears in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....
's words spoken upon reaching Middle-earth, and repeated by Aragorn at his coronation: Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien. Sinomë maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta!. Treebeard
Treebeard
Treebeard is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings. The eldest of the species of Ents, he is said to live in the ancient Forest of Fangorn and stands fourteen feet in height and is tree-like in appearance, with leafy hair and a rigid structure. Fangorn Forest...
's greeting to Celeborn
Celeborn
Celeborn is a fictional character in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He appears in The Lord of the Rings as the Elven husband of Galadriel, Lord of the Galadhrim; and co-ruler along with Galadriel of Lothlórien. He was the father of Celebrían — the wife of Elrond — and thus the...
and Galadriel is also spoken in Quenya: A vanimar, vanimálion nostari.
Other Quenya poems spoken by J.R.R. Tolkien in public but never published in his lifetime are Oilima Markirya ("The Last Ark"), Nieninqe, and Earendel contained in his lecture A Secret Vice
A Secret Vice
A Secret Vice is the title of a lecture written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, given at a conference. Some twenty years later, Tolkien revised the manuscript for a second presentation....
and published for the first time in 1983 in The Monsters and the Critics
The Monsters and the Critics
The Monsters and the Critics is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's scholarly linguistic essays edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously in 1983.The essays are:* "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" looks at Beowulf....
. A fragment (with mistakes) of the poem Narqelion, written in early Quenya or Elfin, was published by Humphrey Carpenter
Humphrey Carpenter
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster.-Biography:...
in his Biography; a facsimile of the entire poem was published in April 1999 in Vinyar Tengwar 40.
In Tolkien's lifetime
- The HobbitThe HobbitThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again, better known by its abbreviated title The Hobbit, is a fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald...
(1937) and The Adventures of Tom BombadilThe Adventures of Tom BombadilThe Adventures of Tom Bombadil is a collection of poetry written by J. R. R. Tolkien and published in 1962. The book contains 16 poems, only two of which deal with Tom Bombadil, a character who is most famous for his encounter with Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring...
(1962) contain a few SindarinSindarinSindarin is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his secondary world, often called Middle-earth.Sindarin is one of the many languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called the Eledhrim or Edhellim in Sindarin....
names (Elrond, Tirith Aear), but no texts or sentences in Quenya.
- 1954–1955: The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
. - 1968: The Road Goes Ever OnThe Road Goes Ever OnThe Road Goes Ever On is a song cycle that has been published as sheet music and as an audio recording. The music was written by Donald Swann, and the words are taken from poems in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, especially The Lord of the Rings.The title of this opus is taken from "The...
.
Posthumously
- 1981: "Oath of Cirion" is a Quenya text in Unfinished TalesUnfinished TalesUnfinished Tales is a collection of stories and essays by J. R. R. Tolkien that were never completed during his lifetime, but were edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and published in 1980.Unlike The Silmarillion, for which the narrative fragments were modified to connect into a consistent and...
- 1983: A Secret ViceA Secret ViceA Secret Vice is the title of a lecture written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, given at a conference. Some twenty years later, Tolkien revised the manuscript for a second presentation....
in The Monsters and the CriticsThe Monsters and the CriticsThe Monsters and the Critics is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's scholarly linguistic essays edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously in 1983.The essays are:* "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" looks at Beowulf....
has several poems in Quenya:
- Oilima Markirya
- Nieninqe
- Earendel
- 1985: Fíriel's Song is a Quenya poem published in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 72
- 1985: Alboin Errol's Fragments are phrases published in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 47.
- 1985: The Etymologies is an etymological dictionnary published in The Lost Road and Other Writings.
- 1989: The Plotz Quenya Declensions is a chart of declension in Quenya of two words (lasse 'leaf' and cirya 'ship') first published in part in the fanzine Beyond BreeBeyond BreeBeyond Bree is the monthly newsletter of the Tolkien Special Interest Group of American Mensa.Bree is a village in Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth.-External links:* *...
, and later in full in Vinyar Tengwar 6, p. 14 - 1991: Koivieneni Sentence in Vinyar Tengwar 14, p. 5–20.
- 1992: New Tengwar Inscription in VT 21, p. 6
- 1992: Liège Tengwar Inscription in VT 23, p. 16
- 1993: Two Trees Sentence in VT 27, p. 7–42
- 1993: Koivieneni Manuscript in VT 27, p. 7–42
- 1993: The Bodleian Declensions, in Vinyar Tengwar 28, pp. 9–34.
- 1994: The Entu Declension in VT 36, p. 8–29
- 1995: Gnomish Lexicon, Parma Eldalamberon 11.
- 1995: Rúmilian Document in Vinyar Tengwar 37, p. 15–23
- 1998: Qenya Lexicon Parma Eldalamberon 12
- 1998: Osanwe-kentaOsanwe-kentaThe Ósanwe-kenta or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought is a text by J. R. R. Tolkien, written as a typescript of eight pages, probably in 1960, published in Vinyar Tengwar in 1998....
, Enquiry into the communication of thought, Vinyar Tengwar 39 - 1998: From Quendi and Eldar, Appendix D. Vinyar Tengwar 39, pp. 4–20.
- 1999: Narqelion, Vinyar Tengwar 40, p. 5–32
- 2000: Etymological Notes – Osanwe-kenta Vinyar Tengwar 41, p. 5–6
- 2000: From The Shibboleth of Fëanor (written ca. 1968) Vinyar Tengwar 41, p. 7–10 (A part of the Shibboleth of Fëanor was published in The Peoples of Middle-earthThe Peoples of Middle-earthThe Peoples of Middle-earth is the 12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien from the unpublished manuscripts of his father J. R. R. Tolkien. Some characters only appear here...
, p. 331–366) - 2000: Notes on Óre Vinyar Tengwar 41, p. 11–19
- 2000: Merin Sentence Tyalie Tyalieva 14, p. 32–35
- 2001: The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor (written 1967–1969) Vinyar Tengwar 42, p. 5–31.
- 2001: Essay on negation in Quenya Vinyar Tengwar 42, p. 33–34
- 2001: Goldogrim Pronominal Prefixes Parma Eldalamberon 13 p. 97
- 2001: Early Noldorin Grammar, Parma Eldalamberon 13, p. 119–132
- 2002: "Words of Joy: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya (Part One), Vinyar Tengwar 43:
- Ataremma (Pater NosterLord's PrayerThe Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
in Quenya) versions I-VI, p. 4–26 - Aia María (Ave MariaHail MaryThe Angelic Salutation, Hail Mary, or Ave Maria is a traditional biblical Catholic prayer asking for the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Hail Mary is used within the Catholic Church, and it forms the basis of the Rosary...
in Quenya) versions I–IV, p. 26–36 - Alcar i Ataren (Gloria Patri in Quenya), p. 36–38
- 2002 "Words of Joy: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya (Part Two), Vinyar Tengwar 44:
- Litany of LoretoLitany of the Blessed Virgin MaryThe Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a Marian litany originally approved in 1587 by Pope Sixtus V. It is also known as the Litany of Loreto, for its first-known place of origin, the Shrine of Our Lady of Loreto , where its usage was recorded as early as 1558.The litany contains many of the...
in Quenya, p. 11–20 - Ortírielyanna (Sub tuum praesidiumSub tuum praesidiumBeneath thy protection is the oldest extant hymn to the Theotokos .-History:The earliest text of this hymn was found in a Coptic Orthodox Christmas liturgy of the third century. It is written in Greek and dates to approximately 250. It is used in the Coptic liturgy to this day, as well as in the...
in Quenya), p. 5–11 - Alcar mi tarmenel na Erun (Gloria in Excelsis DeoGloria in Excelsis Deo"Gloria in excelsis Deo" is the title and beginning of a hymn known also as the Greater Doxology and the Angelic Hymn. The name is often abbreviated to Gloria in Excelsis or simply Gloria.It is an example of the psalmi idiotici "Gloria in excelsis Deo" (Latin for "Glory to God in the highest")...
in Quenya), p. 31–38 - Ae Adar Nín (Pater NosterLord's PrayerThe Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
in Sindarin) Vinyar Tengwar 44, p. 21–30- 2003: Early Qenya Fragments, Parma Eldalamberon 14.
- 2003: Early Qenya Grammar, Parma Eldalamberon 14.
- 2003: "The Valmaric Scripts", Parma Eldalamberon 14.
- 2004: "Sí Qente Feanor and Other Elvish Writings", ed. Smith, Gilson, Wynne, and Welden, Parma Eldalamberon 15
- 2005: "Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals (Part One)." Edited by Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar 47, pp. 3–43.
- 2005: "Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals (Part Two)." Edited by Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar 48, pp. 4–34.
- 2006: "Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets", Part 1, ed. Smith, Parma Eldalamberon 16
- 2006: "Early Elvish Poetry: Oilima Markirya, Nieninqe and Earendel", ed. Gilson, Welden, and Hostetter, Parma Eldalamberon 16
- 2006: "Qenya Declensions", "Qenya Conjugations", "Qenya Word-lists", ed. Gilson, Hostetter, Wynne, Parma Eldalamberon 16
- 2007: "Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals (Part Three)." Edited by Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar 49, pp. 3–37.
- 2007: "Five Late Quenya Volitive Inscriptions." Vinyar Tengwar 49, pp. 38–58.
- 2007: "Ambidexters Sentence", Vinyar Tengwar 49
- 2007: "Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
", edited by Gilson, Parma Eldalemberon 17. - 2009: J.R.R. Tolkien, "Tengwesta Qenderinwa and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 2", edited by C. Gilson, R. Smith and P. Wynne, Parma Eldalemberon 18.
- Tengwesta Qenderinwa 1
- Elements of Quendian Structure
- Tengwesta Qenderinwa 2
- Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 2
- 2010: J. R. R. Tolkien, "Quenya Phonology: Comparative Tables, Outline of Phonetic Development, Outline of Phonology", edited by C. Gilson, Parma Eldalemberon 19.
See also Douglas A. Anderson
Douglas A. Anderson
Douglas Allen Anderson is an author and editor on the subjects of fantasy and medieval literature, specializing in textual analysis of the works of J. R. R...
, Carl F. Hostetter: A Checklist, Tolkien Studies
Tolkien Studies
Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review is an academic journal publishing papers on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D. C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger. It states that it is the first scholarly journal published by an academic press in the area of Tolkien...
4 (2007).
See also
- Calendar of Imladris
- Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Elvish languages (Middle-earth)
- SaratiSaratiSarati is an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion.- External history :...
- SindarinSindarinSindarin is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his secondary world, often called Middle-earth.Sindarin is one of the many languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called the Eledhrim or Edhellim in Sindarin....
Further reading
- Appleyard, Anthony (1992). "Quenya Grammar Re-Examined". Quettar 43, pp. 3–21.
- Derzhanski, Ivan A (1997). "E man i yulma oi enquanta men?" Vinyar Tengwar 38, pp. 14–18.
- Foster, Robert and Glen GoodKnight (1971). "Sindarin and Quenya Phonology". Mythcon I: Proceedings, 54–56. Los Angeles: Mythopoeic Society.
- Gilson, Christopher and Carl F. Hostetter (1994). "The entu, ensi, enta Declension: A Preliminary Analysis". Vinyar Tengwar 36, pp. 7–29.
- Gilson, Christopher and Patrick Wynne (1991). "The Elves at Koivienéni: A New Quenya Sentence". Mythlore 17(3), pp. 23–30.
- Hostetter, Carl F (1992). ""Si man i-yulmar n(g)win enquatuva": A Newly-Discovered Tengwar Inscription". Vinyar Tengwar 21, pp. 6–10.
- Hostetter, Carl F (2007). "Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon". J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, pp. 551–52. New York: Routledge.
- Kloczko, Edward (1995). Dictionnaire des langues elfiques, volume 1 (Quenya-Français-Anglais/Quenya-French-English). Toulon: Tamise.
- Rautala, Helena and K. J. Battarbee (1992). "Familiarity and Distance: Quenya's Relation to Finnish". Scholarship and Fantasy, pp. 21–31. Turku: University of Turku.
- Welden, Bill (2001). "Negation in Quenya". Vinyar Tengwar 42, pp. 32–34.
- Wynne, Patrick H. and Christopher Gilson (1993). "Trees of Silver and of Gold: A Guide to the Koiveinéni Manuscript". Vinyar Tengwar 27, pp. 7–42.
External links
- The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship
- Parma Eldalamberon
- Vinyar Tengwar
- Ardalambion A site with Fauskangerian Neo-Quenya.
- Parma Tyelpelassiva – The book of silver leaves
- EldarinWiki Wiktionary project for Tolkienian languages.
- "The s-case" An old article by Ales Bican examining the evidence for the then enigmatic case, the shortened form of the locative (-s).