Quenya Language

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Quenya Course
Helge K. Fauskanger
Copyright policy: This course can be downloaded from
Ardalambion (http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf/), but not
re-posted elsewhere on the net without permission from the
author, H. K. Fauskanger. Print-outs may be made for per-
sonal use (private groups included).
Typeset by Johan Winge using L
A
T
EX.
First edition in pdf format, 28 February 2002.
Contents
0 Introduction 6
0.1 The question of copyright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
0.2 What is Quenya like? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
0.3 The sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
0.4 A word of warning regarding parts of the corpus . . . . . . . 26
0.5 Spelling conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1 Lesson One 39
1.1 General remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.2 Basic terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.3 The sounds of Quenya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1.4 Pronunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2 Lesson Two 65
2.1 TheNoun............................. 65
2.2 The article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3 Lesson Three 74
3.1 Dual number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.2 Stem variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4 Lesson Four 81
4.1 The Adjective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5 Lesson Five 92
5.1 TheVerb ............................. 92
5.2 More about adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6 Lesson Six 105
6.1 The past tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
7 Lesson Seven 116
7.1 The future tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
7.2 The Aorist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
3
8 Lesson Eight 127
8.1 The perfect tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
8.2 Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
9 Lesson Nine 142
9.1 The infinitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
9.2 The negative verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
9.3 Active participles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
10 Lesson Ten 152
10.1 Adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
10.2 The pronominal endings -nt¨e and -t..............155
10.3 Infinitives with object pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
10.4 The past tense of intransitive verbs in -ya . . . . . . . . . . . 159
10.5 Passive participles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
11 Lesson Eleven 170
11.1Cases ...............................170
11.2 The Genitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
12 Lesson Twelve 183
12.1 The Possessive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
12.2 Various notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
12.3 Verbal or Abstract nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
13 Lesson Thirteen 197
13.1 The Dative case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
13.2 The Gerund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
13.3 The pronoun “we” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
13.4 An indefinite pronoun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
14 Lesson Fourteen 212
14.1 The Allative and Ablative cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
14.2 Equ¨e and auta: two peculiar verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
14.3 Possessive pronominal endings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
15 Lesson Fifteen 232
15.1 More about possessive pronominal endings . . . . . . . . . . . 232
15.2 The Locative case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
15.3 Relative sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
15.4 Third Person obscurities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
4
16 Lesson Sixteen 249
16.1 The Instrumental case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
16.2 Verbs with an unaccented vowel + -ta .............253
16.3 The imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
16.4 The nai formula .........................258
17 Lesson Seventeen 263
17.1 Quenya demonstratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
17.2 Inflecting the “Last Declinable Word” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
17.3 U-stem nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
17.4 Ordinals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
18 Lesson Eighteen 276
18.1 Independent pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
18.2 Impersonal verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
18.3 U-stem verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
18.4 The various uses of l´a ......................287
19 Lesson Nineteen 293
19.1 Pronouns in imperative phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
19.2 Emphatic pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
19.3 Question-words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
19.4 Postpositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
20 Lesson Twenty 305
20.1 The verb “to be” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
20.2 Ma: An interrogative particle? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
20.3 Sa introducing nominal clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
A Keys 317
5
Lesson 0
Introduction
Of all the languages invented by British author and philologist J.R.R.
Tolkien (1892–1973), the most popular has always been Quenya. It also
seems to be the most highly developed of all the languages Tolkien devised.
Indeed only two of them – Quenya and Sindarin – are so complete that one
can with some ease write substantial texts in them without resorting to mas-
sive invention of one’s own. Until recently, Sindarin was poorly understood,
and its complex phonology may daunt fresh students (especially if they have
no linguistic training). My advice to people who want to study Tolkien’s lin-
guistic creations would definitely be that they start with Quenya. Knowing
this tongue will facilitate later studies of the other languages, including Sin-
darin, since Quenya represents just one branch of the Elvish language family:
The Elvish languages are not “independent” entities, but all evolved from
a common ancestral tongue, and in many respects, Quenya stands closer to
this primitive original than the other languages.
In reality as opposed to this fictional context, Tolkien knew well what
kind of style he was aiming for, and having sketched a “primitive Elvish”
language, he cleverly devised sound-shifts that would produce a tongue with
the desired flavour: Quenya resulted from his youthful romance with Finnish;
he was, in his own words, “quite intoxicated” by the sound and style of
this language when he discovered it (The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, p. 214).
However, it should be emphasized that Finnish was an inspiration only;
Quenya is in no way a garbled version of Finnish, and only a few words of
its vocabulary display any semblance to the corresponding Finnish words.
(See Harri Per¨ala’s discussion at http://www.sci.fi/˜alboin/finn que.htm;
the writer is a Finn himself.) Tolkien also mentioned Greek and Latin as
inspirations; we can evidently add Spanish to the list as well.
The fictional or “internal” history of Quenya is synopsized in my regular
Ardalambion Quenya article (see http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/quenya.
htm) and does not have to be repeated in any detail here. Very briefly,
within Tolkien’s mythos Quenya was the language of the Elves that dwelt
in Valinor in the Uttermost West; being spoken in the Blessed Realm, it
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was the noblest tongue in the world. Later one of the clans of the Elves, the
Noldor, went into exile in Middle-earth, bringing the Quenya tongue with
them. In Middle-earth it soon fell out of use as a daily speech, but among
the Noldor it was ever preserved as a ceremonial language, and as such it
was also known to Mortal Men in later ages. Hence in The Lord of the Rings
we have Frodo delivering the famous Quenya greeting elen s´ıla l´umenn’
omentielvo, “a star shines on the hour of our meeting”, when he and his
friends run into some Elves (and the Elves are delighted to meet “a scholar
in the Ancient Tongue”). If one studies Quenya as a way to immerse oneself
in Tolkien’s fiction, it may indeed be best to picture oneself as a mortal
student in Middle-earth in the Third Age, about the period covered in The
Lord of the Rings. (Picturing oneself as an Elvish native speaker in Valinor
back in the First Age may be overly ambitious.) The particular form of
Quenya taught in this course is – by intention – precisely the “late Exilic”
or “Third Age” variant. This is the kind of Quenya exemplified in The Lord
of the Rings, with Galadriel’s Lament (Nam´ari¨e) as the most substantial
example.
Numerous enthusiasts have brought forth a limited, but steadily growing
body of Quenya literature, especially since a substantial amount of vocabu-
lary finally became available with the publication of The Lost Road in 1987,
fifteen years after Tolkien’s death. Thanks to this and the fifteen other books
of Middle-earth material that Christopher Tolkien in the period 1977–96
edited from the manuscripts his father had left behind, we now know very
much more about Tolkien’s languages than we ever did during the lifetime of
their inventor. We certainly can’t sit down and readily translate the works
of Shakespeare into Quenya, but we do know a few thousand words and
can infer the general outlines of the grammar Tolkien envisioned. Still, you
cannot really become “fluent” in Quenya, not matter how hard you study
what is presently available. But it is eminently possible to write quite long
Quenya texts if one deliberately eschews the unfortunate gaps in our knowl-
edge, and we can at least hope that some of these gaps (especially regarding
grammatical features) will be filled in by future publications. In the future,
we may be able to develop Quenya into a more fully “useable” language. But
we must obviously start by carefully internalizing the information provided
by Tolkien’s own material, as far as it is available to us.
Many have wanted a regular “course” or “tutorial”, with exercises and
all, that would allow them to study Quenya on their own with some ease.
One such effort has been made before: Nancy Martsch’ Basic Quenya. All
in all, this was certainly a good work; the fact that material that has been
published after it was written now reveals certain shortcomings, cannot be
held against the author. However, many would like to have a more updated
course, and I have repeatedly been approached by people suggesting that I
would be the right person to write it. It is of course nice when others call me
an “expert” on Tolkienian linguistics; actually I would say that it is difficult
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to be an “expert” in these matters, due to the scarcity of source material.
Nonetheless, I have been so privileged that I have been able to spend much
time studying these matters (starting more than ten years ago), and I see
it as my duty to record and pass on whatever insights I may have gained.
Hence in the end I sat down and started writing this course, intended for
beginners. (This conveniently allows me to fill the uncritical, vulnerable
minds of fresh students with my interpretation of Quenya grammar, which
interpretation I inevitably hold to be the best and most accurate. Ha ha ha.)
However, this course does not seek to imitate a Linguaphone-like format
with long dialogues etc. to help the student to acquire “basic fluency” in
various situations relating to everyday life. This would be quite pointless in
the case of an “art-language” like Quenya, which is to be used for carefully
prepared prose and poetry rather than casual chatting. Rather these lessons
take the form of a series of essays on various parts of Quenya grammar,
reviewing and analyzing available evidence in an attempt to reconstruct
Tolkien’s intentions, with some exercises appended.
Why study Quenya? Obviously not because you are going to Valinor on
holiday and need to be able to communicate with the natives. Some may
want to study this language to somehow get in better accord with the spirit
of Tolkien’s authorship. He referred to
. . . what I think is a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of
a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. [. . .] It is not
a ‘hobby’, in the sense of something quite different from one’s
work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the
foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for
the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the
story follows. I should have preferred to write in ‘Elvish’. But, of
course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and
only as much ‘language’ has been left in as I thought would be
stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked
more.) [. . .] It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in ‘linguistic
aesthetic’, as I sometimes say to people who ask me ‘what is it
all about’. (The Letters of J.R. R.Tolkien, pp. 219–220)
In light of such strong statements made by the author, studying his in-
vented languages cannot be dismissed as some kind of silly escapism for
romantic teenagers. It must be considered a crucial part of scholarship re-
lating to Tolkien’s authorship, or indeed his work in general: The languages
constructed by Tolkien are part of his output as a philologist, not necessar-
ily less serious than his writings on pre-existing languages like Anglo-Saxon;
notice that he refused to call his “fundamentally linguistic” work a mere
hobby. One may call Quenya and the other languages works of art, but no
matter what word we use to describe them, in the end it all boils down
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to this: Tolkien was not just a descriptive linguist, passively exploring and
contemplating pre-existing tongues – he was a creative linguist as well.
Obviously fluency in Quenya or Sindarin is not a prerequisite before you
can say anything intelligent about Tolkien’s narratives; yet it is clear that
some critics and scholars have woefully underestimated the crucial role of
the invented languages, finding themselves unable to take even very clear
statements like the one quoted above wholly seriously. To fully appreciate
the scope and intricacy of Tolkien’s linguistic sub-creation one has to actively
study it for its own sake. It should certainly be able to command interest
for its own sake. Some years ago, recognized Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey
observed that
. . . it’s clear that the languages Tolkien created are created by,
you know, one of the most accomplished philologists of all time,
so there is therefore something interesting in them, and I think
also in them there is poured much of his professional knowl-
edge and thought. [. . .] I’ve often noticed that there are really
very valuable observations about what Tolkien thought about
real philology buried in the fiction. And I would not be at all
surprised if, you know, there were valuable observations buried
in the invented languages. So there may be, in fact, something
which emerges from it. [From an interview conducted during the Arda
symposium in Oslo, April 3–5 1987, published in the journal Angerthas, issue
31.]
Even if one does not believe that there are great new philological insights
waiting to be unearthed from the structure of Tolkien’s languages, I cannot
see why conducting detailed studies of these languages should necessarily be
seen as escapism, or at best a somewhat silly pastime for people who are too
lazy to find something better to do. The languages constructed by Tolkien
have been likened to music; his biographer Humphrey Carpenter observes
that “if he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted
to compose melodies; so why should he not make up a personal system of
words that would be as it were a private symphony?” One may study one of
the languages Tolkien painstakingly developed as one may study a musical
symphony: a complex work of many interrelated parts woven into intricate
beauty. Yet the symphony is fixed in its form, while a language can be
infinitely recombined into ever new texts of prose and poetry, and yet retain
its nature and flavour undiminished. One of the attractions of Quenya is
that we can compose linguistic “music” ourselves just by applying Tolkien’s
rules, so Carpenter’s comparison is too limited: Tolkien did not just make a
symphony, he invented an entire form of music, and it would be a pity if it
were to die with him.
Of course, others may want to study Quenya to immerse themselves in
Tolkien’s fiction, with no pretensions of “scholarship” of any kind: Tolkien’s
9
vision of the Elves (Quendi, Eldar) is no doubt the main achievement of his
authorship, and Quenya was – at least in the somewhat biased opinion of
the Noldor – “the chief Elvish tongue, the noblest, and the one most nearly
preserving the ancient character of Elvish speech” (The War of the Jewels
p. 374). But one may grope towards “Elvishness” in a deeper sense than just
trying to immerse oneself in fiction. Happily abandoning the all too classical
idea of Elves as tiny, overly pretty “fairies”, Tolkien instead achieved the
vision of Elves as something more: “I suppose that the Quendi are in fact
in these histories very little akin to the Elves and Fairies of Europe; and
if I were pressed to rationalize, I should say that they represent greater
beauty and longer life, and nobility – the Elder Children” (The Letters of
J.R.R.Tolkien, p. 176). The quintessence of Tolkien’s vision of “Elvishness”
is contained primarily in the languages, “for to the Eldar the making of
speech is the oldest of the arts and the most beloved” (The Peoples of
Middle-earth p. 398). In a way, the study of Quenya can be a quest for
this vision of something beautiful and noble beyond the normal capability
of our mortal and finite selves: “The Elves represent, as it were, the artistic,
aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane raised to a higher level
than is actually seen in Men” (Letters, p. 176). The seeking for such a “higher
level” transcends all fiction. Tolkien’s inner vision of this level he translated
partly into pictures, much more prominently into narratives, but (to him)
more importantly still, into the words and sounds of language. In Quenya
his vision of Beauty lives on, awaiting those capable of comprehending and
appreciating it.
On their web-pages, the Swedish Tolkien-linguists of the Mellonath Daeron
group try to justify their study of Tolkien’s languages:
Our activity has been described as the ultimate luxury. We study
something that does not exist, just for fun. This is something you
can afford when you have everything else; food, shelter, clothes,
friends, and so on. The Tolkien languages are well worth studying
for their high aesthetic values alone. And knowledge of the lan-
guages is a key to a fuller appreciation of the beauty of Tolkien’s
sub-creation, his world, Arda.
I heartily agree with the last two sentences, but I cannot agree that
Quenya or Sindarin “does not exist”. Obviously we are not talking about
physical, tangible objects, but that goes for any language. These are not fic-
tional languages, but languages as real as Esperanto or any other constructed
language. Tolkien himself noted about his languages that they “have some
existence, since I have composed them in some completeness” (The Letters
of J.R.R.Tolkien, p. 175).
Unlike Esperanto, Quenya is however strongly associated with a fictional
internal history. (Tolkien once stated that Esperanto had been more suc-
cessful if there had been an Esperanto mythos to go with it!) The associated
10
摘要：

QuenyaCourseHelgeK.FauskangerCopyrightpolicy:ThiscoursecanbedownloadedfromArdalambion(http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf/),butnotre-postedelsewhereonthenetwithoutpermissionfromtheauthor,H.K.Fauskanger.Print-outsmaybemadeforper-sonaluse(privategroupsincluded).TypesetbyJohanWingeusingLATEX.Firsteditioninp...

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