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Quenya Course 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). A Typeset by Johan Winge using LTEX. 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 The Noun . 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 The Verb . 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 in¯nitive . 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 -ntÄe and -t . 155 10.3 In¯nitives with object pronouns . 157 10.4 The past tense of intransitive verbs in -ya . 159 10.5 Passive participles . 162 11 Lesson Eleven 170 11.1 Cases . 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 inde¯nite pronoun . 207 14 Lesson Fourteen 212 14.1 The Allative and Ablative cases . 212 14.2 EquÄe 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 de¯nitely 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 ¯ctional 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 PerÄala's discussion at http://www.sci.¯/~alboin/¯nn 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 ¯ctional 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 6 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¶³la lumenn'¶ 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 ¯ction, 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 exempli¯ed in The Lord of the Rings, with Galadriel's Lament (Nam¶ariÄe) 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 ¯nally became available with the publication of The Lost Road in 1987, ¯fteen years after Tolkien's death. Thanks to this and the ¯fteen 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 ¯lled 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 e®ort 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 di±cult 7 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 ¯ll 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.
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