LESSON ELEVEN

Story: - Here is a little story: 1 year ago, i've met someone; who lived far far away from me. Even though the distance was far, we felt attracted to each other. We thought that 4082.39 miles. This section of Eldamo outlines what we know about Quenya grammar, including both its conceptual development and recommendations for its use for the purposes of Neo-Quenya writing.

The concept of cases. The Genitive case.

This website contains archives of the Tolkien Discussion Group from 2009 to early 2013. The discussion group continues to meet in Second Life in Alqualonde the Swanhaven. Contact AelKennyr Rhiano in Second L. Lesson 3: Dual number and stem variation Dual numbers In addition to the normal plural, Quenya also has a dual number, which is used to denote two things naturally forming a pair, such as the two feet of one person. When using a dual form, there is no need to add a special word for 'two'; a dual word like 'talu' means 'two feet' all by itself. The previous lesson covered two Quenya plural forms: the somewhat mysterious 'partitive plural' in -li, and the 'normal' plural in either -r or -i (mostly depending on the shape of the word). Like quite a few 'real' languages, Quenya also possesses a dual form, that has no direct counterpart in English.

CASES

Lessons1-10 have mainly been concerned with adjectives and verbs. As for nouns, wehave only discussed how their plural and dual forms are constructed. There is,however, much more to say about the inflection of the Quenya noun. The secondhalf of this course will predominantly be concerned with the elaborate casesystem of Quenya, which is indeed the most characteristic feature of thelanguage. It is in the treatment of nouns that the grammatical structure ofQuenya most clearly reflects two of Tolkien's inspirations, Finnish and Latin.

What, linguistically speaking, are cases? Anoun may have many functions in a sentence. English may indicate what functiona noun has by means of word order alone. In a sentence like 'the man lovesthe woman', it is merely the word order that gives away the fact that'the man' is the subject and 'the woman' is the object. Therule that very early slips into the subconscious mind of children exposed toEnglish goes something like this: 'The noun in front of the predicate verbis its subject, while the noun that comes after it is normally itsobject.' Where word order is not enough, English may slip in clarifyingprepositions in front of a noun, e.g. 'to' in a sentence like'the Elf gives a gift to the Dwarf'. There are languages thatwouldn't need to have a 'to' here; instead the noun 'Dwarf'would occur in a special, inflectional form.

Of course, Quenya also hasprepositions, and the student will already have encountered several: nu'under', or 'over', imbë 'between',ve 'as, like', mir 'into' (which word, by theway, is formed from the simpler preposition mi 'in'). But itis a characteristic feature of Quenya grammar that where English would oftenplace a preposition in front of a noun, or rely on word order alone to indicatewhat the function of a noun is, Quenya would have a special form of the nounwhich by itself indicates its function. These various, specialized noun-formsare called cases. For instance, our example above – 'the Elf givesa gift to the Dwarf' – would translate intoQuenya something like i Elda anta anna i Naucon,where the case ending -n added to Nauco 'Dwarf'corresponds to the English preposition 'to'. (This particular case iscalled the dative, to be fully discussed in Lesson Thirteen.)

Certain prepositions may also demandthat the word (noun or pronoun) following them appears inflected for some case– sometimes quite irrespective of the normal, independent function of thiscase. The relevant preposition is then said to 'take' (or 'govern')this or that case. The same phenomenon may be found in English, if one looksclosely. While the case system is all but gone as far as English nouns areconcerned, many English pronouns at least preserve a specific form thatis used when the pronoun is the object and not the subject of a sentence. Thatis why 'Peter saw he' is wrong; it must be 'Peter saw him',with the object form of this pronoun. ('He' is the subject forminstead, and therefore quite proper in a sentence like 'he sawPeter'.) But while the primary function of the form 'him' is tofunction as the object of a sentence, very many prepositions also insist onbeing followed by this form. For instance, 'from he' does not soundwell; it must be 'from him', though 'him' is not the objectof a sentence here.

The Quenyanoun-forms so far discussed (whether singular, plural or dual) are examples ofthe nominative case. The most important grammatical function of thenominative is that this is the form a noun has when it functions as the subjectof a verb. In Lesson Five, we very briefly touched on another form of the noun– the accusative case, which is the form a noun assumes when it is the objectof a verb. Modern English does not preserve any distinction between nominativeand accusative in nouns (though such a distinction persists in parts of thepronoun table, like nominative 'he' vs. accusative 'him' inour examples above). English nouns do not change their form dependent onwhether the noun is the subject or the object of the sentence – and neither donouns in Third Age Quenya. Tolkien imagined an archaic form of Quenya,'Book Quenya', that did have an accusative case distinct in form fromthe nominative. The noun 'ship' would be cirya (pl. ciryar)if it was used as the subject of a sentence, but ciryá (pl. ciryai)if it appeared as the object: nominative vs. accusative. However, the distinctaccusative disappeared from the language as spoken in Middle-earth; the forms cirya(pl. ciryar) came to be used both as subject and object. So either youcan say that in Third Age Quenya, the nominative and the accusative cases havecome to be identical in form, or you can say that the nominative has taken overthe functions of the distinct accusative so that in effect, there is noaccusative anymore. It boils down to exactly the same thing.

But as far as we know, the accusativewas the only Quenya case that was lost among the Exiles. The remaining cases,in addition to the nominative, are the genitive, the possessive,the dative, the allative, the ablative, the locative,and the instrumental. (I should add that learning the form and functionof the cases is more important than learning their Latin names.) There is alsoa mysterious case which Tolkien listed in the Plotz Letter, but withoutdiscussing its name or use – so there is little I can say about it here.

In Lessons 11-16, we will work our waythrough the list of Quenya cases, discussing their functions and how they areformed. Precisely because we have the blessed Plotz Letter, we are now onsomewhat more solid ground than we usually find ourselves upon when discussingQuenya grammar. (Tolkien really should have sent Dick Plotz a list of pronounsand verb forms as well!)

THE GENITIVE

We willstart our discussion of the Quenya cases with the few Quenya noun forms thatactually have a direct English equivalent (sort of). Where Quenya has nine orten noun cases, English has only two: nominative and genitive. The nominativewe have already discussed: In English as in Exilic Quenya, a noun appears inthe nominative when it is the subject or the object of a noun. In bothlanguages, the nominative singular may well be considered the simplest form ofthe noun. There is no special ending or other inflectional element to signalthat 'this is a nominative form'; rather it is the absence ofany such element that tells us what case the noun appears in.

All the other cases – or in English, theone other case – do display special endings, though. The one noun case ofmodern English, except for the nominative, is the genitive. (Pleasenotice the spelling; I am tired of seeing 'genetive' on certainmailing lists.) In the singular, it is formed by adding the ending 's tothe noun, e.g. girl's from girl. In the plural, this endingnormally merges with the plural ending -s, but its theoretical presenceis hinted at in writing by means of an apostrophe (girls' for **girls's..Gollumwould have loved the latter form).

The grammatical function of this case ought tobe familiar enough to anyone who is capable of reading this text; already inLesson Two, we briefly touched on this 'ownership form'. As stated inmy handy Oxford Advanced Learner's Di

23verbs (dual)sindarin Lessons