Like English, Quenya has singular and plural nouns, with singular unmarked and plural marked by -i or -r. However, Quenya has two additional “special plurals”, the dual used when there are only two of an item (“both”), and the partitive-plural when the plural represent a subset of a larger group (“some”). Thus:
- singular < dual < partitive-plural < plural
Note: I’m skipping ahead to cover the specific inflections before discussing noun classes, to space out the analysis a bit more. I will come back to parts 11-16 later.
Also, in the future I’m going to have a number of very short “bridge” chapters like this one to introduce a related set of topic. I decided to include them for completeness.