New Theme! What do you think?

Study, speak, and hang out with fellow Elvish students!

Paul Strack

New Series: Sindarin Grammar

Now that I’ve wrapped up Quenya Grammar (for now), I’m starting a new series on Sindarin. Like the Quenya series, this information will eventually be collected in Eldamo: https://eldamo.org/content/grammar-indexes/grammars-s.html The series will be similar to the Quenya one, in that I intend to examine both the Sindarin of the 1950s

Quenya Grammar P93: Numerals

Tolkien wrote a series of essays on Elvish numbers in the late 1960s. One of those essays, Eldarinwe Leperi are Notessi (ELN), gave a set of numbers that many Neo-Quenya writers now use (VT48/6): er or min “one”. atta “two”. nelde “three”. canta “four”. lempe “five” ¹. enque “six”. otso

Quenya Grammar P92: Prepositions

Like most head-initial languages, Quenya uses prepositions to express various relationships between words: i falmalinnar imbe met “on the foaming waves between us” (LotR/377), or ilye mahalmar “above all thrones” (UT/305), ve maiwi yaimie “like gulls wailing” (MC/222). The preposition appears at the beginning of the expression, followed by the

Quenya Grammar P90: Comparison

In Tolkien’s later writing, Quenya did not have a direct equivalent of English’s comparative “-er” suffix. In linguistic notes from 1966-67, Tolkien said that “A is brighter than B” is expressed using the preposition lá “beyond”: A (ná) calima lá B (PE17/90), where the copula ná- “to be” is optional

Quenya Grammar P89: Adjectives

Adjectives in Quenya generally (but not always) precede the noun they modify and generally (but not always) are inflected into the plural when they modify plural nouns. As Tolkien described it in Common Eldarin: Noun Structure from the early 1950s: Adjectives were not distinguished inflexionally from nouns in Eldarin. But