LESSON ONE
The sounds of Quenya.
Pronunciation and accentuation.

GENERAL REMARKS
Quenya as an actual entity in our own world exists primarily as a written language: Quenya enthusiasts tend to be widely scattered and must generally share their compositions via some written medium only (indeed I shall normally refer to users of Quenya as "writers" rather than "speakers"). Nonetheless, any student should obviously know what pronunciation Tolkien imagined, as well as his intentions can be approximated now.
There exist a very few recordings of Tolkien himself reading Quenya texts. In a late TV interview, Tolkien writes out and pronounces the greeting elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo. More notably, he made two different recordings of Namárië (sung and spoken). The spoken version is also available on the net: http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/tolkien_elvish/index.html (under "Poem in Elvish"). A few lines of this version of Namárië differ from their LotR counterparts: The recorded version has inyar únóti nar ve rámar aldaron / inyar ve lintë yulmar vánier instead of yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron! / yéni ve lintë yuldar (a)vánier as in LotR. The recording was made before the book was published (and hence before the final revisions). A much later recording, with the same text as in the book, also exists. I have not heard it, so I cannot comment further.
The very few extant recordings are interesting, but they are not our chief source of information. Most of what we know about Quenya pronunciation is based on Tolkien's written notes about how his languages should be pronounced, predominantly the information provided in LotR Appendix E. (Indeed Tolkien's actual pronunciation in the recordings is not always quite flawless according to his own technical descriptions, but then he was not a native speaker of Quenya.)

Any natural language has a phonology, a set of rules defining what sounds are used, how they vary and behave, and how they can be combined. This goes for any well-made invented language as well. Quenya is most definitely not a haphazard jumble of sounds; Tolkien carefully constructed its phonology – both as an evolving entity (classical Quenya gradually developing from Primitive Elvish) and as a "fixed" form (defining the kind of Quenya that was used as a language of lore and ceremony in Middle-earth). Tolkien had Pengolodh, the sage of Gondolin, observe that Elvish tongues tended to use relatively few sounds – "for the Eldar being skilled in craft are not wasteful nor prodigal to small purpose, admiring in a tongue rather the skilled and harmonious use of a few well-balanced sounds than profusion ill-ordered" (PM:398). None of the sounds used in Quenya are particularly exotic from a European viewpoint, but they are combined in an exquisitely tidy manner. Compared to Tolkien's Elvish, many "real" languages indeed appear rather messy.

BASIC TERMS
Let us get some basic terms into place (people with linguistic training need not spend much time on this section). The sounds of any language can be divided into two broad categories, vowels and consonants. The vowels are sounds made by letting the air stream "freely" through the mouth: Different vowels are produced by modifying the position of the tongue and the lips, but the stream of air is not directly obstructed. If one draws out various vowels, pronouncing aaaaa... or eeeee... or ooooo...,  it is easy to feel how the air streams quite unhindered though the mouth: One merely configures the tongue and lips to "shape" the desired sound. Vowels can be more or less "open" or "closed": You only have to notice the position of the tongue and lower jaw when pronouncing aaah... as contrasted with their position when you pronounce ooooh... to understand what is meant by this. The vowel a (as in English part) is the most open, while the vowel u (as in English rude) is the most closed. Other vowels fall between. Vowels can also be more or less "rounded", mainly depending on the position of the lips; the vowel u (as just described) is said to be rounded because it is pronounced with the lips pouted. A vowel like o (as in English sore) is actually pronounced much like the a of part, but o is rounded and a is not – making the vowels audibly distinct.
When pronouncing vowels, the stream of air is only modified (by means of devices like the ones just described). It is never actually "hindered". In the case of the consonants, the air is however more actively obstructed. Thus, Tolkien can inform us that one early Elvish term for consonant was tapta tengwë or just tapta, meaning "impeded element" or "impeded one" (VT39:7). In the most "extreme" cases the stream of air may even be completely halted for a moment: This is easily perceived in the case of a consonant like p, which is pronounced by bringing the lips into contact, momentarily cutting off the stream of air from the lungs and allowing a pressure to build up inside the mouth. Then the lips are suddenly parted again, releasing the air in a small explosion – and this explosion constitutes a p. Such plosive consonants include t, p, k and their counterparts d, b, g (sc. hard g as in gold, not as in gin). They are all formed by halting and then suddenly releasing the air various places in the mouth. Instead of halting the air completely one may also let it "fizzle through" a small opening, as when f is pronounced by forcing the air out between the lower lip and the upper teeth; such "friction" sounds are called fricatives (or spirants) and include consonants like f, th, v. And there are yet other options on how to manipulate the stream of air, such as rerouting it through the nose to produce nasal consonants like n or m. 
	The concept of voicing should also be understood. Humans (and, it would seem, Elves) come with a kind of buzzing device installed in their throats, namely the vocal chords. By making the vocal chords vibrate, one may add "voice" to the stream of air before it enters the speech organs proper. The presence or lack of such voicing is what distinguishes sounds like v vs. f. If one draws out a sound like ffff...and suddenly turns it into vvvv... instead, one will feel the "buzzer" in the throat kicking in (put a finger on your glottis – what in men is called the "Adam's apple", less protuberant in women – and you will actually feel the vibration of the vocal chords). In principle, the device of voicing could be used to double the number of sounds we are able to produce, since they could all be pronounced either with vibration in the vocal chords (as voiced sounds) or without such vibration (as unvoiced sounds). In practice, most of the sounds of speech do not appear in unvoiced versions. Many sounds would barely be perceptible without the voicing (n, for instance, would be reduced to little more than a weak snort). Normally all vowels are voiced as well, certainly so in Quenya (though in Japanese, vowels may lose their voicing in certain environments). But I have already referred to d, b, g as the "counterparts" of t, p, k; they are counterparts in the sense that the former are voiced and the latter are not. One characteristic feature of Quenya (at least the Noldorin dialect) is the very limited distribution of the voiced plosives d, b, g; they occur solely in the middle of words, and then only as part of the consonant clusters nd/ld/rd, mb, and ng. Some speakers also pronounced lb instead of lv. (Possibly Tolkien imagined different rules for the poorly attested Vanyarin dialect of Quenya: The Silmarillion refers to a lament called Aldudénië made by a Vanyarin Elf; this word has puzzled researchers since the middle d occurs in a position that would be quite impossible in Noldorin Quenya.)
	Syllables: Made up of vowels and consonants, speech is not an undifferentiated outburst of sound. Rather it is perceived to be organized into rhythmic units called syllables. The shortest possible words are necessarily monosyllabic, having only one syllable – like English from or its Quenya equivalent ho. Words of more than one syllable, polysyllabic ones, form longer strings of rhythmic "beats". A word like faster has two syllables (fas-ter), a word like wonderful has three (won-der-ful), a word like geography has four (ge-og-ra-phy), and so on – though obviously we can't go much further before the words would be felt to be impractically long and difficult to pronounce. Some oriental languages, like Vietnamese, show a great preference for monosyllabic words. But as is evident from the English examples just quoted, European languages often employ longer words, and Tolkien's Quenya makes extensive use of big mouthfuls (as does Finnish). Consider words like Ainulindalë or Silmarillion (five syllables: ai-nu-lin-da-lë, sil-ma-ril-li-on). An uninflected Quenya word typically has two or three syllables, and this number is often increased by adding inflectional endings, or by compounding.

THE SOUNDS OF QUENYA
In Quenya, the basic vowels are a, e, i, o, u (short and long). They may also be combined into diphthongs, groups of two basic vowels pronounced together as one syllable: There are three diphthongs in -i (ai, oi, ui) and three in -u (au, eu, iu, though the diphthongs eu and iu are quite rare). The consonants of Third Age Quenya may be listed as c (= k), d, f, g, gw, h, hy, hw, l, ly, m, n, nw, ny, p, qu, r, ry, s, t, ty, v, y and w (this listing is not wholly uncontroversial; the consonant system of Quenya can be plausibly analyzed in more than one way). In Elvish writing, the Tengwar orthography also upholds the distinction between some consonants that by the Third Age had come to be pronounced alike and thus merged altogether (þ merging with s, while initial ñ fell together with n – see the discussion of spelling conventions). In the transcription and spelling employed in this course, the former presence of "lost" distinct consonants is reflected in two cases only: hl and hr, that were originally unvoiced l and r, but later they merged with normal l, r (and are therefore not included on the list of Third Age Quenya consonants above). Thus we will spell, say, hrívë ("winter") in this way despite the fact that Tolkien imagined the typical Third Age pronunciation to be simply "rívë" (with a normal r).
Though the consonants hy, gw, hw, ly, nw, ny, ry, ty, and qu (and hr, hl) must here be written as two letters (as digraphs), they should evidently be taken as unitary sounds: Their pronunciation will be discussed in greater detail below. The digraphs in -w represent labialized consonants, while the digraphs in -y stand for palatalized consonants; again, see below for further discussion of these terms. It should be understood that qu is simply an aesthetic way of spelling what would otherwise be represented as cw (most people will agree that Quenya looks better than Cwenya), so qu, like nw, is a labialized consonant. When counting syllables one must remember that there is no actual vowel u in qu; "u" here stands for w. A word like alqua ("swan") thus has only two syllables: al-qua (= al-cwa). One must not think "al-qu-a" and conclude that there are actually three syllables. In Tengwar writing, qu is denoted by a single letter, and in most early sources, Tolkien also used the single letter q to represent it.
	Double consonants: Some consonants also occur in long or double versions; double vs. single consonants may be compared to long vs. short vowels. The "obvious" cases, sc. the double consonants directly represented in orthography, are cc, ll, mm, nn, pp, rr, ss and tt (e.g. ecco "spear", colla "cloak", lamma "sound", anna "gift", lappa "hem of robe", yarra- "to growl", essë "name", atta "two"). The group pp is very rare, only attested in material far predating the LotR. In the Note on Pronunciation appended to the Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien noted: "Consonants written twice are pronounced long, thus Yavanna has the long n heard in English unnamed, penknife, not the short n in unaimed, penny." Words like ana "towards" vs. anna "gift", tyelë "ceases" vs. tyellë "grade", ata "again" vs. atta "two" should be audibly distinct. – It is possible that some of the consonants written as digraphs must also be counted as double consonants when they occur between vowels; e.g. ny = long or double palatalized n (more on this below). 
	Consonant clusters (vs. single consonants): It is difficult to pronounce many sequential consonants, so the languages of the world generally confine themselves to relatively small groups (or "clusters") of consonants. The most typical word, from just about any language, is a series of vowels and consonants (single ones or relatively short consonant clusters) alternating – the "core" of each syllable usually being a vowel. Tolkien's Quenya is no exception; this language actually has quite restrictive rules for how consonants and vowels can be combined into syllables and longer words. Even so, consonant clusters are quite common, but they are not distributed as "freely" as in English. While English and for that matter Sindarin allow consonant clusters at the beginning of words, Quenya does not (SD:417-418). A word like scream, commencing with a cluster of no less than three consonants, would be quite impossible in Quenya. Tolkien noted that the name that the "Woses" or Wild Men had for themselves, Drughu, was adapted to Quenya as Rú (UT:385). Quenya could not preserve the initial cluster dr- of the original form of this loan-word (even apart from the fact that Quenya could not have d in this position). Quenya does allow a limited number of consonant clusters medially, between vowels in the middle of words; among "frequent" of "favoured" clusters Tolkien cited ld, mb, mp, nc, nd, ng, ngw, nqu, nt, ps, ts and x (for cs). Hence we have such typical Quenya-style words as Elda "Elf", lambë "tongue", tumpo "hump", ranco "arm" etc. Finally, at the end of words, only five single consonants may occur: only -l, -n, -r, -s, or -t is permitted in this position (Letters:425; however, most Quenya words end in a vowel). Consonant clusters or double consonants are not normally found at the end of words, though they may occur if a final vowel drops out (is elided) because the next word begins in the same or a similar vowel. Hence in LotR we have a "final" nn in the phrase lúmenn' omentielvo ("on the hour of our meeting"), but only because this is reduced from lúmenna omentielvo (this full form occurring in WJ:367 and Letters:424). The only genuine consonant cluster occurring at the end of a word seems to be nt used a specific grammatical ending (dual dative, to be discussed in later lessons) – e.g. ciryant "for a couple of ships", formed from cirya "ship". Tolkien's earliest "Qenya" experiments, as recorded in the Qenya Lexicon of 1915, were more liberal in this respect. "Qenya" allowed more final consonants and even final consonant clusters, but as LotR-style Quenya evolved in Tolkien's notes, he tightened up the phonology. Thus he gave the language a more clearly defined flavour.

PRONUNCIATION
Vowels: Quenya vowels are pure. For people who want to pronounce Elvish vowels with some degree of accuracy, Tolkien recommended Italian vowels as a model (as did Zamenhof for Esperanto, by the way). Speakers of English have an ingrained habit of blurring many vowels, especially when they are not fully stressed; hence in a word like banana it is typically only the middle A that comes out as a "proper" A-sound. The two other A's, that are not stressed, are typically made to sound like a blurred, obscure "reduction vowel" that linguists call a schwa (from a Hebrew word for nothingness; English textbooks sometimes prefer the spelling "shwa"). But in Quenya all vowels, in all positions, must be clearly and distinctly pronounced; any tendencies to "blur" them must be strongly resisted.
	As we remember, Quenya has both long and short vowels, the long ones being marked with an accent: á, é, ó, ú, í vs. short a, e, o, u, i. Long and short vowels must be kept apart and pronounced clearly distinct. Sometimes vowel length is the only thing that makes otherwise similar words distinct: for instance, cu with a short u means "dove", whereas cú with a long ú means "crescent".
	Long á can be sounded as in English father: má "hand", nárë "flame", quáco "crow". However, English does not have anything corresponding to Quenya short a. It is absolutely necessary to master it, for short a is by far the commonest of Quenya vowels. Tolkien noted that it should be more "open" than the long á. What we want is a vowel that by its sound (or quality) is about midway between the a's of English father and English cat – but as for its length (or quantity), it should by all means be short as in the latter word. The vowel heard in Spanish padre will do. Speakers of English may pin down a short a by isolating the first part of the diphthong ai as in aisle. 
NOTE: If you have the original Star Wars movie available, listen carefully when Harrison Ford first appears about 45 minutes in and introduces himself as "Han Solo": Ford actually produces a nice Quenya-style short a in "Han", making this syllable sound as it would in Quenya words (e.g. hanu "a male" or handa "intelligent"; apparently there is even a Quenya word han "beyond"). But later in the SW movies, the vowel of "Han" is inconsistently pronounced either with a long a as in English father or with the vowel heard in English cat, which is precisely the vowel to be avoided in Quenya. Linguistic consistency was never the, ahem, force of Star Wars. By the way, do you remember Endor, the green moon where George Lucas placed his reinvented teddy bears in the third movie? Guess what the Quenya word for "Middle-earth" is! Lucas would surely say that his intention was to pay tribute to Tolkien...

UPDATED NOTE: Now that Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring has appeared, I can quote examples from the soundtrack of this movie as well; most people interested in Tolkien's work will surely have seen it, and many are also going to buy it on video or DVD. Good examples of short Elvish a occur in the Sindarin name Caradhras "Redhorn" as pronounced  by Christopher Lee ("Saruman") in the scene where his spying crows return to Isengard: "So, Gandalf, you try to lead them over Caradhras..." Lee also gets the short a's more or less right in a scene following shortly afterwards, when he stands on the top of Isengard reading a Quenya invocation: Nai yarvaxëa rasselya taltuva notto-carinnar... (but the last word sounds almost like cárinnar, the first vowel being long – after all, Chris Lee is not a native speaker of Quenya!) 

An extra challenge for speakers of English is to pronounce -a as a full vowel at the end of words. Where English orthography has a final -a, it is normally pronounced like a schwa. Contrast the English and the Spanish pronunciation of the final vowel in a name like Sara; in Spanish, the English-style reduction or "blurring" of the -a does not take place. In one very early source, Tolkien actually stated that "Qenya", like English, turned final, unaccented -a into a schwa ("as in English drama", QL:9), but there is nothing to suggest that this idea was still valid decades later when he wrote the LotR. Indeed even the early source just referred to has it that there was one important dialect of "Qenya" where the weakening of final -a did not take place. So speakers should try to pronounce a full a in all positions: neither of the a's in a word like anna "gift" should be pronounced as in the English name Anna.
Long é is another Quenya sound that does not occur in contemporary English. The long e of English became long i (like Quenya í) centuries ago – though because of this descent it is still often spelt ee, as in see. Quenya é has the value of German eh as in Mehr. The pronunciation of ai in English air at least approaches é, but this is really a short e followed by a schwa. Tolkien notes that long é should be closer than short e (see LotR Appendix E), so just lengthening the vowel heard in English end will not be quite sufficient. The quality of the vowel should be about midway between the vowels heard in English end and English see, but it should be long like the latter: nén "water", ré "day", ména "region".
Short e may be pronounced as in English end. In Quenya this sound also occurs in final position. Since word-final e is usually silent in English orthography, Tolkien often used the spelling ë in this position – and throughout this course, this spelling is employed consistently. This is only to remind English readers that in Quenya, this letter is to be distinctly pronounced. But since word-final e never occurs in spoken English, some speakers tend to substitute i or ey (following English practice in the rare cases of a final orthographic "e" being sounded, as when Jesse is pronounced "jessi", or karate is pronounced "karatey"). Quenya e should have the value described above in all positions. It must NOT be pronounced i, nor must there be a y-like sound creeping after it: lómë "night", morë "black", tinwë "sparkle".
Long í is pronounced as in English machine, that same as "ee" in English see: the Quenya word sí ("now") is similar in sound. Other examples include nís "woman" and ríma "edge". This long í must be noticeably longer than short i, which may be pronounced like in English pit: Titta "tiny", imbë "between", vinya "new". In one early source, Tolkien himself quoted the word pit as an example of short "Qenya" i (QL:8). Later writings suggest that the quality of the vowel-sound should be like the i of machine, in English often spelt "ee" – start with this sound and shorten it. (Before unvoiced stops, as in feet, "ee" may be quite short also in English – just make sure there is a distinction of length between i and í.) Notice that i is never pronounced ai as in English fine = "fain". (Quenya finë "larch" has two syllables, the vowels being those heard in pit [ideally a little closer] and pet, respectively.) Of course, this also goes for final -i (usually a plural ending). If the student will forgive another Star Wars reference, George Lucas' Jedi may be "jedai" = "jed-eye", but Tolkien's Quendi are most definitely not "quendai". In Quenya, final -i should rather be pronounced as in Iraqi, Mississippi.
Long ó may be pronounced more or less as in English sore, but preferably a little tenser and "closer" (midway between the vowel-sounds of English sore and English "oo" as in soon): mól "slave", tó "wool", óma "voice". Short o may be pronounced as in English for (when accented), or as in box. The quality of the latter vowel may be just a little too open and A-like according to Tolkien's descriptions. Yet this is the pronunciation he himself used in most cases in the recording of him reading Namárië; it should perhaps be attributed to his English accent. Some words with o: rondo "cave", olos "dream", tolto "eight". Of course, Quenya o is never pronounced "ow" as in English so, also; a word like tolto must NOT come out as "tol-tow". Neither must o ever be reduced to a schwa or dropped altogether; be especially mindful of the ending -on, often found in masculine names (and also in plural genitives like Silmarillion; see later lessons). "English-style" pronunciation of a name like Sauron would result in what a baffled Elf might try to represent in writing as Sór'n (or at best Sóren). The final -on should sound rather like the first syllable of English online, with the vowel fully intact even though it is unaccented in Sauron. In the Jackson movie, the actors usually deliver a good pronunciation of this name; especially listen to how "Gandalf" and "Saruman" pronounce it. Good examples of short Elvish o also occur in the name Mordor as pronounced by the same two actors.
Long ú is the vowel of English brute, in English often spelt "oo" as in fool: Númen "west", cú "crescent", yúyo "both". It must be distinctly longer than short u, which is pronounced somewhat like the vowel of English put (NOT like in English cut). Ideally, Quenya short u should be a little more "rounded" than the vowel of put; it should be simply a shorter version of the long ú or "oo" described above: Cundu "prince", nuru "death", ulundo "monster". Notice that Quenya u is never pronounced "yu" as in English union; ulundo should not become "yulundo".

Speakers of English must be especially mindful of their vowels when a combination vowel + r occurs. In the combinations ar, or, many speakers of English have a tendency to lengthen the vowel even where it should be short (and many would also let the r drop out, especially when it is followed by another consonant). But in Quenya words like narda ("knot") or lorna ("asleep"), the vowel before the r must be short, as indicated by the absence of the accent mark. It is not permissible to let the pronunciation drift towards "ná(r)da", "ló(r)na", no matter how tempting this is to people used to English speech-habits.
Where the groups er, ir, ur occur (e.g. in words like sercë "blood", tirno "watcher", turma "shield"), speakers of English must take care NOT to pronounce the vowels after the fashion of English serve, girl, turn. (I once had an English teacher who described the vowel of "girl" as one of the ugliest sounds of the English language. She taught English at university level, so she should know – though perhaps she wasn't wholly serious...) Short e, i, u should sound just as described above, wholly irrespective of the following r. In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien noted that er, ir, ur should sound, not as in English fern, fir, fur, but rather like air, eer, oor (that is, like it would be natural for a speaker of English to pronounce orthographic "air, eer, oor" – however, it should be understood that this would only be an approximation of the ideal pronunciation). In the Peter Jackson movie, the actors struggle to pronounce the final syllable of the Quenya name Isildur correctly, with variable results. In the flash-back scene where Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving) leads Isildur into Mount Doom and urges him to destroy the Ring, Weaving's pronunciation of the name Isildur is very good – following Tolkien's guidelines to the letter.

Diphthongs: In addition to the "basic", unitary vowel-sounds discussed above (what linguists would call the monophthongs), we have the diphthongs – combinations of two basic vowels that are run together into one syllable, in many ways behaving like a unitary vowel for the purpose of word-building: The Quenya diphthongs are ai, au, eu, iu, oi, and ui.
	¤ The diphthong ai is the same that is heard in English aisle. It is NOT like the one in English mail, though English orthographic "ai" usually represents the latter sound (can anyone think of other exceptions than aisle?) The first syllable of faila "just, generous" must not pronounced like the English word fail, since Quenya ai always has the sound of English I, eye: Aica "fell, terrible", caima "bed", aira "holy". Of course, the first syllable of the latter word sounds nothing like English air!
¤ The diphthong au is pronounced as in German Haus, or more or less as the "ow" of English cow: aulë "invention", laurëa "golden", taurë "forest". It is never sounded as in English caught, aura (in which words "au" is pronounced rather like Quenya ó). In his "Note on Pronunciation" appended to the Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien notes that the first syllable of Sauron should be like English sour, not English sore. (However, the diphthong in sour is in British English followed by a schwa – a faint reminiscence of the otherwise silent final r. This schwa should not be pronounced in Sauron.)
¤ The diphthong eu does not occur in English, but it is not dissimilar to the "o" of English so. The only difference is that while the first part of the diphthong is a schwa in English, it should be a normal e (as in end) in Quenya. In particular, some British upper-class pronunciations of English "o" as in so come close to Quenya eu (but the American pronunciation does not). Quenya examples: leuca "snake", neuma "snare", peu "pair of lips". This diphthong is not very common.
¤ The diphthong iu may be sounded like yu in English yule, according to the usual Third Age Pronunciation. Tolkien imagined that originally, it had rather been a "falling" diphthong like the other Quenya diphthongs, stressed on the first rather than the last element (LotR Appendix E). However, the Third Age pronunciation would be equally "valid" also within the mythos, and for speakers of English it is easier to achieve. This diphthong is in any case very rare; in the Etymologies it is only attested in a handful of words (miulë "whining, mewing", piuta "spit", siulë "incitement" and the group tiuca "thick, fat", tiuco "thigh" and tiuya- "swell, grow fat" – a few more examples of iu could be quoted from Tolkien's early "Qenya" material).
¤ The diphthong oi is easy, corresponding to English "oi" or "oy" as in oil, toy: coirëa "living", soica "thirsty", oira "eternal".
¤ The diphthong ui Tolkien sometimes compared to the sound occurring in English ruin. This is a rather surprising example, for surely the word "ruin" is not normally pronounced as containing a diphthong, but as two distinct syllables: ru-in. Rather think "ooy" as in the English phrase too young: huinë "shadow", cuilë "life", uilë "(long, trailing) plant". Notice that the combination qui does not contain this diphthong; this is just a more visually pleasing way of spelling cwi (e.g. orqui "Orcs" = orcwi).

All other groups of vowels are not diphthongs, but simply vowels belonging to separate syllables, to be pronounced distinctly. In linguistic terms, vowels that are in direct contact without forming diphthongs are said to be in hiatus. Primitive Elvish apparently did not have such combinations, at least not in the middle of words: Tolkien had Fëanor concluding that "our fathers...in building words took the vowels and parted them with the consonants as walls" (VT39:10). But some consonants had been lost in Quenya, so that vowels that were originally so "parted" had come into direct contact (VT39:6). In Quenya we even have polysyllabic all-vowel words like Eä (a name of the universe) or oa ("away"). The most frequent combinations of vowels in hiatus are ea, eo, ie, io, oa; each vowel should be sounded "by itself". Tolkien often emphasizes this fact by adding diaereses or "dots" to one of the vowels, and in the consistent spelling here imposed on the material, we regularly write ëa (Eä), ëo (Eö), oë. Thus there is no excuse for such mistakes as pronouncing ëa as in English heart or please, or oë as in canoe or foetus. (Other distortions are apparently also possible: Cate Blanchett simply reduced Eärendil to "Erendil" the one time her version of Galadriel pronounces this name in the Jackson movie: "I give you the light of E[ä]rendil, our most beloved star..." Can we have an extra vowel for the Director's Cut, please?)
In this course we do not use the diaeresis in the combinations ie (except when final) and oa, but as indicated by the spelling ië and öa in certain Tolkien manuscripts, the vowels must be pronounced distinctly and not drawn together as in English piece (or tie), or English load. In accordance with this, Christopher Tolkien in the Note on Pronunciation that he appended to the Silmarillion indicates that the name Nienna is to be pronounced Ni-enna, not "Neena" as if ie were sounded as in English piece. (Immediately after the line in which she mangles the name Eärendil, Cate Blanchett pronounces the Quenya word namárië, "farewell". I'm glad to say that she did a better job with this word, getting the -ië more or less right!) Some words with vowels in hiatus: fëa "soul", lëo "shade", loëndë "year-middle" (the middle day of the year according to the Elvish calendar), coa "house", tië "path".

Consonants: Most Quenya consonants are easy to pronounce for people used to speaking a Western language. These points may be observed:
¤ C is always pronounced k, never s; indeed Tolkien does use the letter k rather than c in many sources. Celma "channel" or cirya "ship" must not come out as "selma", "sirya". (This goes for Sindarin spelling as well: When Celeborn is pronounced "Seleborn" in the Rankin/Bass animated version of LotR, it clearly shows that the moviemakers never made it to Appendix E.)
¤ In the groups hw, hy, hl, hr, the letter h is not to be pronounced separately. These are just digraphs denoting unitary consonants:
¤ What is spelt hl, hr was originally unvoiced l, r. That is, these sounds were pronounced without vibration in the vocal chords, resulting in what may be described as "whispered" versions of normal l, r. (If you can isolate the l of English please, you will have an unvoiced l – though in this case, it is just "incidentally" unvoiced because of the influence from the unvoiced plosive p immediately preceding it. English never has unvoiced l as an independent sound of speech, as Quenya originally did.) In Quenya, these sounds are quite rare; examples include hrívë "winter" and hlócë "serpent, dragon". However, Tolkien stated that by the Third Age, hr and hl had come to be pronounced as normal voiced r, l, though the spelling hl, hr apparently persisted in writing.
¤ What is spelt hw corresponds to English wh in dialects where this is still distinct from normal w (e.g., witch and which are audibly distinct words – American English, as well as northern British English, normally uphold this distinction, though it has been abandoned in the British Received Pronunciation). Put simply, hw is a (weak) version of the sound you make when you blow out a candle. Hw is not a very frequent sound in Quenya; this seems to be a quite complete list of the known words where it occurs: hwan "sponge, fungus", hwarin "crooked", hwarma "crossbar", hwermë "gesture-code", hwesta "breeze, breath, puff of air" (also as verb: hwesta- "to puff"), hwindë "eddy, whirlpool".
¤ What is spelt hy represents a sound that may occur in English, but that is not normally recognized as a distinct consonant in this language. Hy denotes what by a German term is often referred to as ich-Laut or "ich-sound", since it is exemplified by "ch" in the German word ich ("I"). To speakers of English it may sound much like sh (one imagines Kennedy training long and hard to avoid "Ish bin ein Berliner"). Still, as I said, a (weak) version of the sound in question may often be heard in English as well: In words like hew, huge, human, the h may be pronounced like an (obscure) hy. Cf. SD:418-419, where Tolkien states that in Quenya or "Avallonian", the sound hy is "approximately equivalent to...h in huge". In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien also pointed out that hy has the same relationship to y as hw (discussed above) has to normal w: one is unvoiced, the other voiced. So another way of arriving at hy is to start with the sound of y (as in you) and produce a voiceless, "whispered" variant of it. Once you have the sound pinned down, you only have to strengthen it; it should be pronounced with the same force as English sh: Hyarmen "south", hyalma "shell, conch", hyellë "glass". It seems that hy mostly occurs at the beginning of words; ahya- "change" is presently the sole known example of hy occurring between vowels in the middle of a word. However, h in the combination ht following certain vowels should also be pronounced like hy; see below. – In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien noted that speakers of Westron (the supposed "original language" of the Red Book, that Tolkien "translated" into English) often substituted the sound of sh for Quenya hy. Speakers of English who don't care about subtle phonological details may of course do the same, turning a word like hyalma into "shalma". This would be a pronunciation that existed also within the Middle-earth setting, though it was not quite like the proper Elvish pronunciation (and it does seem best to aim for the latter!) I guess many speakers of English would hardly be able to tell the difference, though. Incidentally, one can achieve a pretty good hy by starting from sh; just make sure that your tongue is not raised (you may press its tip against the lower teeth to be certain of that). If you try to pronounce sh with the tongue in this position, what comes out ought to sound like hy.
¤ Outside the groups hw, hy, hl, hr, the letter h does represent an independent sound, but it is pronounced somewhat differently in different positions. It seems that originally, Quenya h (at least where it comes from Primitive Elvish kh) was typically stronger than English h – that is, a "breath-h" as in high. In Fëanor's day it was apparently pronounced like ch in German ach or Scottish loch, or like Cyrillic X. In phonetic writing, this sound is represented as [x]. But later, at the beginning of words, this [x] was weakened and became a sound like English h. In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien informs us that the Tengwa letter for [x] was originally called harma; naturally this Tengwa was so called because the initial h of this word was an example of the sound the letter denoted, [x]. But when [x] in this position eventually turned into an English-style h, the Tengwa was renamed aha, for in the middle of words, [x] was not weakened. So we can extract these rules: at the beginning of words (before a vowel), the letter h is to be pronounced like English h. But in the middle of words, h is to be pronounced [x]: as between vowels in aha "wrath", and likewise before t in words like pahta "closed", ohta "war", nuhta- "to stunt". 
In one late source, Tolkien noted that "in Quenya and Telerin medial [x] eventually became h also in most cases" (VT41:9). It may therefore be permissible to pronounce even words like aha with an English-style breath-h. But the group ht must probably always be pronounced [xt]; the weaker breath-h would be barely audible in this position.
This rule needs one modification. Likely, h before t was originally pronounced [x] in all cases. Following any of the vowels a, o, and u, this pronunciation persisted, as in the examples pahta, ohta, nuhta- above. But following the vowels i and e, the original [x] turned into a sound similar to German ich-Laut (German may indeed be Tolkien's inspiration for this particular development in Quenya phonology). Thus in words like ehtë "spear" or rihta- "to jerk", h should be pronounced just like the hy described above. Again, Tolkien imagined that human (mortal) speakers of Westron had a tendency to substitute a sound like English sh and say "eshtë", "rishta" instead.
¤ Quenya l "represents more or less the sound of English initial l, as in let" (LotR Appendix E). Now why did Tolkien specify that Quenya l is to sound like an initial English l (regardless of its position in a Quenya word)? As Tolkien was well aware, British English l is pronounced somewhat differently in different positions. An initial l, as in let, is pronounced as a so-called "clear" l – and this is the kind of l that should be used in all positions in Quenya (as is also the case in other languages, like German). But when l is not initial, English in most cases employs a so-called "dark" l, which differs from the the "clear" l in that the "dark" variant is pronounced by arching the back of the tongue upwards: Contrast the pronunciation of l in two words like let (clear l) and fill (dark l). Compared to the "clear" l, the "dark" l sounds lower pitched, but this sound is to be avoided in Quenya. This may be something of a problem to Americans, since their L's tend to be rather "dark" in all positions, even initially (at least as perceived by European ears). – Perfectionists should also observe another detail: In Letters:425, Tolkien mentioned l among the Quenya "dentals", sc. sounds that are pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the (upper) teeth. English normally uses an alveolar l instead, that is, a sound pronounced with the tip of the tongue further back, above the teeth rather than touching them. This again makes for a somewhat "darker" sound. When pronouncing a Quenya l, one should make sure that that the tip of the tongue touches the teeth.
¤ Quenya n is like English n. Usually this sound had been n all along, but in some cases it represents older ng as in English king, ding (notice that there is no distinct g to be heard, despite the spelling). Unlike English, Quenya could also have this sound at the beginning of words. As mentioned in the discussion of spelling conventions, Tolkien sometimes used the letter ñ to represent this older ng, e.g. Ñoldor. In his letters, Tolkien in one case added a footnote to the word Noldor (so spelt), informing the recipient that the initial N was to be pronounced "ng as in ding" (Letters:176). This would however be the "archaic" pronunciation; people speaking Quenya in Frodo's day would simply say Noldor: LotR Appendix E clearly indicates that by the Third Age, initial ñ had come to be pronounced like a normal n, and therefore the Elvish letter for ñ "has been transcribed n". We have adopted the same system here, so the letter n in nearly all cases represents normal English n, regardless of its phonological history in Quenya. I say "in nearly all cases" because n is still pronounced ñ before c (= k), g and qu. This is not much of a problem, for it is natural for speakers of English and many other languages to use this pronunciation anyway. In a word like anca "jaw" the cluster nc is therefore pronounced like "nk" in English tank, and in a word like anga "iron" the ng should be sounded like "ng" in English finger. Notice that Quenya ng occurring in the middle of words should always be pronounced with an audible g (this also goes for the group ngw, as in tengwa "letter"). It is NOT just the simple ñ described above, the "ng" of English king, with no distinct g. (We are of course talking about a hard g here; Quenya ng must never be pronounced "nj" as in English angel, but always as in finger. The sound of "soft" g as in English gin does not occur in Quenya.)
¤ Quenya r "represents a trilled r in all positions; the sound was not lost before consonants (as in [British] English part)" (LotR Appendix E). English r is generally much too weak for Quenya. Its weakness is precisely the reason why it tends to drop out before consonants and at the end of words (except where the next word happens to begin in a vowel – and by analogy, some speakers of English even introduce an R-sound where a word that properly should end in a vowel comes before a word beginning in a vowel. That is when vanilla ice starts coming out as "vanillar ice" – or, if you like, "vanilla rice"! Of course, this must be avoided in Quenya.) Quenya r should be trilled, as in Spanish, Italian, Russian etc., or for that matter as in Scottish English. Certain subtleties of Tengwar spelling suggests that in Quenya, r was somewhat weaker immediately in front of consonants (as opposed to vowels) and at the end of words. Nonetheless, it should be a properly trilled, wholly distinct sound even in these positions: Parma "book", erdë "seed", tasar "willow", Eldar "Elves". The vowel in front of r should not be lengthened or otherwise affected. In the Jackson movie, the actors portraying Gandalf and Saruman normally pronounce the name Mordor correctly, with trilled r's and short vowels (whereas Elijah Wood's "Frodo" invariably says Módó with no trace of any r's!) In the movie, Mordor is Sindarin for Black Land, but by its form and pronunciation, the word could just as well be Quenya mordor = "shadows" or "stains" (the plural form of mordo).
 The uvular r that is common in languages like French and German should be avoided in Quenya, for LotR Appendix E states that this was "a sound which the Eldar found distasteful" (it is even suggested that this was how the Orcs pronounced R!)
¤ The consonant s should always be unvoiced, "as in English so, geese" (LotR Appendix E). In English, s is often voiced to z, even though orthography may still show "s". For instance, though the s of English house is unvoiced, it becomes voiced in the plural form houses (for this reason, Tolkien noted that he would have liked the spelling houzes better – see PM:24). When pronouncing Quenya, one should be careful not to add voice to s, turning it into z: Asar "festival", olos "dream", nausë "imagination". Third Age Exilic Quenya did not possess the sound z at all. (Tolkien did imagine that z had occurred at an earlier stage, but it had later turned into r, merging with original r. For instance, UT:396 indicates that the plural of olos "dream" was at one stage olozi, but later it became olori.) Where it occurs between vowels, s often represents earlier þ (more or less = th as in thin); the words asar and nausë mentioned above represent older aþar and nauþë and were so spelt in Tengwar orthography.
¤ On v and w: We must assume that v and w are properly pronounced as in English vine and wine, respectively (but initial nw is strictly not n + w but simply a so-called labialized n; see below). There are some unclear points here, though. LotR Appendix E seems to indicate that in Third Age Quenya, initial w had come to be pronounced v: it is said that the name of the Tengwa letter vilya had earlier been wilya. Likewise, Tolkien indicated that the word véra ("personal, private, own") had been wéra in what he called "Old Quenya" (PM:340). In the Etymologies, the evidence is somewhat divergent. Sometimes Tolkien has primitive stems in W- yield Quenya words in v-, as when the stem WAN yields Quenya vanya- "go, depart, disappear". Sometimes he lists double forms, as when the stem WÂ (or WAWA, WAIWA) yields Quenya vaiwa and waiwa, both meaning "wind". Under the stem WAY Tolkien listed a word for "envelope" as "w- vaia", evidently indicating a double form waia and vaia (all of these examples are found in LR:397). In LR:398, there are further double forms, but in the case of the verb vilin ("I fly") from the stem WIL, Tolkien curiously changed it to wilin. Perhaps he suddenly decided to go for the "Old Quenya" spelling rather than actually rejecting one in favour of the other?
The weight of the evidence seems to be that at the beginning of words, w- had come to be pronounced as normal v- by the Third Age; where Tolkien listed double forms in w- and v-, the former is apparently to be taken as the more archaic form. However, I have not regularized the spelling on this point, though where Tolkien himself used or listed a form in v- rather than w- (either alone or as an alternative to w-), I will use the form in v- in this course. (This also goes for vilin!) It is possible, though, that according to the Third Age pronunciation all initial w's should be sounded as v, the original distinction between initial v and w having been lost in the spoken language. It is unclear whether or not Tolkien meant that this distinction was consistently upheld in Tengwar orthography (as when this writing upheld the distinction between þ and s even after both had come to be pronounced s). If so, the letter called (wilya >) vilya was still used for v representing older w, while another letter (vala) was used for v that had been v all along. – Other than at the beginning of words, the distinction between v and w was upheld even in the Third Age. In the case of the groups lw and lv the distinction could even be emphasized by altering the pronunciation of the latter: "For lv, not for lw, many speakers, especially Elves, used lb" (LotR Appendix E). Hence a word like elvëa "starlike" would often be pronounced "elbëa", and it might also be so written in Tengwar orthography. Though frequent, this would seem to be a non-standard pronunciation, and the spellings employed by Tolkien usually indicates the pronunciation "lv". Cf. for instance Celvar (or "Kelvar", meaning animals) rather than Celbar in the speeches of Yavanna and Manwë in the Silmarillion, chapter 2. In PM:340 Tolkien quotes a Quenya word for "branch" as olba rather than olva, though.
¤ The letter y "is only used as a consonant, as y in E[nglish] Yes": Tolkien singled this out as one of the few major departures from Latin spelling in the spelling conventions he used for Quenya (Letters:176). The vowel y, like German ü or French "u" as in lune, does not occur in Quenya (though it is found in Sindarin).

The question of aspiration
There is one uncertainty regarding the precise pronunciation the unvoiced stops c (= k), t, p: In English as well as some other languages, these sounds, when occurring before a vowel at the beginning of a word, are normally aspirated. That is, a h-like puff of breath is slipped in after them. In this position they are pronounced a little like genuine sequences k + h, t + h, p + h (as in backhand, outhouse, scrap-heap). The average speaker is not conscious of this at all, not really perceiving the extra h as a distinct sound: It is just the way k, t, p is "expected" to sound at the beginning of words. But in some languages, like French, Russian and (perhaps most importantly) Finnish, there is no such gratuitous h automatically following these consonants when they occur in certain positions.
Should Quenya t, p, c be aspirated as in English, or should they be pronounced as in French or Finnish? This question is not directly addressed anywhere in Tolkien's published writings. It may be observed that Quenya t, p, c descend from Primitive Elvish consonants that were certainly not aspirated, for in the primitive language they contrasted with distinct aspirated sounds: primitive th, ph, kh, which later became s, f, h in Quenya. (Cf. two wholly distinct primitive words like thaurâ "detestable" and taurâ "masterful" – the th of the first word should be sounded the way a speaker of English would most likely mispronounce the t of the latter! The t of taurâ should actually be pronounced French-style, with no aspiration.) So were Quenya t, p, c still unaspirated, since they had been so in the primitive language?
Since the primitive aspirated sounds had been changed, adding aspiration to t, p, c would cause no confusion. It should be noted, though, that in the writing system devised by Fëanor, there were originally distinct letters for aspirated sounds: "The original Fëanorian system also possessed a grade with extended stems, both above and below the line [of writing]. These usually represented aspirated consonants (e.g. t + h, p + h, k + h)" (LotR Appendix E). However, these were not the letters used to spell Quenya t, p, c. So all things considered, I think Quenya t, p, c should ideally be pronounced without aspiration. For people who are used to automatically slip in a h-like puff of breath after these consonants it may be difficult to get rid of it, since they are not really conscious of its presence at all. A phonology teacher once advised me that one way of getting rid of the aspiration is to practice pronouncing t, p, c/k with a burning candle in front of your mouth; the trick is to pronounce these consonants without the flame of the candle flickering (because of the puff of breath that constitutes the aspiration).
The voiced counterparts of t, p and c/k, namely d, b and (hard) g respectively, are not aspirated in English. For this reason, people who are used to hearing the unvoiced sounds pronounced as aspirated variants may (wrongly) perceive unaspirated unvoiced plosives as their voiced counterparts. Pronounced without aspiration, Quenya words like tarya ("stiff"), parma ("book") or calma ("lamp") may sound a little like "darya, barma, galma" to speakers of English (speakers of French, Russian or Finnish would not be confused). When pronouncing such words, one must not introduce vibration in the vocal chords to produce actual voiced sounds d, b, g. – But I should add that the whole aspiration issue is not something a student needs to spend much time on; as I said, the exact pronunciation of Quenya t, p, c is nowhere addressed in published writings. If it is indeed wrong to add aspiration to these consonants, at least one will err little more than Tolkien did himself when reading Namárië.

Palatalized and labialized consonants
In Quenya, we find words like nyarna "tale", tyalië "play" or nwalca "cruel". From these spellings it would seem that such words begin in consonant clusters: n + y, t + y, n + w. However, this would not agree with the explicit statement made in Lowdham's Report that "Adunaic, like Avallonian [= Quenya], does not tolerate more than a single basic consonant initially in any word" (SD:417-418). So how are we to explain this?
	The solution seems to be that "combinations" like the ny of nyarna are just single, basic consonants: Ny is not a cluster n + y, but the same unitary sound that is fittingly represented as a single letter "ñ" in Spanish orthography – as in señor. Of course, this sounds very much like "senyor", but "ñ" is really a single consonant. This "ñ" is a palatalized version of n, an n that has been "tinted" in the direction of y. English employs one distinctly palatalized consonant, usually represented by the digraph "sh" (which, of course, is not a cluster s + h); this can be described as a palatalized s. By carefully comparing the pronunciation of s and sh you can perceive the palatalization mechanism operating in your own mouth: A consonant is palatalized by arching the back of the tongue up towards the roof of the mouth (the palate, hence the term "palatalized consonant"). The relationship between s and sh corresponds to the relationship between n and Quenya ny (or Spanish "ñ").
Besides ny, Quenya also has the palatalized consonants ty, ly, ry (e.g. in tyalië "play", alya "rich", verya "bold"); these are palatalized counterparts of "normal" t, l, r. Regarding ty, Tolkien wrote that it may be pronounced as the "t" of English tune (see for instance SD:418-419 – it should be noted that he is thinking of dialects where this comes out as "tyoon"; this is not the case in all forms of American English). In Gondor, some mortal speakers of Quenya supposedly pronounced ty like ch as in English church, but that was not quite the proper Elvish pronunciation. As for the consonant ly, it would be similar to the "lh" of Portuguese olho ("eye"). In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien noted that l (so spelt) should also "to some degree [be] 'palatalized' between e, i and a consonant, or finally after e, i". The wording "to some degree" seems to suggest that we would not have a regular, "full-blown" palatalized l in these positions (like the sound spelt ly), but in words like Eldar "Elves" or amil "mother", the l should ideally have just a little tint of palatalizing to it.
	Besides the palatalized consonants, we have the labialized consonants: nw, gw and qu (= cw). These are not really clusters n + w, g + w, c + w. Rather they represent n, g, c (k) pronounced with pouted lips, as when pronouncing w: By the pouting of the lips, the consonant is "labialized" (this word comes from the Latin term for "lip"). Quenya qu may certainly be pronounced as in English queen, but ideally it should be pronounced as k and w merged together in a single, unitary sound. (True, there does exist one early source where Tolkien states that qu, though originally being simply k "accomp[anied] by lip-rounding", "is now sounded practically exactly as English qu – a liprounded k foll[owed] by a distinct w sound": See Parma Eldalamberon #13, page 63. However, I think this idea may be superseded by information from a much later source, indicating that Quenya had no initial consonant clusters: SD:417-418.) Nw and gw similarly represent "merged" versions of n/w, g/w. – It should be noted that nw is a single, labialized consonant only at the beginning of words, where it represents earlier ngw (sc. what Tolkien might also spell "ñw", using "ñ" for ng as in king). In the middle of words, e.g. in vanwa "gone, lost", nw really is a cluster n + w and is so spelt also in Tengwar orthography. However, the labialized consonants qu and gw also occur in the middle of words. In fact, gw occurs only in that position, and always in the combination ngw (not "ñw" but "ñgw", still using "ñ" as Tolkien did): Lingwë "fish", nangwa "jaw", sungwa "drinking-vessel".
The question of length: It may seem that when they occur medially between vowels, the palatalized and labialized consonants count as long or double consonants (as if the digraphs represented actual consonant clusters after all). Again using the letter "ñ" with its Spanish value of a palatalized n (and not, as Tolkien often did, for ng as in king), one may ask whether a word like atarinya ("my father", LR:61) actually represents "atariñña". If so, the group ny in the middle of words denotes a long palatalized N. Then the very word Quenya would be pronounced "Queñña" rather than "Quen-ya". Another possibility is "Queñya", the n being palatalized all right, but there is still a relatively distinct y-sound following it (which there would not be when ny occurs at the beginning of a word). Tolkien reading a version of Namárië at least once pronounced the word inyar as "iññar" (but the second time it occurred he simply said "inyar" with n + y). In any case, the groups ny, ly, ry, ty and qu (for cw) must be counted as either long consonants or consonant clusters for the purpose of stress (see below) – though it is also clear that sometimes they must be analyzed as single, unitary consonants.

Stress 
Whenever a language has polysyllabic words, speakers of this language may enunciate some syllables more forcefully than others. We say that these syllables are stressed or accented. In some languages speakers don't normally emphasize certain syllables more than others. For instance, the Japanese put about the same amount of stress on every syllable, resulting in what unloving foreigners have referred to as "machine gun articulation". But in Western languages, a varying amount of stress is common: Some syllables are stressed, others unstressed.
	The rules for which syllables are stressed vary wildly, though. Some languages have a very simple system; in French, words that are to receive any stress are always accented on the final syllable. To the natives, Paris is not "PARis" as in English, but rather "parIS" (actually the French don't pronounce the s, but that has nothing to do with the accent). The Finns also have a very simple system, stressing all words on the first syllable: While some speakers of English may think that Helsinki is most "naturally" pronounced "HelSINKi", the residents of the city will insist on "HELsinki" instead.
	Since the Finnish language was evidently Tolkien's foremost inspiration, one might think that he would have copied its simple system of accenting all words on the first syllable over into Quenya. In the "internal" or fictional history of the language, he did indeed envision an early period during which Quenya words were so accented (the so-called retraction period, WJ:366). However, this was replaced by a new system already before the Noldor went into exile, so Quenya as a language of lore in Middle-earth employed different accentuation patterns, carefully described in LotR Appendix E. This is the system we must use. (It seems that Tolkien actually copied it from Latin!)
	Words of one syllable, like nat "thing", obviously pose no problem; this one syllable is the sole candidate for receiving the stress. The simplest polysyllabic words, those of two syllables, are no problem either: In LotR Appendix E, Tolkien noted that "in words of two syllables [the accent] falls in practically all cases on the first syllable". As this wording implies, there may be a very few exceptions; the only exception known seems to be the word avá "don't!", that is accented on the final syllable: "aVÁ". (Even this one word also appears in the alternative form áva, stressed on the first syllable according to the normal rule: "ÁVa".) The name of the Blessed Realm, Aman, I sometimes hear people pronounce with the stress on the second rather than the first syllable – but the correct pronunciation must be "AMan", if we can trust the rules set out by Tolkien. ("AmAN" would be Amman, capital of Jordan!)
	Longer words, with three or more syllables, are slightly more complex when it comes to stress. Many of them are accented on the second to last syllable. However, in some cases the second-to-last syllable isn't "qualified" to receive the accent: This syllable cannot be accented if it is short. So how do we recognize a short syllable? If it contains no long vowel (no vowel marked with an accent), this is obviously one omen. Then the vowel itself is necessarily short. If this short vowel is followed by only one consonant, or even no consonant at all, this syllable has little chance of receiving the accent. Its one remaining chance of redeeming itself as a long syllable is that instead of a simple short vowel it actually contains one of the Quenya diphthongs: ai, au, eu, oi, ui or iu. Two vowels combined into a diphthong count as having the same "length" as a normal, unitary long vowel (marked by an accent). But if there is no diphthong, no long vowel, and not even a short vowel followed by more than one consonant, the syllable in question is irredeemably short. If this is the second-to-last syllable in a word of three or more syllables, this penultimate syllable has forfeited all its chances to receive the stress. In such a case the stress moves one step ahead, to fall on the third syllable from the end (no matter what this syllable looks like). Tolkien noted that words of such a shape "are favoured in the Eldarin languages, especially Quenya". Examples:
	¤ A word like vestalë "wedding" is accented "VESTalë". The second-to-last syllable cannot receive the stress because its vowel (the a) is short and followed by only a single consonant (the l); hence the accent moves one step ahead, to the third syllable from the end. Plural forms like Teleri (the Sea-Elves) and Istari (the Wizards) I sometimes hear people mispronounce as "TeLERi", "IsTARi"; applying Tolkien's rules we have to conclude that he actually intended "TELeri", "ISTari". The short penultimate syllables in these words cannot be accented.
¤ A word like Eressëa (the name of an isle near the Blessed Realm) some speakers of English are tempted to accent on the second-to-last syllable (following the stress-pattern of such a place-name as "Eritrea"!) But since in Er-ess-ë-a the second-to-last syllable is just a short ë not followed by a group of consonants (actually not even one consonant), this syllable cannot be accented and the stress moves to the syllable before it: "ErESSëa". Other words of the same pattern (with no consonant following a short vowel in the second-to-last syllable): Eldalië "the people of the Elves" ("ElDAlië" – though the word Elda "Elf" by itself is of course accented "ELda"), Tilion "The Horned", name of a Maia ("TILion"), laurëa "golden" ("LAURëa"), Yavannië "September" ("YaVANNië"), Silmarillion "[The Story] of the Silmarils" ("SilmaRILLion").
But though such words were "favoured", there is certainly no lack of words where the second-to-last syllable does qualify for receiving the accent. Examples: 
¤ Varda's title Elentári "Star-Queen" is pronounced "ElenTÁRi", since the vowel á in the second-to-last syllable is long. (If this had been a short a, it couldn't have been stressed since it is not followed by more than one consonant, and the third syllable from the end would have been accented instead: "ELENtari" – but no such word exists.) The names Númenórë, Valinórë are likewise accented on the long ó in the second-to-last syllable (whereas in the shortened forms Númenor, Valinor the accent must fall on the third syllable from the end: NÚMenor, VALinor).
¤ Words like hastaina "marred" or Valarauco "Power-demon" (Sindarin Balrog) are accented "hasTAINa", "ValaRAUCo" – since diphthongs like ai, au can be counted as long vowels for the purpose of stress.
¤ The names Elendil and Isildur are accented "ElENDil" and "IsILDur", since the vowel in the second-to-last-syllable, though short, is followed by more than one consonant (the groups nd, ld, respectively). A double consonant would have the same effect as a cluster of different consonants; for instance, Elenna ("Starwards", a name of Númenor) is pronounced "ElENNa". (Contrast the adjective elena "stellar, of the stars": this must be accented "ELena" since the second-to-last syllable "en" is short and therefore unable to receive the accent – unlike the long syllable "enn" in Elenna.)

Notice that the one letter x represents two consonants, ks. Therefore, a word like Helcaraxë (a place-name) is accented "HelcarAXë" (not "HelCARaxë" as if there were only one consonant following the a in the second-to-last syllable). Cf. the alternative spelling Helkarakse in the Etymologies, entry KARAK.

As noted above, some combinations should apparently be thought of as single consonants: qu (for cw/kw) represents labialized k, not k + w. Similarly, ny, ty, ly, ry would be palatalized n, t, l, r (the first = Spanish ñ). But in the middle of words, for the purpose of stress, it seems that qu, ly, ny, ty etc. do count as groups of consonants (double consonants or clusters – we cannot be certain precisely what Tolkien intended). In WJ:407, Tolkien indicates that the compound word ciryaquen "shipman, sailor" (made from cirya "ship" + -quen "person") is to be accented "cirYAquen". If qu (= cw/kw) were here thought of as a single consonant, labialized k, there would not be a group of consonants following the a and it could not receive the accent: the word would then have been pronounced "CIRyaquen" instead. So either qu here does count as a cluster k + w, or it represents a long or double labialized k (or even labialized kw followed by w). Bottom line is: pronounce "cirYAquen" and be relieved that the rest is mainly academic meandering. A few other words including the combinations in question: Elenya (first day of the Eldarin six-day week, accented "ElENya"), Calacirya or Calacilya (a place in the Blessed Realm, accented "CalaCIrya", "CalaCIlya").
A word of warning regarding the accent mark: Notice that the accent mark that may appear above vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú) only denotes that the vowel is long. While this symbol is frequently used to indicate the stressed syllable, this is not the case in Tolkien's normal spelling of Quenya. (Some may have noted that Pokémon isn't accented on the é either, so Tolkien isn't wildly idiosyncratic in this department!) A long vowel will often receive the stress, as in the example Elentári above, but not necessarily so: If the long vowel does not appear in the second-to-last syllable, its length (and the accent mark denoting it!) is quite irrelevant for the purpose of stress. In a word like Úlairi, the Quenya name for the Ringwraiths or Nazgûl, the stress falls on the diphthong ai, not on the ú. The spelling palantír has mislead many, making them think that this word is to be accented on "tír". Here is something Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf in the Peter Jackson LotR movie trilogy, wrote as the film was being shot:

...I have to learn a new pronunciation. All this time we have being
saying "palanTÍR" instead of the Old English stress on the first syllable.
Just as the word was about to be committed to the soundtrack, a correction came from Andrew Jack, the Dialect Coach; he taught me a Norfolk accent for Restoration, and for LOTR he supervises accents, languages and all things vocal. Palantír, being strictly of elvish origin should follow Tolkien's rule that the syllable before a double consonant should be stressed – "paLANTír" making a sound which is close to "lantern"...

Andrew Jack was right. Palantír cannot be stressed on the final syllable; virtually no polysyllabic Quenya words are accented in such a way (as I said above, avá "don't!" is the sole known exception). Instead the a in the second-to-last syllable receives the accent because it is followed by the consonant cluster nt (I should not call this a "double consonant" like McKellen does, since I want to reserve that term for a group of two identical consonants, like tt or nn – but for the purpose of stress, double consonants and clusters of different consonants have the same effect). So it is indeed "palANTír". (But in the plural form palantíri, where the long í suddenly appears in the second-to-last syllable, it does receive the accent: "palanTÍRi".)

In the case of long words ending in two short syllables, the last of these syllables may receive a weaker secondary stress. In a word like hísimë "mist", the main stress falls on hís, but the final syllable -më is not wholly unstressed. This secondary stress is much weaker than the main accent, though. (Nonetheless, Tolkien did note that for the purpose of poetry, the secondary stress can be used metrically: RGEO:69.)

Speed
Finally a brief note on something we know little about: How fast should one talk when speaking Quenya? The few recordings of Tolkien speaking Quenya are not "reliable" in this matter; he inevitably enunciates quite carefully. But regarding Fëanor's mother Míriel he noted that "she spoke swiftly and took pride in this skill" (PM:333). So fast Quenya is evidently good Quenya. When Tolkien also wrote that "the Elves made considerable use of...concomitant gestures" (WJ:416), one remembers that he had a great love for Italian – see Letters:223.

Summary of Lesson One: The Quenya vowels are a, e, i, o, u; long vowels are marked with an accent: á, é etc. The vowels should be pure, pronounced with their "Italian" values; long á and é should be noticably closer than short a, e. Some vowels may receive a diaeresis (ë, ä etc.), but this does not affect their pronunciation and is only intended as a clarification for people used to English orthography. The diphthongs are ai, au, eu, oi, ui, and iu. The consonant c is always pronounced k; l should be pronounced as a "clear", dental L; r should be trilled; s is always unvoiced; y is only used as a consonant (as in English you). Ideally, the consonants t, p, c should probably be unaspirated. Palatalized consonants are represented by digraphs in -y (ty, ny etc.); labialized consonants are normally written as digraphs in -w (e.g. nw, but what would be cw is spelt qu instead). H is pronounced [x] (German ach-Laut) before t, unless this combination ht is preceded by one of the vowels e or i, in which case h is sounded like German ich-Laut. Otherwise, h may be pronounced like English h; the digraphs hy and hw however represent ich-Laut and unvoiced w (like American English wh), respectively. The combinations hl and hr originally represented unvoiced l, r, but by the Third Age, these sounds had come to be pronounced like normal l and r. In polysyllabic words, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable when that is long (containing either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by a consonant cluster or a double consonant). If the second-to-last syllable is short, the stress falls on the third syllable from the end (unless the word has only two syllables, in which case the first syllable receives the stress whether it is short or long).

EXERCISES
As far as the most critical subtleties of pronunciation are concerned, I unfortunately cannot make any exercises; we are not in a classroom so that I can comment on your pronunciation. But regarding stress (accent) and the pronunciation of h, it is possible to make exercises.

1. Determine which vowel (single vowel or diphthong) receives the accent in the words below. (It is not necessary to indicate where the entire syllable it belongs to begins and ends.)

A. Alcar ("glory")
B. Alcarë (longer variant of the above)
C. Alcarinqua ("glorious")
D. Calima ("bright")
E. Oronti ("mountains")
F. Únótimë ("uncountable, numberless")
G. Envinyatar ("renewer")
H. Ulundë ("flood")
I. Eäruilë ("seaweed")
J. Ercassë ("holly")

Extra exercise on stress: While we hear many Sindarin lines in the movie, one of the few really prominent samples of Quenya in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring is the scene where "Saruman" (Christopher Lee) standing on the top of Isengard reads an invocation to bring down an avalanche in order to stop the Fellowship. He says to the mountain they are attempting to cross: Nai yarvaxëa rasselya taltuva notto-carinnar! = "may your bloodstained horn collapse upon enemy heads!" (not translated in the movie). The actor accents the words like this: nai yarVAXëa RASSelya TALTuva notto-CARinnar. Are all the words accented as they should be, according to Tolkien's guidelines? If not, what is right and what is wrong?

2. Where the letter h appears in Quenya words as they are spelt in our letters, it may be pronounced in various ways. Ignoring the digraphs hw and hy, the letter h may be pronounced
A) a "breath-h" like English h as in high, 
B) more or less as in English huge, human or ideally like ch in German ich, 
C) like ch in German ach or Scottish loch (in phonetic writing [x]).
In addition we have alternative D): the letter h is not really pronounced at all, but merely indicates that the following consonant was unvoiced in archaic Quenya.
Sort the words below into these four categories (A, B, C, D):

K. Ohtar ("warrior")
L. Hrávë ("flesh")
M. Nahta ("a bite")
N. Heru ("lord")
O. Nehtë ("spearhead")
P. Mahalma ("throne")
Q. Hellë ("sky")
R. Tihtala ("blinking")
S. Hlócë ("snake, serpent")
T. Hísië ("mist")

The keys to the exercises found in this course can be downloaded from this URL:
http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/keys.rtf

LESSON TWO
Nouns. Plural form. The article.

Words that denote things, as opposed to for instance actions, are called nouns. The "things" in question may be inanimate (like "stone"), animate (like "person", "woman", "boy"), natural (like "tree"), artificial (like "bridge, house"), concrete (like "stone" again) or wholly abstract (like "hatred"). Names of persons, like "Peter" or "Mary", are also considered nouns. Sometimes a noun may denote, not one clearly distinct object or person, but an entire substance (like "gold" or "water"). So there is much to be included.
	In most languages, a noun can be inflected, that is, it appears in various forms to modify its meaning, or to make it fit into a specific grammatical context. For instance, if you want to connect two English nouns like "Mary" and "house" in such a way as to make it clear that Mary owns the house, you modify the form of the noun Mary by adding the ending -'s, producing Mary's, which readily connects with house to make the phrase Mary's house. Or starting with a noun like tree, you may want to make it clear that you are talking about more than one singular tree, and so you modify the word to its plural form by adding the plural ending -s to get trees. In English, a noun doesn't have very many forms at all; there is the singular (e.g. girl), its plural (girls), the form you use when the one denoted by the noun owns something (girl's) and the combination of the plural and this "ownership"-form (written girls' and unfortunately not really distinct from girls or girl's in sound, but speakers of English somehow get along without too many misunderstandings – rest assured that the Quenya equivalents are clearly distinct in form!) So an English noun comes in no more than four different forms.
A Quenya noun, on the other hand, comes in hundreds of different forms. It can receive endings not only for two different kinds of plural, plus endings denoting a pair of things, but also endings expressing meanings that in English would be denoted by placing small words like "for, in/on, from, to, of, with" etc. in front of the noun instead. Finally a Quenya noun can also receive endings denoting who owns it, e.g. -rya- "her" in máryat "her hands" in Namárië (the final -t, by the way, is one of the endings denoting a pair of something – in this case a natural pair of hands).
	Having read the above, the student should not succumb to the idea that Quenya is a horribly difficult language ("imagine, hundreds of different forms to learn where English has only four!"), or for that matter start thinking that Quenya must be some kind of super-language ("wow, hundreds of different forms to play with while the poor English-speaking sods have to get along with a pitiful four!") English and Quenya organize the information differently, that is all – the former often preferring a string of short words, the latter rather jumbling the ideas to be expressed into one big mouthful. The hundreds of different forms arise because a much lower number of endings can be combined, so there is no reason to despair. It is a little like counting; you needn't learn two hundred and fifty different numeric symbols to be able to count to 250, but only the ten from 0 to 9.
	Most of the endings a noun can take we won't discuss until
 (much) later lessons. We will start with something that should be familiar enough, found even on the puny list of English noun-forms: Making a noun plural – going from one to several.
	In Quenya, there are two different plurals. One is formed by adding the ending -li to the noun. Tolkien called this the "partitive plural" (WJ:388) or a "general pl[ural]" (see the Etymologies, entry TELES). Unfortunately, the function of this plural – sc. how it differs in meaning from the more "normal" plural discussed below – is not fully understood. We have a few examples of this plural in our scarce source material, but they are not very helpful. For a long time it was assumed that this plural implied that there were "many" of the things in question; hence Eldali (formed from Elda "Elf") would mean something like "many Elves". There may be something to this, but in several of the examples we have, there seems to be no implication of "many". It has been suggested that Eldali may rather mean something like "several Elves" or "some Elves", sc. some out of a larger group, some considered as part of this group: The term "partitive plural" may point in the same direction. However, I will for the most part leave the partitive plural alone throughout this course. Its function just isn't well enough understood for me to construct exercises that would only mean feeding some highly tentative interpretation to unsuspecting students. (I present some thoughts about the -li plural in the appendices to this course.)
	For now we will deal with the "normal" plural form instead. Any reader of Tolkien's narratives will have encountered plenty of examples of this form; they are especially common in the Silmarillion. Nouns ending in any of the four vowels -a, -o, -i or -u , plus nouns ending in the group -ië, form their plural with the ending -r. Cf. the names of various groups of people mentioned in the Silmarillion:

Elda "Elf", plural Eldar
Vala "god (or technically angel)", pl. Valar
	Ainu "spirit of God's first creation", pl. Ainur
	Noldo "Noldo, member of the Second Clan of the Eldar", pl. Noldor
	Valië "female Vala", pl. Valier

For another example of -ië, cf. tier for "paths" in Namárië; compare singular tië "path". (According to the spelling conventions here employed, the diaeresis in tië is dropped in the plural form tier because the dots are there merely to mark that final -ë is not silent, but in tier, e is not final anymore because an ending has been added – and hence the dots go.) Examples of the plurals of nouns in -i are rare, since nouns with this ending are rare themselves, but in MR:229 we have quendir as the pl. of quendi "Elf-woman" (and also quendur as the pl. of quendu "Elf-man"; nouns in -u are not very numerous either).

This singular word quendi "Elf-woman" must not be confused with the plural word Quendi that many readers of Tolkien's fiction will remember from the Silmarillion, for instance in the description of the awakening of the Elves in chapter 3: "Themselves they named the Quendi, signifying those that speak with voices; for as yet they had met no other living things that spoke or sang." Quendi is the plural form of Quendë "Elf"; nouns ending in -ë typically form their plurals in -i, and as we see, this -i replaces the final -ë instead of being added to it. In WJ:361, Tolkien explicitly refers to "nouns in -e, the majority of which formed their plurals in -i". 

As this wording implies, there are exceptions; a few nouns in -ë are seen to use the other plural ending, -r, instead. One exception we have already touched on: where the -ë is part of -ië, we have plurals in -ier, as in tier "paths". Hence we avoid the awkward plural form **tii. Other exceptions cannot be explained as easily. In LotR Appendix E, we have tyeller for "grades", evidently the plural of tyellë.  Why tyeller instead of **tyelli? LR:47 likewise indicates that the plural of mallë "road" is maller; why not **malli? It may be that nouns in -lë have plurals in -ler because "regular" **-li might cause confusion with the partitive plural ending -li mentioned above. Unfortunately, we lack more examples that could confirm or disprove this theory (and so I don't dare to construct any exercises based on this assumption, though I would follow this rule in my own Quenya compositions). The form tyeller confused early researchers; with extremely few examples to go on, some wrongly concluded that nouns in -ë regularly have plurals in -er. The name of the early journal Parma Eldalamberon or "Book of Elven-tongues" (sporadically published still) reflects this mistake; the title incorporates **lamber as the presumed plural of lambë "tongue, language", while we now know that the correct plural must be lambi. Though the error was early suspected and is now recognized by everyone, the publisher never bothered to change the name of the journal to the correct form Parma Eldalambion (and so, ever and anon, I get an e-mail from some fresh student wondering why my site is called Ardalambion and not Ardalamberon...) In some cases, Tolkien himself seems uncertain which plural ending should be used. In PM:332, the plural form of Ingwë "Elf of the First Clan [also name of the king of that clan]" is given as Ingwi, just as we would expect; yet a few pages later, in PM:340, we find Ingwer instead (it is there said that the First Clan, the Vanyar, called themselves Ingwer, so perhaps this reflects a special Vanyarin usage?) It may be noted that in Tolkien's earliest "Qenya", more nouns in -ë apparently had plural forms in -er. For instance, the early poem Narqelion has lasser as the plural of lassë "leaf", but in Namárië in LotR Tolkien used the plural form lassi. 
As far as I know, the words in the exercises below all follow the normal rule: Nouns ending in -ë, except as a part of -ië, have plurals in -i.

This leaves only one group of nouns to be considered, namely those that end in a consonant. These nouns, just like those that end in -ë, are seen to have plurals in -i. A few examples: Eleni "stars", the plural form of elen "star", occurs in Namárië (and also in WJ:362, where both the singular and the plural form are quoted). The Silmarillion has Atani for "Men" (not "males", but humans as opposed to Elves); this is formed from the singular word Atan. According to WJ:388, the word Casar "Dwarf" has the plural Casari "Dwarves". 

Of these two plural endings – r as in Eldar "Elves", but i as in Atani "(Mortal) Men" – Tolkien imagined the latter to be the most ancient. The plural ending -i comes directly from Primitive Elvish -î, a word like Quendi representing primitive Kwendî. The plural ending -r arose later: "For the showing of many the new device of r was brought in and used in all words of a certain shape – and this, it is said, was begun among the Noldor" (PM:402). In primary-world terms, both plural endings were however present in Tolkien's conception from the beginning; already in his earliest work on "Qenya", written during World War I, we find forms like Qendi (as it was then spelt) and Eldar coexisting. The twin plural endings are a feature that evidently survived throughout all the stages of Tolkien's development of Quenya, from 1915 to 1973.

NOTE ON THE DIFFERENT WORDS FOR "ELF": As the attentive reader will have inferred from the above, there is more than one Quenya word for "Elf". The word with the widest application, within the scope of Tolkien's fiction, was Quendë pl. Quendi. This form is at least associated with the word "to speak" (quet-), and Tolkien speculated that ultimately these words were indeed related via a very primitive base KWE- having to do with vocal speech (see WJ:391-392). When the Elves awoke by the mere of Cuiviénen, they called themselves Quendi (or in primitive Elvish actually Kwendî) since for a long time they knew of no other speaking creatures. Eventually the Vala Oromë found them under a starlit sky, and he gave them a new name in the language they themselves had developed: Eldâi, often translated "Starfolk". In Quenya, this primitive word later appeared as Eldar (singular Elda). While the term Eldar (Eldâi) was originally meant to apply to the entire Elvish race, it was later only used of the Elves that accepted the invitation of the Valar to come and dwell in the Blessed Realm of Aman and embarked on the Great March to get there (the term Eldar is also applicable to those who never actually made it all the way to Aman, such as the Sindar or Grey-elves who stayed in Beleriand). Those who refused the invitation were called Avari, "Refusers", and hence all Elves (Quendi) can be subdivided into Eldar and Avari. Only the former play any important part in Tolkien's narratives. So in later Quenya the situation was this: Quendë pl. Quendi remained as the only truly universal term for all Elves of any kind, but this was a technical word primarily used by the Loremasters, not a word that would be used in daily speech. The gender-specific variants of Quendë "Elf", namely masculine quendu and feminine quendi, would presumably be used only if you wanted to speak of a specifically Elvish (wo)man as opposed to a (wo)man of any other sentient race: These are not the normal Quenya words for "man" and "woman" (the normal words are nér and nís, presumably applicable to a man or woman of any sentient race, not just Elves). The normal, everyday Quenya term for "Elf" was Elda, and the fact that this word technically didn't apply to Elves of the obscure Avarin tribes living somewhere far east in Middle-earth was no big problem since none of them was ever seen anyway. Regarding the compound Eldalië (which combines Elda with lië "people, folk") Tolkien wrote that when one of the Elves of Aman used this word, "he meant vaguely all the race of Elves, though he was probably not thinking of the Avari" (WJ:374). – Throughout the exercises found in this course, I have used Elda (rather than Quendë) as the standard translation of English "Elf", regardless of any specialized meaning it may have within Tolkien's mythos. As I said in the Introduction, in these exercises I largely eschew specific references to Tolkien's mythos and narratives. 

THE ARTICLE
We have time for one more thing in this lesson: the article. An article, linguistically speaking, is such a word as English "the" or "a, an". These little words are used in conjunction with nouns to express such different shades of meaning as "a horse" vs. "the horse". Anyone capable of reading this text in the first place will know what the difference is, so no lengthy explanation is necessary. In short, "a horse" refers to a horse that hasn't been mentioned before, so you slip in the article "a" as a kind of introduction: "Look, there's a horse over there!" You may also use the phrase "a horse" if you want to say something that is true of any horse, as in "a horse is an animal". If, on the other hand, you say "the horse", it usually refers to one definite horse. Hence "the" is termed the definite article, while "a, an", lacking this "definite" aspect, is conversely called the indefinite article.
 In this respect at least, Quenya is somewhat simpler than English. Quenya has only one article, corresponding to the English definite article "the" (and since there is no indefinite article it must be distinguished from, we may simply speak of "the article" when discussing Quenya). The Quenya word corresponding to English "the" is i. For instance, Namárië has i eleni for "the stars". As can be inferred from the above, Quenya has no word corresponding to English "a, an". When translating Quenya into English, one simply has to slip in "a" wherever English grammar demands an indefinite article, as in the famous greeting Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo, "a star shines upon the hour of our meeting". As we see, the first word of the Quenya sentence is simply elen "star", with nothing corresponding to the English indefinite article "a" before it (or anywhere else in the sentence, for that matter). In Quenya, there is no way you can maintain the distinction between "a star" and just "star"; both are simply elen. Luckily there isn't much of a distinction to be maintained anyway. Languages like Arabic, Hebrew and classical Greek employ a similar system: there is a definite article corresponding to English "the", but nothing corresponding to the English indefinite article "a, an" (and this is the system used in Esperanto as well). After all, the absence of the definite article is itself enough to signal that a (common) noun is indefinite, so the indefinite article is in a way superfluous. Tolkien decided to do without it in Quenya, so students only have to worry about i = "the".
Sometimes, Tolkien connects the article to the next word by means of a hyphen or a dot: i-mar "the earth" (Fíriel's Song), i·coimas "the lifebread" (PM:396). However, he did not do so in LotR (we have already quoted the example i eleni "the stars" in Namárië), and neither will we here.
The Quenya article is generally used as in English. However, some nouns that would require the article in English are apparently counted as proper names in Quenya, and so take no article. For instance, the sentence Anar caluva tielyanna is translated "the Sun shall shine upon your path" (UT:22, 51); yet there is no article in the Quenya sentence. "The Sun" is not **i Anar, but simply Anar. Clearly Anar is perceived as a proper name, designating one celestial body only, and you don't have to say "the Anar" any more than an English-speaking person would say "the Mars". The name of "the" Moon, Isil, undoubtedly behaves like Anar in this respect. It may be noted that both words are treated as proper names in the Silmarillion, chapter 11: "Isil was first wrought and made ready, and first rose into the realm of the stars... Anar arose in glory, and the first dawn of the Sun was like a great fire..."
Also notice that before a plural denoting an entire people (or even race), the article is not normally used. WJ:404 mentions a saying Valar valuvar, "the will of the Valar will be done" (or more literally *"the Valar will rule"). Notice that "the Valar" is simply Valar in Quenya, not i Valar. Similarly, PM:395 has lambë Quendion for "language of the Elves" and coimas Eldaron for "coimas [lembas] of the Eldar" – not **lambë i Quendion, **coimas i Eldaron. (The ending -on here appended to the plurals Quendi, Eldar signifies "of"; this ending should not affect whether or not the article has to be present before the word.)
With this usage compare Tolkien's use of "Men" in his narratives to refer to the human race as such: "Men awoke in Hildórien at the rising of the Sun... A darkness lay upon the hearts of Men... Men (it is said) were at first very few in number..." (Silmarillion, chapter 17.) By contrast, "the Men" would refer, not to the entire race, but only to a casual group of "Men" or humans. Quenya plurals denoting entire peoples or races seem to behave in the same way. In a Quenya text there would probably be no article before plurals like Valar, Eldar, Vanyar, Noldor, Lindar, Teleri, Atani etc. as long as the entire race or people is considered, even though Tolkien's English narratives speak of "the Valar", "the Eldar" etc. However, if we replace Eldar with its equivalent "Elves", we see that the article often would often not be required in English, either (e.g. "Elves are beautiful" = Eldar nar vanyë; if you say "the Elves are beautiful" = i Eldar nar vanyë, you are probably describing once particular group of Elves, not the entire race).
Occasionally, especially in poetry, the article seemingly drops out for no special reason. Perhaps it is simply omitted because of metric considerations. The first line of Namárië, ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen, Tolkien translated "ah! like gold fall the leaves..." – though there is no i before lassi "leaves" in the Quenya text. The Markirya poem also leaves out the article in a number of places, if we are to judge by Tolkien's English translation of it.

Summary of Lesson Two: There is a plural ending -li the function of which we don't fully understand, so we will leave it alone for now. The normal plural is formed by adding -r to nouns ending in any of the vowels -a, -i, -o, -u, plus nouns ending in -ië. If, on the other hand, the noun ends in -ë (except, of course, as part of -ië) the plural ending is usually -i (displacing the final -ë); nouns ending in a consonant also form their plurals in -i. The Quenya definite article, corresponding to English "the", is i; there is no indefinite article like English "a, an".

VOCABULARY
Regarding Frodo hearing Galadriel singing Namárië, the LotR states that "as is the way of Elvish words, they remained graven in his memory". This may be a comforting thought to students attempting to memorize Quenya vocabulary. In the lessons proper, while I discuss various aspects of Quenya, I will normally mention quite a few words – but in the exercises, I will only use words from the "vocabulary" list that is hereafter presented at the end of each lesson. Thus, this is all the student is excepted to carefully memorize (doing the exercises for the next lessons, you will also need vocabulary introduced earlier). We will introduce twelve new words in each lesson: a fitting number, since Tolkien's Elves preferred counting in twelves rather than tens as we do. A unified list of all the vocabulary henceforth employed in the exercises of this course can be downloaded from this URL: http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/q-vocab.rtf

minë "one" (from now on, we will introduce one new number in each lesson)
Anar "(the) Sun"
Isil "(the) Moon"
ar "and" (a most useful word that will allow us to have two exercises in one...translate "the Sun and the Moon", for instance...)
Elda "Elf"
lië "people" (sc. an entire "ethnic group" or even race, as in Eldalië = the People of the Elves).
vendë "maiden" (in archaic Quenya wendë)
rocco "horse" (specifically "swift horse for riding", according to Letters:382)
aran "king"
tári "queen"
tasar "willow" (by its form this could be the plural of **tasa, but no such word exists, and -r is here part of the basic word and not an ending. This word occurs, compounded, in LotR – Treebeard chanting "In the willow-meads of Tasarinan [Willow-vale] I walked in the spring...")
nu "under"

EXERCISES

1. Translate into English (or whatever language you prefer):

A. Roccor
B. Aran (two possible English translations!)
C. I rocco.
D. I roccor. 
E. Arani.
F. Minë lië nu minë aran.
G. I aran ar i tári.
H. Vendi.

2. Translate into Quenya:

I. Willows.
J. Elves.
K. The kings.
L. Peoples.
M. The horse under (or, below) the willow.
N. A maiden and a queen.
O. The queen and the maidens.
P. The Sun and the Moon (I promised you that one...)

LESSON THREE
Dual number. Stem variation.

DUAL NUMBER
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. Dual number refers to two things, a couple of things. The dual is formed with one out of two endings: -u or -t.
	Within the fictional timeline imagined by Tolkien, these two endings originally had somewhat different meanings, and so were not completely interchangeable. A footnote in Letters:427 provides some information on this. The ending -u (from Primitive Elvish -û) was originally used in the case of natural pairs, of two things or persons somehow belonging together as a logical couple. For instance, according to VT39:9, 11, the word pé "lip" has the dual form peu "lips", referring to one person's pair of lips (and not, for instance, to the upper lip of one person and the lower lip of another, which would be just "two lips" and not a natural pair). The noun veru, meaning "married pair" or "husband and wife", has dual form; in this case there does not seem to be a corresponding singular "spouse" (but we have verno "husband" and vessë "wife" from the same root; see LR:352). The noun alda "tree" occurs in dual form with reference, not to any casual pair of trees, but the Two Trees of Valinor: Aldu. 
Notice that if the ending -u is added to a noun ending in a vowel, this vowel is displaced: hence the dual of alda is aldu rather than **aldau – though a word quoted in PM:138, reproducing a draft for the LotR Appendices, seems to suggest that Tolkien for a moment considered precisely the latter form. There is also an old source that has Aldaru, apparently formed by adding the dual ending -u to the normal plural aldar "trees", but this seems to be an early experiment of Tolkien's that was probably long obsolete by the time he wrote LotR. In the dual form peu, the final vowel of pé "lip" is apparently not displaced by the dual ending -u. However, Quenya pé is meant to descend from primitive Elvish peñe, whereas the dual form peu is meant to come from peñû (VT39:9) – so the e of peu was not originally final.
	As for the other dual ending, -t, it according to Letters:427 represents an old element ata. This, Tolkien noted, was originally "purely numerative"; it is indeed related to the Quenya word for the numeral "two", atta. By "purely numerative", Tolkien evidently meant that the dual in -t could denote two things only casually related. For instance, ciryat as the dual form of cirya "ship" could refer to any two ships; ciryat would only be a kind of spoken shorthand for the full phrase atta ciryar, "two ships". However, Tolkien further noted that "in later Q[uenya]", the dual forms were "only usual with reference to natural pairs". Precisely what he means by "later" Quenya cannot be determined; it could refer to Quenya as a ritual language in Middle-earth rather than the vernacular of the Eldar in Valinor. In any case, the Third Age Quenya we aim for in this course must certainly be included when Tolkien speaks of "later" Quenya, so here we will follow the rule that any dual form must refer to some kind of natural or logical pair, not to two things only casually related. In other words, the dual in -t came to have just the same "meaning" as a dual in -u. A dual like ciryat "2 ships" (curiously spelt "ciriat" in Letters:427, perhaps a typo) would not in later Quenya be used with reference to any two ships, but only of two ships that somehow form a pair – like two sister ships. If you just want to refer to two ships that do not in any way form a natural or logical pair, like any two ships that happen to be seen together, you would not use the dual form but simply the numeral atta "two" – hence atta ciryar.
	Since the two endings -t and -u had come to carry the same meaning, 
some rule is needed to determine when to use which. Which ending should be used can apparently be inferred from the shape of the word itself (just like the shape of the word normally determines whether the plural ending should be -i or -r). In Letters:427, Tolkien noted that "the choice of t or u [was] decided by euphony", sc. by what sounded well – adding as an example that -u was preferred to -t if the word that is to receive a dual ending already contains a t or the similar sound d. Hence the dual of alda is aldu rather than **aldat. It seems that as far as later Quenya is concerned, -t would be your first option as the dual ending, but if the noun it is to be added to already contains t or d, you opt for -u instead (remembering that this ending displaces any final vowels). The duals Tolkien listed in the Plotz Letter, ciryat "a couple of ships" and lasset "a couple of leaves" (formed from cirya "ship" and lassë "leaf") confirm that a words with no t or d in them take the dual ending -t. Perhaps the ending -u would also be preferred in the case of nouns ending in a consonant, since -t could not be added directly to such a word without producing a final consonant cluster that Quenya phonology wouldn't allow; unfortunately we have no examples. (If the ending -t is to be used anyhow, a vowel would probably have to be inserted before it, producing a longer ending – likely -et. We will eschew this little problem in the exercises below, since nobody really knows the answer.)
	It is clear, however, that Quenya has a number of old duals that do not follow the rule that the ending is normally -t, replaced by -u only if there is a d or t in the word it is to be added to. The examples veru "married pair" and peu "lips, pair of lips" are proof of that; here there is no t or d present, but the ending is still -u rather than -t. Presumably these are "fossilized" dual forms reflecting the older system in which only -u denoted a natural or logical pair. The example peu "(pair of) lips" suggests that the ending -u is used in the case of body-parts occurring in pairs, such as eyes, arms, legs. (The other ending -t may however be used if certain other endings intrude before the dual ending itself; we will return to this in a later lesson.) The word for "arm" is ranco; the dual form denoting one person's pair of arms is not attested, but my best guess is that it would be rancu. The compound hendumaica "sharp-eye[d]" mentioned in WJ:337 may incorporate a dual hendu "(pair of) eyes". The Quenya word for "eye" is known to be hen, or hend- before an ending (the Etymologies only mentions the normal plural hendi "eyes", LR:364). In the case of this word the dual ending would be -u rather than -t anyway, since there is a d in hend-. The word for "foot", tál, probably has the dual talu (for the shortening of the vowel, see below).

STEM VARIATION 
This is a subject we shall have to spend some paragraphs on, since even on this early stage of the course we haven't been able to wholly eschew it. I will go into some detail here, but students can rest assured that they are not expected to remember all the words and examples below; just try to get a feel for what stem variation is all about.
Sometimes the form of a Quenya word subtly changes when you add endings to it. Two such words were mentioned above. If you add an ending to tál "foot", for instance -i for plural or -u for dual, the long vowel á is shortened to a. So the plural "feet" is tali rather than **táli, the dual "a couple of feet" is talu rather than **tálu. In such a case, tál "foot" may be said to have the stem tal-. Likewise, the word hen "eye" has the stem hend-, since its plural is hendi and not just **heni. The "stem" form does not occur by itself, but is the form you add endings to. When presenting a gloss, I will represent such stem variation by listing the independent form first, followed by a parenthetical "stem form" with a hyphen where the ending goes, e.g.: tál (tal-) "foot", hen (hend-) "eye".
	In the case of tál vs. tal-, the variation is apparently due to the fact that vowels were often lengthened in words of only one syllable, but when the word had endings the word obviously got to have more than one syllable and so the lengthening did not occur (another example of the same seems to be nér "man" vs. plural neri "men", MR:213/LR:354). Originally, the vowel was short in all forms. It is usually true that the stem form gives away how the word looked at an earlier stage in the long linguistic evolution Tolkien dreamed up in great detail. Hen "eye" in its stem hend- reflects the primitive "base" KHEN-D-E from which it is ultimately derived (LR:364). Quenya could not have -nd at the end of a word and simplified it to -n when the word stands alone (thus, hen in a way represents the impossible "full" form hend), but before an ending the group -nd- was not final and could therefore actually appear. Very often stem variation has to do with clusters or sounds that are not allowed at the end of words, but that may appear elsewhere. Cf. a word like talan "floor". The plural "floors" is not **talani as we might expect, but talami. The stem is talam- because this is the form of the Primitive Elvish root-word: TALAM (LR:390). As Quenya evolved from Primitive Elvish, a rule came into place that only a few consonants were allowed at the end of words, and m was not one of them. The closest "permissible" consonant was n, and so the old word talam was altered to talan – but in the plural form talami (and other forms that added an ending to the word), the m was not final and therefore persisted unchanged. Another, similar case is filit "small bird", that has the stem filic- (e.g. plural filici "small birds"): The primitive root-word was PHILIK (LR:381), but Quenya did not permit -k at the end of a word, so in that position it became -t. When not final it remained k (here spelt c).
In some cases, the "independent" form is a simplified or shortened form of a word, while the stem form reflects the fuller form. For instance, Tolkien apparently imagined that the word merendë "feast, festival" was often shortened to meren, but the stem is still merend- (LR:372). Hence the plural of meren is merendi, not **mereni. When it stands alone, the word nissë "woman" is normally reduced to nis (or nís with a lengthened vowel), but the double S persists before endings: thus the plural "women" is nissi (LR:377, MR:213). A similar case is Silmarillë, the name of one of the legendary jewels created by Fëanor; this is normally shortened to Silmaril, but before endings the double L of the full form is preserved (Silmarill-); hence the plural is always Silmarilli. In the case of compound words, sc. words made up from several other words, the second element in the compound is often reduced, but a fuller form may turn up before an ending. For instance, the noun Sindel "Grey-elf" (WJ:384) incorporates -el as a reduced form of Elda "Elf". The plural of Sindel is not **Sindeli, but Sindeldi preserving the cluster -ld- seen in Elda. (Since the final -a is lost in the compound, we cannot have the plural **Sindeldar.)
In some cases a word may be contracted when you add endings to it. In such cases the stem-form does not reflect the older, more complete form of the word. Such contraction often occurs in two-syllable words containing two identical vowels. For instance, feren "beech-tree" is reduced to fern- before an ending, e.g. plural ferni instead of **fereni. WJ:416 likewise indicates that laman "animal" may be reduced to lamn- before an ending, hence for instance lamni "animals", though the unreduced form lamani was also in use. Occasionally, the contracted forms suffer further change when compared to the unreduced form; as the plural of seler "sister" we might expect **selri, but since lr is not a permissible consonant cluster in Quenya, it is changed to ll – the actual plural "sisters" being selli (cf. the Etymologies, entry THEL-, THELES-).

Another form of stem-variation is very poorly attested as far as nouns are concerned, but there are hints to the effect that the final vowel of some words would change when an ending is added. In Quenya, the final vowels -o and -ë sometimes come from -u and -i in Primitive Elvish. At one stage of the linguistic evolution, original short -i became -e when the vowel was final; in the same environment original short -u became -o. For instance, the primitive word tundu "hill, mound" came out as tundo in Quenya (LR:395). But since this change only occurred when the vowel was final, it is possible that its original quality would be preserved before an ending. The plural "hills" may well be tundur rather than tundor, though neither form is attested. According to SD:415, the Quenya noun lómë "night" has the "stem" lómi-, evidently meaning that the final vowel -ë changes to -i- if you add an ending after it. For instance, adding the dual ending -t to lómë (to express "a couple of nights") would presumably produce lómit rather than lómet. This would be because lómë comes from Primitive Elvish dômi (LR:354), and -i never turned into -e except when final. Some think certain words in Namárië, lírinen and súrinen, are attested examples of this phenomenon: These are forms of lírë "song" and súrë "wind" (the latter is attested by itself in MC:222; the meaning of the ending -nen seen in lírinen and súrinen will be discussed in a later lesson). If this word originally ended in an -i that became -ë only later (and only when final), it may explain why in this word -ë seemingly turns into -i- before an ending. We would then say that súrë has the stem súri-.
There seems to be a similar variation involving the final vowel -o, that in some cases descend from final -u in Primitive Elvish; again the primitive quality of the vowel may be resurrected if an ending is added to it. For instance, rusco "fox" is said to have the stem ruscu-, so if we add the dual ending to speak of a "a couple of foxes", the resulting form should presumably be ruscut rather than ruscot. However, there is no extensive treatment of this phenomenon in Tolkien's published writings; indeed the statements made in SD:415 and VT41:10 that lómë and rusco have stems lómi-, ruscu- are as close as we get to explicit references to it.

The student should not despair, thinking that all sorts of strange things typically happen whenever you add an ending to a Quenya word, so that there is a great potential for making embarrassing mistakes (or at least very much extra stuff to memorize). Most Quenya words seem to be quite well-behaved, with no distinct "stem" form to remember; you just add the ending and that's it. Where a distinct stem-form is known to exist (or where we have good reason to suspect one), this will of course be indicated when I first present the word, if it is relevant for the exercises.

Summary of Lesson Three: In addition to the plural form(s), Quenya also has a dual number used for a pair of things forming some kind of natural or logical couple. (We must assume that two things only casually associated would be denoted by a normal plural in conjunction with the numeral atta "two".) The dual is formed with one out of two endings: -t or -u (the latter displaces final vowels; the dual of alda "tree" is therefore aldu rather than aldau). One's first choice seems to be -t, but if the word this ending is to be added to already contains a t or a d, the alternative ending -u is preferred instead (for reasons of euphony – if you like, to avoid "crowding" the word with t's or similar sounds!) However, there seems to be a number of old, "fossilized" dual forms that end in -u even though there is no d or t in the word, such as veru "married pair" and peu "pair of lips". The latter example may suggest that all body-parts occurring in pairs are denoted by dual forms in -u rather than -t, regardless of the shape of the word (though the ending -t is evidently preferred if other endings intrude before the dual ending itself; more on this later).
Quite a few Quenya words subtly change when endings are appended to them, e.g. talan "floor" turning into talam- in the plural form talami. We would then call talam- the stem form of talan. Similarly, the final vowels -o and -ë sometimes appear as -u- and -i-, respectively, if some ending is added; thus lómë "night" has the stem lómi-. In many cases, the stem-form echoes the older shape of words (sounds or combinations that could not survive at the end of a word being preserved where not final), though the stem-form may also represent a contraction.

VOCABULARY

atta "two"
hen (hend-) "eye"
ranco "arm"
ando "gate"
cirya "ship"
aiwë "bird"
talan (talam-) "floor"
nér (ner-) "man" (adult male of any sentient race – Elvish, mortal or otherwise)
nís (niss-) "woman" (similarly: adult female of any sentient race)
sar (sard-) "stone" (a small stone – not "stone" as a substance or material) 
alda "tree"
oron (oront-) "mountain"

EXERCISES

1. Translate into English:

A. Hendu
B. Atta hendi (and answer: what is the difference between this and hendu above?)
C. Aldu
D. Atta aldar (and answer again: what is the difference between this and Aldu above?)
E. Minë nér ar minë nís.
F. I sardi.
G. Talami.
H. Oronti.

2. Translate into Quenya:

I. Two ships (just any two ships that happen to be seen together)
J. Two ships (that happen to be sister ships)
K. Arms (the two arms of one person)
L. Two mountains (within the same range; Twin Peaks, if you like – use a dual form)
M. Double gate (use a dual form)
N. Two birds (that have formed a pair)
O. Two birds (just any two birds)
P. Men and women.

LESSON FOUR
The Adjective. The Copula. Adjectival agreement in number.  

The vocabulary of any language can be separated into various classes of words – various parts of speech. Tolkien's languages were designed to be "definitely of a European kind in style and structure" (Letters:175), so the parts of speech they contain are not very exotic, but ought to be quite familiar to any schoolchild in Europe or America. We have already mentioned the nouns, which by a somewhat simplified definition are words denoting things. Now we will move on to the adjectives.
	Adjectives are words that have assumed the special function of description. If you want to say that someone or something possesses a certain quality, you can often find an adjective that will do the job. In a sentence like the house is red, the word "red" is an adjective. It describes the house. There are adjectives for all sorts of qualities, quite useful if you want to say that someone or something is big, small, holy, blue, silly, rotten, beautiful, thin, nauseous, tall, wonderful, obnoxious or whatever the occasion demands.
One often distinguishes two different ways of using an adjective:
1. You can team it up with a noun which it then describes, resulting in phrases like tall men or (a/the) red book. Such phrases can then be inserted into a full sentence, like tall men scare me or the red book is mine, where the words tall, red simply provide extra information about their companion nouns. This is called using the adjective attributively. The quality in question is presented as an "attribute" of the noun, or is "attributed" to it (tall men – OK, then we know precisely what kind of men we are talking about here, the tall ones, their tallness being their "attribute").
2. But you may also construct sentences where the whole point is that someone or something possesses a specific quality. You don't just "presuppose" the tallness as when you speak of tall men – you want to say that the men are tall, that's the very piece of information you want to convey. This is called using an adjective predicatively: You choose a party you want to say something about, like the men in this case, and then add an adjective to tell what quality this party possesses. The adjective is then called the predicate of this sentence.
As the attentive reader already suspects from the example above, there is one more complication: You don't just say the men tall, but the men are tall. Actually sentences like the men tall would be quite OK in a great number of languages (and Quenya may even be one of them), but in English you have to slip in a word like are or is before the adjective when you use it as a predicate: The book is red. The men are tall. This "is/are" doesn't really add a whole lot of meaning here (there is a reason why so many languages manage without any corresponding word!), but it is used to "couple" the adjective with the words that tell us what we are really talking about here – like the book and the men in our example. Hence "is/are" is called a copula. In sentences like gold is beautiful, I am smart or stones are hard, it can be perceived the prime function of the copula (here variously manifesting as is, am and are) is simply to connect the following adjectives beautiful, smart, hard with the thing(s) or person we are talking about: gold, I, stones. The copula is an integral part of the predicate of the sentence. This is one of the most important constructions speakers or English have at their disposal when they want to say that X possesses the quality Y.
Well, let's get down to Quenya here. When compared to the plethora of shapes that a noun can have, Quenya adjectives are quite restricted in form. The vast majority of Quenya adjectives end in one of two vowels -a or -ë. The latter ending is the less common and typically occurs in colour-adjectives: Ninquë "white", morë "black", carnë "red", varnë "brown" etc. When an adjective does not end in -a or -ë, it virtually always ends in -in, e.g. firin "dead", hwarin "crooked", melin "dear" or latin "open, free, cleared (of land)". The latter adjective is actually listed as latin(a) in Tolkien's writings (LR:368), evidently suggesting that latin is shortened from a longer form latina, both variants occurring in the language. (Perhaps all the adjectives in -in are to be considered shortened forms of full forms in -ina.) Adjectives that do not end in either -a, -ë or -in are extremely rare; there is at least teren "slender" – but even this adjective also has a longer form in -ë (terenë).
Adjectives in -a are by far the most common type. The final vowel -a may appear by itself, as in lára "flat", but it is often part of a longer adjectival ending like -wa, -na (variant -da), -ima or -ya. Examples: helwa "(pale) blue", harna "wounded", melda "beloved, dear", melima "loveable", vanya "beautiful". The word Quenya itself is in its origin a ya-adjective meaning "Elvish, Quendian", though Tolkien decided that it came to be used only as a name of the High-elven language (Letters:176, WJ:360-361, 374).
In Quenya as in English, an adjective can be directly combined with a noun, describing it. We have many attested examples of adjectives being used attributively like this; they include the phrases lintë yuldar "swift draughts" (Namárië), luini tellumar "blue vaults" (prose-style Namárië), fána cirya "a white ship" (Markirya), quantë tengwi "full signs" (a term used by early Elvish linguists; we needn't discuss its precise meaning here; see VT39:5). In these examples, the word order is the same as in English: adjective + noun. This is apparently the normal, preferred order. In Quenya, it is however also permissible to let the adjective follow the noun. For instance, Markirya has anar púrëa for "a bleared sun", literally "(a) sun bleared", and in LR:47 we have mallë téra, literally "road straight", for "a straight road" (cf. LR:43). Perhaps this word order is used if you want to emphasize the adjective: the context in LR:47 indicates that this is a straight road as opposed to a bent one. However, letting the adjective follow the noun may be the normal word order in the case of an adjectival "title" that is used in conjunction with a proper name: In UT:305 cf. 317 we have Elendil Voronda for "Elendil the Faithful" (well, the form found in UT:305 is actually Elendil Vorondo, because the phrase is inflected; we will return to the ending -o here seen in a later lesson). Presumably you could also use the more normal word-order and speak of voronda Elendil, but that – I guess – would simply be a more casual reference to "faithful Elendil", not meaning "Elendil the Faithful" with the adjective used as a regular title. It may be noted that Quenya, unlike English, does not insert the article before an adjective used as a title (not **Elendil i Voronda, at least not necessarily). 
What, then, about using adjectives as predicates, like "red" is the predicate of the sentence "the book is red"? (Contrast the attributive use of the adjective in a phrase like "the red book".) The adjective vanwa "lost" is used predicatively in Namárië: Vanwa ná...Valimar "lost is...Valimar" (a place in the Blessed Realm that Galadriel thought she would never see again). This sentence tells us that the Quenya copula "is" has the form ná. Plural "are" seems to be nar, attested in an early version of Namárië recorded by Tolkien on tape (see Jim Allan's An Introduction to Elvish, p. 5). It is generally assumed that these copulas would be used as in English, for instance like this:

I parma ná carnë. "The book is red."
Ulundo ná úmëa. "A monster is evil."
I neri nar hallë. "The men are tall."

In this lesson as originally published in December 2000, I slipped in a warning at this point:

I should add, though, that due to the extreme scarcity of examples we can't be certain what the preferred word order really is. From the example vanwa ná...Valimar "lost is...Valimar" in Namárië one could argue that ná should follow the adjective, so that "the book is red" should rather be i parma carnë ná, "the book red is". It would be interesting to know if ná "is" would still follow vanwa "lost" if we relocated Valimar to the beginning of the sentence; should "Valimar is lost" be Valimar ná vanwa, English-style, or perhaps Valimar vanwa ná? In the examples above and the exercises below I have organized the sentences using the "English" word order, but Tolkien may have had something more exotic up his sleeve. There is no way of telling before more material is published.

I revise this lesson in November 2001, and this summer a few more examples involving the word ná "is" finally became available. There does seem to be a tendency to place ná at the end of the sentence, as in the example lá caritas...alasaila ná (literally, "not to do it unwise is" – VT42:34). Yet the same article that provides this example also cites the formula "A ná calima lá B" (literally, "A is bright beyond B") as the Quenya way of expressing "A is brighter than B" (VT42:32). Notice that this formula employs an English-style word-order, with ná "is" preceding rather than following calima "bright". So it seems that sentences like i parma ná carnë, word by word corresponding to English "the book is red", may be possible after all. Therefore I have not revised any of the examples or exercises of this course, all of which employ the "English" word order as far as the copula ná is concerned. It seems, however, that the order i parma carnë ná "the book red is" must be considered a perfectly valid alternative, and Tolkien may even have intended this to be the more common word order. We must await still more examples.
	[New update, January 2002: This month some new examples were indeed published. It seems that the exact word order is simply a matter of taste. The example elyë na manna "thou art blessed" from VT43:26 has an English-style word order, and here the copula "is/art" appears in the short form na rather than ná. I have however maintained ná in the exercises of this course, mainly for the sake of clarity: the word na has several other, quite distinct meanings. But perhaps the short form na- is consistently preferred when some ending is to be added; cf. the plural form nar "are". Of course, the unattested form nár could be equally valid for all I know.]
In Fíriel's Song (a pre-LotR text), the word for "is" appears as ye rather than ná or na, as in írima ye Númenor "lovely is Númenor" (LR:72). However, both the Qenya Lexicon (QL:64) and the Etymologies (LR:374) point to ná instead, and in Namárië we have this word attested in an actual text. Etym and the QL are earlier than Fíriel's Song, but Namárië is later, so would seem that ye was just a passing experiment in Tolkien's evolution of Quenya. In Fíriel's Song we also see an ending for "is", -ië, appended to adjectives and displacing their final vowel: hence in this song we have márië for "(it) is good", derived from the adjective mára "good". This ending -ië is transparently related to the independent word ye. I don't think the system of using the ending -ië for "is" was still valid in LotR-style Quenya, and I wouldn't recommend it to writers. The ending -ië has other meanings in later Quenya.
Another system may well be valid, though: using no copula at all. You simply juxtapose the noun and the adjective, the word "is/are" being understood: Ilu vanya "the World [is] fair" (Fíriel's Song), maller raicar "roads [are] bent" (LR:47). The formula "A is bright beyond B" = "A is brighter than B" referred to above is actually cited as "A (ná) calima lá B" in VT42:32. As suggested by the parentheses, ná could be omitted. The example malle téra "a straight road" mentioned above could also be interpreted "a road [is] straight", if the context allowed it. The final version of Tolkien's Quenya translation of the Hail Mary, published in January 2002, leaves out several copulas: Aistana elyë, ar aistana i yávë mónalyo = "blessed [art] thou, and blessed [is] the fruit of thy womb".
We must assume that the copula ná, nar is not limited to combining nouns and adjectives, but can also be used to equate nouns: Parmar nar engwi "books are things", Fëanáro ná Noldo "Fëanor is a Noldo". (Notice, by the way, that the proper Quenya form of Fëanor's name is Fëanáro; "Fëanor" is a Quenya-Sindarin hybrid form used in Middle-earth after his death.) Again it may be permissible to leave out the copula and retain the same meaning: Parmar engwi, Fëanáro Noldo.

Adjectival agreement in number: Quenya adjectives must agree in number with the noun they describe. That is, if the noun is plural, the adjective must be, too; if the adjective describes several nouns it must also be plural, even if each of the nouns is singular. English makes no such distinction – its adjectives do not change – but it is not surprising that Tolkien built adjectival agreement in number into Quenya, since this was to be a highly inflected language.
 We have no examples of what happens if an adjective is to agree with a noun in the dual form. It is generally assumed, though, that there are no special dual forms of adjectives, but only one plural (or should we say "non-singular") form. The Markirya poem indicates that there is no special form of adjectives to go with the somewhat obscure "partitive plural" form in -li; an adjective describing a noun in -li simply appears in the normal plural form. This may support the theory that adjectives don't have a special dual form, either.
How, then, is the plural form of adjectives constructed? From the examples now available, it can be seen that Tolkien experimented with various systems over the years. In early sources, adjectives in -a form their plural form by adding the ending -r, just like nouns in -a do. For instance, one very early "map" of Tolkien's imaginary world (actually depicted as a symbolic ship) includes a reference to I Nori Landar. This evidently means "The Wide Lands" (LT1:84-85; the adjective landa "wide" occurs in the Etymologies, entry LAD. Christopher Tolkien in LT1:85 suggests the translation "The Great Lands".) Here the plural noun nori "lands" is described by the adjective landa "wide" – another example of an attributive adjective following the noun, by the way – and since the noun is plural, the adjective takes the plural ending -r to agree with it. This way of forming plural adjectives was still valid as late as 1937 or slightly earlier; we have already quoted the example maller raicar "roads [are] bent" from LR:47, where the adjective raica "crooked, bent, wrong" (listed by itself in LR:383) is plural to agree with maller.
However, this system cannot be recommended to writers; the evidence is that in LotR-style Quenya, it had been abandoned. Tolkien in a way reached back into the past and revived a system he had used in what may be the very first "Qenya" poem he ever wrote, Narqelion of 1915-16. In this poem, adjectives in -a form their plurals by means of the ending -i. For instance, the phrase sangar úmëai occurring in this poem apparently means "throngs large" = large throngs; the adjective úmëa "large" is listed in the early Qenya Lexicon (QL:97 – but in later Quenya, the word úmëa means "evil" instead). Later, Tolkien however introduced one more complication: Adjectives in -a had plurals in -ai in archaic Quenya only. In Exilic Quenya, Quenya as spoken by the Noldor after they had returned to Middle-earth, -ai at the end of words of more than one syllable had been reduced to -ë. (Cf. WJ:407 regarding the ending -vë representing "archaic Q -vai".) So while the plural form of, say, quanta "full" was apparently quantai at the older stages of the language, it later became quantë. This form we have already met in one of the examples quoted above: quantë tengwi, "full signs", where quanta appears in the plural form to agree with tengwi "signs" (VT39:5).
There is one special case to be considered: adjectives in -ëa, such as laurëa "golden". In archaic Quenya, we must assume that the plural form was simply laurëai. But when -ai later became -e, what would be ?laurëe did not prove to be a durable form. To avoid the cumbersome combination of two concomitant e's, the first of them was changed to i. Hence the plural form of laurëa in Exilic Quenya appears as laurië, as in the first line of Namárië: Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen... "Ah! golden fall the leaves in the wind..." – the adjective being plural to agree with the noun it describes, lassi "leaves".
As for adjectives in -ë, they seem to behave like most nouns of the same shape: -ë becomes -i in the plural. We don't have very many examples, but the phrase luini tellumar "blue vaults" in the prose version of Namárië seems to incorporate the plural form of an adjective luinë "blue" (actually not attested in this form, but as observed above, there are many colour-adjectives in -ë). Moreover, in the Etymologies Tolkien noted that the an adjective maitë "handy, skilled" has the plural form maisi (LR:371). Evidently the plural form was especially mentioned primarily to illustrate another point: that adjectives in -itë have plural forms in -isi, the consonant t turning into s before i. This particular idea seems to have been dropped later, though: In a much later, post-LotR source, Tolkien wrote hloníti tengwi, not ?hlonísi tengwi, for "phonetic signs" (WJ:395). So perhaps the plural form of maitë could simply be ?maiti as well.
As for the plural form of adjectives ending in a consonant, such as firin "dead", we don't seem to have any examples to guide us. It has traditionally been assumed that they form their plurals in -i, just like nouns of this shape do, and this still seems reasonably plausible. So, say, "dead men" could be firini neri. If any argument can be raised against this assumption, it is that adjectives in -in actually seem to be shortened forms of longer adjectives in -ina. As pointed out above, Tolkien quoted the adjective meaning "open, free, cleared (of land)" as latin(a), indicating double forms latin and latina. The plural form of latina should obviously be latinë, for older latinai. But what about latin? If this is merely a shortened form of latina, perhaps the plural form would still be latinë rather than latini? We cannot know for certain; in the exercises below I have followed the traditional assumption, using plurals in -i. Adjectives ending in a consonant are quite rare anyway, so this uncertainty does not greatly jeopardize the quality of our own Quenya texts.
In what positions do adjectives agree in number? Attested examples like those already quoted, like luini tellumar "blue domes", would seem to indicate that an attributive adjective in front of the noun does show agreement. So does an attributive adjective following the noun; the Markirya poem has i fairi nécë for "the pale phantoms", or literally "the phantoms pale" (néca pl. nécë "vague, faint, dim to see", MC:223). An adjective separated from the noun it describes also agrees in number, hence laurëa "golden" appears in plural form laurië in the first line of Namárië, laurië lantar lassi "golden fall leaves" (the prose Namárië has lassi lantar laurië "leaves fall golden"). As for predicative adjectives, we lack late examples. In German, adjectives do agree in number when they are used attributively, but adjectives used predicatively do not. Yet the old example maller raicar "roads [are] bent" in LR:47 would seem to indicate that in Quenya, adjectives agree in number also when they are used predicatively. In later Quenya we should presumably read maller (nar) raicë, since Tolkien changed the rules for how the plural form of adjectives is constructed.
So in short, we can conclude that adjectives agree in number with the nouns they describe "everywhere" – whether they appear before, after or separated from the noun, whether they are used attributively or predicatively. There are a few examples that don't quite fit in, though. Appendix E of the essay Quendi and Eldar of ca. 1960 contains several "well-behaved" examples of plural adjectives that are used attributively with the plural noun tengwi "signs", making up various phrases used by early Elvish linguists when they tried to analyze the structure of their tongue (as I said above, we needn't concern ourselves with the precise meaning of these terms here). Besides hloníti tengwi "phonetic signs" and quantë tengwi "full signs" already quoted (WJ:395, VT39:5), we have racinë tengwi "stripped signs" and penyë tengwi "lacking signs" (VT39:6; the singular of the latter, penya tengwë "a lacking sign", is attested: VT39:19). In these phrases the adjectives hlonítë "phonetic", quanta "full", racina "stripped, deprived" and penya "lacking, inadequate" all assume their plural forms, beautifully agreeing with tengwi "signs, elements, sounds". So far, so good. But then we turn to the draft material for Appendix E of Quendi and Eldar. Here Tolkien did not let the adjectives agree in number, and we have phrases like lehta tengwi "free/released elements", sarda tengwi "hard sounds" and tapta tengwi "impeded elements" (VT39:17). We would of course expect lehtë tengwi, sardë tengwi, taptë tengwi, but these are not found. Unless we are to assume that there are several classes of adjectives, some that agree in number and others that don't – and I think this is rather far-fetched – it seems that Tolkien in the draft material used a system whereby an attributive adjective immediately in front of its noun does not agree in number. But when he actually wrote the Appendix, he would seem to have introduced agreement in this position as well, and so we have for instance quantë tengwi rather than ?quanta tengwi for "full signs". Elvish grammar could change at lightening speed whenever Tolkien was in his "revision" mood, so this would not be surprising.
The last version of the Markirya poem, which Christopher Tolkien thinks was written at some point in the last decade of his father's life (1963-73), is also relevant here. In the phrase "fallen towers", Tolkien first wrote the adjective atalantëa "ruinous, downfallen" in its plural form atalantië, just like we would expect. Then, according to Christopher Tolkien, he mysteriously changed atalantië to the singular (or rather uninflected) form atalantëa, though the adjacent noun "towers" was left in the plural (MC:222). Again Tolkien seems to be experimenting with a system whereby attributive adjectives immediately in front of the noun they describe do not agree in number, but appear in their uninflected form. A similar system appears in Tolkien's writings on Westron, the "Common Speech" of Middle-earth (a language he only sketched). Perhaps he considered introducing such a system in Quenya as well, and we see this idea flickering on and off, so to speak, in his writings?
However, the system I would recommend to writers is to let adjectives agree in number also in this position. In Namárië in LotR we have the phrase lintë yuldar "swift draughts", and in the interlinear translation in RGEO:66 Tolkien explicitly noted that lintë is a "pl." adjective. We must assume, then, that lintë represents older lintai, the plural form of an adjective linta. If an attributive adjective immediately in front of the noun it describes did not agree in number, "swift draughts" should have been ?linta yuldar instead. The source where Tolkien explicitly identified lintë as a plural form was published during his own lifetime, and moreover as late as in 1968, possibly postdating even the last version of Markirya. So his final decision seems to have been that adjectives do agree in number with their nouns also when the adjective appears immediately in front of the noun. One suspects that he spent many sleepless nights carefully considering the various pros and cons in this important question.

NOTE ON ADJECTIVES USED AS NOUNS: As described above, Tolkien at one stage had adjectives in -a form their plurals in -ar, but later he replaced this with -ë (for older -ai). However, adjectives in -a may still have plural forms in -ar if they are used as nouns, because in such a case they are naturally inflected as nouns. Tolkien noted that instead of saying penyë tengwi "lacking signs" the Elves might simply refer to the penyar or "lacking ones" – "using [the adjective] penya as a technical noun" (VT39:19). A more well-known example is provided by the adjective vanya "fair, beautiful"; this would normally have the plural form vanyë (e.g. vanyë nissi "beautiful women"). However, the adjective vanya can also be used as a noun, "a Vanya" or "Fair One", which was the word used of a member of the First Clan of the Eldar. Then the whole clan is of course called the Vanyar, as in the Silmarillion chapter 3: "The Vanyar were [Ingwë's] people; they are the Fair Elves." Using another (but related) adjective "beautiful", namely vanima, Treebeard employed another noun-style plural when he greeted Celeborn and Galadriel as a vanimar "o beautiful ones" (the translation given in Letters:308).
Adjectives in -ë would however have their usual plural form in -i even if they are used as nouns, since most nouns in -ë also form their plurals in -i.

Summary of Lesson Four: Adjectives are words used to describe various qualities, such as "tall" or "beautiful". They can be combined with nouns, making up phrases like "(a/the) red book" or "tall men", where the adjectives "red" and "tall" describe the nouns "book" and "men" directly; this is called using an adjective attributively. But adjectives can also be used in sentences like "the book is red" or "the men are tall", where the whole point of the sentence is to ascribe a certain quality to a noun; here the adjective is used as a predicate. In such cases English slips in a copula, like "is" or "are" in these examples, to clarify the relationship between the noun and the adjective. Many languages do without this extra device (one would just say what corresponds to "the book red"), and this seems to be permissible in Quenya as well, but the explicit copula ná "is"/nar "are" also occurs in the material. – Most Quenya adjectives end in the vowel -a, some also in -ë; the only ones that end in a consonant are a few that nearly always have the ending -in (apparently shortened from -ina). Quenya adjectives agree in number; if an adjective describes a plural noun or more than one noun, the adjective must be plural as well. Adjectives in -a have plural forms in -ë (for older -ai); notice that if the adjective ends in -ëa it forms its plural in -ië (to avoid -ëe). Adjectives in -ë have plural forms in -i; for the few adjectives in -in we lack examples, but it is normally assumed that they would add -i in the plural.

VOCABULARY
Except for the two first items, all of these are adjectives. Don't worry about the other words occurring in the exercises below; those you have already memorized carefully, following my instructions in Lesson Two. Right?

neldë "three"
ná "is" (nar "are")
vanya "beautiful, fair"
alta "great" (= big; the word is used of physical size only)
calima "bright"
taura "mighty"
saila "wise" (we will use this form found in late material; a pre-LotR source has saira instead)
úmëa "evil"
carnë "red" (we suspect that Tolkien the Devout Catholic was thinking about cardinals with their red attires; the Italian word carne = "[red] meat" may also be relevant here...) 
ninquë "white"
morë "black" (cf. the first element of Sindarin Mordor = Black Land)
firin "dead"

EXERCISES

1. Translate into English:

A. Morë rocco.
B. Calimë hendu.
C. Neldë firini neri.
D. Vanyë aiwi.
E. Tári ná taura nís.
F. I oronti nar altë.
G. Aran taura (two possible translations!)
H. I nér ar i nís nar sailë. 

2. Translate into Quenya:

I. The white gate.
J. A great ship.
K. The floor is red.
L. One black stone and three white stones.
M. Wise kings are mighty men.
N. The mighty man and the beautiful woman are evil.
O. Elves are beautiful.
P. The Elves are a beautiful people.

LESSON FIVE
The Verb: Present tense and agreement in number. Subject/object. The superlative form of adjectives.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the previous lesson, the vocabulary of any language can be separated into various classes of words, or "parts of speech". So far we have explicitly discussed the nouns, which denote things, and adjectives, which are words used to describe nouns (linguists would find these definitions rather simplistic, but they will do for our purpose). Actually we have already touched on a three other parts of speech as well, without discussing them in depth. As part of Lesson Two you hopefully memorized the word nu "under", which is a preposition; prepositions are small words or "particles" like under, on, of, to, in, about etc., often used to provide information about spatial relationships (e.g. "under the tree" = nu i alda), though frequently they are used in more abstract contexts. With the word ar "and" we have also included the most typical representative of the conjunctions, words used to connect (or indeed "conjoin") other words, phrases or sentences, e.g. Anar ar Isil = "the sun and the moon". Still, no thorough discussion of prepositions or conjunctions as such seems necessary: in Quenya they seem to behave pretty much like their English equivalents, so for the most part you simply have to learn the corresponding Quenya words.
	Another part of speech that we have already touched on is far more sophisticated and intriguing: the verb. We encountered one verb in the previous lesson: ná "is", with its plural form nar "are". As verbs go, this one is not very exciting; it is used simply to coordinate a noun with some sort of predicate that tells us what the noun "is": Aran ná taura, "a king is mighty", tasar ná alda "a willow is a tree". As I said in the previous lesson, the copula ná doesn't really provide much extra information here, except clarifying the relationship between the various elements of the sentence. Most other verbs (very nearly all other verbs, actually) are however full of meaning. They don't just tell us what someone or something "is", but what someone or something does. The Verb brings action into the language.
In a sentence like "the Elf dances" it is easy to identify "dances" as the action-word, telling us what is going on here. And sure enough, "dances" is a form of the English verb to dance. This verb may appear in other forms as well; instead of "dances" we might say "danced", which moves the action into the past: "The Elf danced." This illustrates an important feature of verbs in European languages: the form of the verb gives information about when the action denoted takes place, in the present or in the past. Some languages also have special future forms. Tolkien built all of these features into Quenya.
The different "time-forms" of the verb are called various tenses; we speak of present tense, past tense and future tense. We will only deal with the present tense in this lesson, and return to the others later. (The trinity of present, past and future does not represent a full list of all the tenses there are. We will discuss a total of five different tenses in this course, and I would be very surprised if unpublished material does not describe even more tenses than the ones we know at present.)
	Here I should slip in a warning: We don't have much explicit information about the Quenya verb. In the so-called Plotz Letter, that Tolkien wrote to Dick Plotz at some point in the mid-sixties, he set out the declension of the noun. Apparently similar information about the verb was to follow; it never did. This is of course most unfortunate. Not that Tolkien took this information to his grave; we know that he did write about these matters, but the relevant writings have not been published. For the time being, we must for the most part try to figure out the grammatical rules by ourselves if we would like our Quenya poems to include verbs. Regarding the present tense, some scraps of information luckily appeared in Vinyar Tengwar #41, July 2000. Combining this info with some linguistic deduction, we can probably make out the main features of the system Tolkien had in mind.
As they appear in various sources, Quenya verbs seem to fall into two main categories (though there are some verbs in our corpus that don't readily fit into either, even if we exclude the early "Qenya" material where some really weird things are going on in the verbal system). The first and largest category is what can be termed A-stems, for they all end in -a. Another term for the same is derived verbs, for these verbs never represent a naked primitive "root-word", but are derived by adding endings to this root. The most frequent of these endings are -ya and -ta; much less frequently we see -na or just -a. Examples:

calya- "to illuminate" (root KAL)
tulta- "to send for, to fetch, to summon" (root TUL)
harna- "to wound" (root SKAR; primitive initial sk- became h- in Quenya)
mapa- "to grasp, to seize" (root MAP)

(Convention has it that when you list verbal stems as such, you add a hyphen at the end; Tolkien usually does so in his writings. The "stem" of a verb is a basic form that we start from when deriving other forms, such as different tenses.)
	If these A-stems can be termed "derived verbs", the other category consists of the "non-derived" or primary verbs. These are verbs that display no such ending as -ya, -ta, -na or -a. The verbal stems in question can be termed "primary" or "basic" since they essentially represent a primitive root with no additions. For instance, the verb mat- "eat" comes directly from the root MAT- of similar meaning. Tac- "fasten" represents the root TAK- "fix, make fast". Tul- "come" can be identified with the root TUL- "come, approach, move towards" (contrast the derived verb tulta- "send for, summon, fetch" from the same root, derived by means of the ending -ta). In the case of the roots MEL- "love" and SIR- "flow", Tolkien didn't even bother to repeat the glosses for the Quenya verbs mel- and sir- (see LR:372, 385).
When discussing Quenya verbs, we sometimes need to refer to the stem-vowel. This is the vowel of the root-word underlying the verb as it appears in Quenya. In the case of primary verbs like mel- "love", it is of course easy to identify the stem-vowel, since e is the only vowel there is (and sure enough, this is also the vowel of the underlying root MEL-). In the case of derived verbs like pusta- "stop" or ora- "impel", the vowels of the added ending (here -ta and -a) do not count as stem-vowels. Pusta-, for instance, is derived from a root PUS, and its stem-vowel is therefore u, not a. In the vast majority of cases, the stem-vowel is simply the first vowel of the verb (but not necessarily so, there may be some prefixed element).
With this we have the necessary terms in place and can finally start discussing the formation of the present tense. To start with the primary verbs, what seems to be the present tense of the verb mel- "love" is attested in LR:61, Elendil telling his son Herendil: Yonya inyë tye-méla, "I too, my son, I love thee". Here we have the verb describing a present or on-going (in this case quite permanent) action. Another example of a present-tense primary verb can apparently be found in the LotR itself, in the famous greeting elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo, "a star shines [or, is shining] upon the hour of our meeting". Síla would seem to be the present tense of a verb sil- "shine (with white or silver light)", listed in the Silmarillion Appendix. Méla and síla show the same relationship to the simple verbal stems mel- and sil-: the present-tense forms are derived by lengthening the stem-vowel (this is denoted by supplying an accent, of course) and adding the ending -a. This conclusion is supported by an example from VT41:13: The verb quet- "speak, say" there appears in the present tense quéta "is saying".
	Though forms like méla and síla may occasionally be translated using the simple present tense in English, hence "love(s)" and "shines", is seems that the Quenya present tense properly denotes a continuous or ongoing action that is best translated using the English "is ...-ing" construction, as in the example quéta just quoted: this is "is saying" rather than just "says". The conclusion that the Quenya present tense properly denotes continuous actions is also supported by other evidence: The Quenya present tense of the primary verb mat- "eat" is nowhere attested in published material. However, Tolkien stated that mâtâ was "the stem of the continuous form", which could be translated "is eating" (VT39:9; â here denotes long a, in Quenya spelt á). Tolkien actually put an asterisk in front of mâtâ to mark it as an "unattested" form, so this should evidently be taken as primitive Elvish rather than Quenya. How Quenya evolved from the primitive language can be inferred from many other examples, so we know that mâtâ would come out as máta. This form would seem to fall into the same pattern as méla, síla and quéta: lengthened stem-vowel and ending -a (and working backwards, we can deduce that Tolkien meant méla, síla, quéta to be descended from primitive Elvish mêlâ, sîlâ, kwêtâ). Presumably these are all "continuous" forms; just like primitive mâtâ "is eating" they apparently emphasize the ongoing nature of the action: Síla may literally be "is shining" rather than just "shines". Perhaps the lengthening of the stem-vowel somehow symbolizes this ongoing or "drawn-out" action. In the case of méla in the sentence inyë tye-méla, it is more natural to translate "I love you" rather than "I am loving you", but the latter would seem to be the most literal meaning.

Then we must consider the second and larger category of verbs, the A-stems. In their case, the information from VT41 is of particular value. 

It seems that the A-stems form their present tense by somewhat the same rule as the primary verbs, but the rule needs a little "adaptation" to fit the shape of an A-stem verb. Our sole attested example is the verb ora- "urge" or "impel". VT41:13, 18 indicates that its present tense is órëa ("is urging"). As in the case of primary verbs, the stem-vowel has been lengthened and the ending -a has been added. There is one complication, though: since the verbal stem ora- already ended in -a, this vowel is changed to e so as to avoid two a's in sequence: What would be óra-a manifests as órëa. Hence we must conclude that verbs like mapa- "grasp, seize" and lala- "laugh" appear as mápëa, lálëa in the present tense.
Short A-stems like ora- or mapa- are however of a rather unusual shape, since they add only the simple vowel -a to the original root. As discussed above, A-stems where the final -a is only part of a longer derivational ending (most often -ya or -ta) are much more common. We have already quoted examples like calya- "to illuminate" and tulta- "to summon" (roots KAL, TUL). Such "complex" A-stems have a consonant cluster following the vowel of the original root, like ly and lt in these examples. We have no actual example of the present tense of such a verb. If we were to apply the pattern we deduce to exist from the example órëa "is urging", it would land us on forms like ?cályëa "is illuminating" and ?túltëa "is summoning". However, there seems to be a phonological rule in Quenya prohibiting a long vowel immediately in front of a consonant cluster. It would seem that a word like ?túltëa cannot exist (but frankly I'm not quite sure about ?cályëa, since ly/ny/ry sometimes seem to count as unitary palatalized consonants rather than consonant clusters). Lacking actual examples, we can only assume that in such a case the lengthening of the vowel would simply be dropped, so that the present tense of verbs like calya- and tulta- would be calyëa, tultëa (though as I just indicated, ?cályëa may be possible for all I know). This would apply wherever there is a consonant cluster following the vowel of the verbal stem. Further examples are lanta- "fall", harna- "wound" and pusta- "stop", that would all – presumably – form their present-tense forms in -ëa: Lantëa "is falling", harnëa "is wounding", pustëa "is stopping".
We must assume that this system also applies where there is a diphthong in the verbal stem, since like a vowel in front of a consonant cluster, a diphthong cannot be lengthened in any way. The present-tense forms of verbs like faina- "emit light" or auta- "pass" would presumably be fainëa, autëa.
We now know enough to start building simple sentences: 
¤ Isil síla "the Moon is shining" (present tense síla formed from the primary verb sil- "shine")
¤ I Elda lálëa "the Elf is laughing" (present tense formed from the short A-stem lala- "laugh")
¤ Lassë lantëa "a leaf is falling" (present tense formed from the complex A-stem lanta- "fall"; we cannot have *lántëa paralleling lálëa because a long vowel cannot occur in front of a consonant cluster)

NOTE (added September 2002): Some of my deductions above have been criticized by VT editor Carl F. Hostetter. No one disputes the fact that primary verbs form their present or "continuous" tense by lengthening the stem-vowel and adding -a, but the notion that A-stems have present-tense forms in -ëa has proved controversial. Of course, this is based on the one example órëa (from ora- "impel"), and it was Hostetter himself who published this form and suggested that this is an example of the present/continuous tense.  However, it may be that the idea of present-tense forms in -ëa represents merely a short-lived fluctuation in Tolkien's evolving conceptions. I have not changed any of the exercises below, but until we know more about Tolkien's precise intentions, writers may opt to avoid the present-tense forms in -ëa in their own compositions. As we will discuss later, there is a way to work around this particular uncertainty.

Some useful terms can be included here. Once you include a verb in the sentence, denoting some kind of action, you must normally devote another part of the sentence to telling who is doing this action. The party that does whatever the verb tells us is being done, constitutes the subject of the sentence. In a sentence like Isil síla "the Moon is shining", it is thus Isil "the Moon" that is the subject, since it is the Moon that does the shining the verb síla tells us about. In a sentence like i Elda máta "the Elf is eating", i Elda "the Elf" is the subject, since the Elf does the eating.
This very sentence, i Elda máta, has possibilities. We can add one more element, like the noun massa "bread", and get i Elda máta massa "the Elf is eating bread". Now what is the function of this added word? It is the "target" of the verbal action, in this case what is eaten. The target of the verbal action is called the object, the passive counterpart of the active subject: The subject does something, but the object is what the subject does something to. The subject "subjects" the object to some kind of action. This "action" may of course be much less dramatic than "subject eats object" as in the example above. For instance, it can be as subtle as in the sentence "the subject sees the object" (fill in with other sense-verbs if you like), where the "action" of the subject does not physically affect the object in any way. That is not the point here. The basic idea of the subject-object dichotomy is simply that the subject does something to the object, though "does something to" must sometimes be understood in a wider sense.
NOTE: Notice, though, that in sentences with the copula ná/nar "is/are", for instance i alda ná tasar "the tree is a willow", tasar "a willow" does not count as the object of i alda "the tree". I alda is the subject all right, since this is the element that "does" what little action there is in this sentence: "the tree is..." But tasar "a willow" is not the object, for in this sentence "the tree" does not do anything to "a willow" – and the hallmark of the object is that something is done to it. Rather than doing anything do a willow, the tree is a willow, and that is another thing altogether: Tasar is here the predicate of i alda, as we discussed in the previous lesson. But if we substitute máta "is eating" for ná "is", we are right back to a subject-verb-object construction: I alda máta tasar, "the tree is eating a willow". If you are unduly troubled by the fact that this sounds somewhat nonsensical, rest assured that the grammar is fine.

In the case of some verbs, there can be no object. In the case of (say) lanta- "to fall", you can have a subject and say i Elda lantëa "the Elf is falling". Here the subject doesn't do anything to an object; it is just the subject itself that is doing something. With a verb like mat- "eat", it is kind of optional if you want to fill out the sentence with an object or not: I Elda máta (massa), "the Elf is eating (bread)"; this works as a complete sentence even without the object. But some verbs by their meaning demand an object, and the sentence would be felt to be incomplete without it. If we say i Elda mápëa "the Elf is seizing", this only raises the question "the Elf is seizing what?" and we must come up with an object to make the sentence complete.

In the Plotz letter, Tolkien indicated that in one variant of Quenya, so-called Book Quenya, nouns would have a special form if they function as objects. Singular nouns ending in a vowel would have this vowel lengthened (for instance, cirya "ship" would become ciryá if it appears as the object of a sentence), and nouns that normally employ the plural ending -r would switch to -i (so "ships", as object, would be ciryai instead of ciryar). This special "object" form, in linguistic terms the accusative case, was supposedly used in (archaic?) written Quenya. However, this accusative does not appear in any actual texts, such as Namárië or even the last version of the Markirya poem, which must be almost contemporaneous with the Plotz letter. Namárië, sung by Galadriel, is perhaps supposed to reflect the usage of spoken Third Age Quenya. Whatever the case, I do not use the distinct accusative in the exercises I have made for this course (or in my own Quenya compositions). It seems clear that the use of the accusative was far from universal, within or without the fictional context. So I would say cirya(r) for "ship(s)" even if the word appears as the object of a sentence.
 
With the terms subject and object in place, we can discuss another feature of the Quenya verb. Just like adjectives agree in number with the nouns they describe, verbs agree in number with their subjects. Let us have a closer look at the first line of Namárië, laurië lantar lassi "like gold fall the leaves", or literally "golden fall [the] leaves". Here the adjective laurëa "golden" appears in plural form laurië to agree in number with the plural noun lassi "leaves", as we discussed in the previous lesson. But the verb lanta- "to fall" must also agree with its plural subject lassi. The verb lanta therefore takes the ending -r. (The verb itself appears in the so-called aorist tense, to be discussed later; you can think of aorist lantar vs. present tense lantëar as corresponding to English "fall" vs. "are falling", respectively. Some would consider a form like lantëar speculative, but lantar is directly attested in Tolkien's writings.) The plural ending -r we have already met in the case of nouns, as in Eldar "Elves", but nouns may also have plurals in -i, depending on their shape. In the case of verbs, the plural ending -r seems to be universal, no matter what the verb looks like. The ending -r is not restricted to the present tense of verbs, but is seemingly used in all tenses, wherever a plural subject turns up. 
Essentially we have already met the verbal plural ending in the verb nar "are", the plural of ná "is". (One may ask why ná does not turn into ?nár with the long vowel intact. The latter form may very well turn out to be valid, but nar "are" with a short a is at least less prone to confusion with the noun nár "flame".)
	More than one subject has the same effect on the verb as a (single) plural subject, the verb taking the ending -r in both instances:
	
	I arani mátar "the kings are eating" (sg. i aran máta "the king is eating")

I aran ar i tári mátar "the king and the queen are eating" (if you want the verb mat- "eat" to appear in singular present-tense form máta here, you must get rid of either the king or the queen so that there is just a single subject)

On the other hand, it has no effect on the verb if we have a plural object or multiple objects, e.g. i aran máta massa ar apsa "the king is eating bread and meat" (apsa "cooked food, meat"). The verb agrees in number with the subject only.
	It has generally been assumed that the verb has only one plural form, the ending -r being universal. In other words, the verb would take the ending -r not only where the subject noun appears in the "normal" plural (ending -r or -i), but also where it is dual (ending -u or -t) or appears in the "partitive plural" form (ending -li). However, we have no actual examples from LotR-style Quenya, and in particular I will not rule out the possibility that there may be a special dual form of the verb to go with dual subjects (ending -t as for most nouns, like Aldu sílat rather than Aldu sílar for "the Two Trees are shining"???) The published material allows no certain conclusion in this question, so I will simply avoid dual subjects in the exercises I make for this course.

The last thing we must consider when discussing the verb is the question of word order. Where in the sentence does the verb fit in, really? English sentences generally list the subject, the verb and the object (if there is any object) in that order. The attentive reader will have noticed that most of the Quenya sentences above are organized in the same manner. This seems to be the most typical word order in Quenya prose. Examples of the subject and the verb in that order include lassi lantar "leaves fall" and mornië caita "darkness lies [upon the foaming waves]" – both from the prose version of Namárië. But there are also examples of the verb being placed first, e.g. Fingon's cry before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad: Auta i lómë!, literally "Passes the night", but translated "the night is passing!" in the Silmarillion ch. 20. Indeed both of the above-quoted examples of the order subject-verb from the prose Namárië instead show the order verb-subject in the poetic version in LotR: lantar lassi, caita mornië. In English, fronting the verb is one way of turning a declarative statement into a question, e.g. "Elves are beautiful" vs. "are Elves beautiful?", but this way of forming questions evidently doesn't work in Quenya. (Auta i lómë! "passes the night!" for "the night is passing!" is perhaps an example of dramatic style or affectionate speech; the verbal action is evidently considered more important than the subject that performs it. I suspect that in a less dramatic context, one would rather say i lómë auta.)
Namárië also provides an example of a sentence with both subject, verb and object: hísië untúpa Calaciryo míri, "mist [subject] covers [verb] the jewels of Calacirya [this whole phrase being the object]". Yet word order is again quite flexible, especially in poetry, as further examples from Namárië shows. We have object-subject-verb in the sentence máryat Elentári ortanë, literally "her hands (the) Starqueen raised" (in LotR translated "the Queen of the stars...has uplifted her hands"). The sentence ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë, literally "all paths downlicked (i.e. covered) shadow", has the order object-verb-subject (in LotR, Tolkien used the translation "all paths are drowned deep in shadow"). In the prose version of Namárië, Tolkien interestingly reorganized both of these to subject-verb-object constructions: Elentári ortanë máryat, lumbulë undulávë ilyë tier. This is our main basis for assuming that this is the normal order, preferred where there are no poetic or dramatic considerations to be made. 
In general, one must be careful about putting the object before the subject, for this could in some cases cause confusion as to which word is the object and which is the subject (since the commonest form of Quenya does not maintain a distinct accusative case to mark the object). Such inversions are however quite permissible when the subject is singular and the object is plural or vice versa. Then the verb, agreeing in number with the subject only, will indirectly identify it. In the sentence ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë we can readily tell that it must be lumbulë "shadow" and not ilyë tier "all paths" that is the subject, because the verb undulávë does not receive the ending -r to agree with the plural word tier. Hence this can't be the subject – but the singular noun lumbulë "shadow" can.

MORE ABOUT ADJECTIVES
In English and other European languages, adjectives have special forms that are used in comparison. In English, adjectives have a comparative form that is constructed by adding the ending -er, and a superlative form that is formed with the ending -est. For instance, the adjective tall has the comparative form taller and the superlative form tallest. (In the case of some adjectives, English however resorts to the independent words more and most instead of using the endings, e.g. more intelligent and most intelligent instead of intelligenter and intelligentest, which forms are perceived as cumbersome.) The function of these forms is to facilitate comparison between various parties. If we want to say that one party possesses the quality described by the adjective to a greater extent than some other party, we may use the comparative form: "Peter is taller than Paul." The superlative form is used if we want to say that one party possesses the quality in question more than all others that are considered: "Peter is the tallest boy in the class."
In the first version of this Quenya lesson, as published in December 2000, I wrote: "But when it comes to Quenya, there is not much we can say. The published material includes absolutely no information about comparative forms; we don't even have an independent word for 'more'." Since then, the situation has happily changed; during 2001 a little more information appeared in the journals Tyalië Tyelelliéva (#16) and Vinyar Tengwar. Now we do know a special formula that is used in comparison: "A is brighter than B" may be expressed as "A ná calima lá B", literally "A is bright beyond B" (VT42:32). However, the word lá has other meanings beside "beyond", and it will be more practical to discuss and practice its use in comparison in a later lesson ("The various uses of lá", Lesson Eighteen).
We will here focus on the superlative form of adjectives instead. It is somewhat disquieting to notice that when Tolkien was making a Quenya translation of the Litany of Loreto, he broke off before translating the Latin superlative form purissima "most pure" – as if he himself was not quite certain how to render it (VT44:19). Yet one tiny scrap of evidence regarding the superlative has long been available: In Letters:278-279, Tolkien explained the adjectival form ancalima occurring in LotR. Translating it as "exceedingly bright", he stated that this is calima "shining brilliant" with the element an- added, the latter being a "superlative or intensive prefix". For this reason, many writers have used the prefix an- as the equivalent of the English ending -est, to construct the superlative form of adjectives – e.g. anvanya "fairest" from vanya "fair, beautiful" (but is should be understood that ancalima remains our sole attested example of an- used in this sense).
One may wonder whether the form that is made by prefixing an- really is the equivalent of an English superlative, sc. a form of the adjective that implies having the most of the property involved in comparison with certain others. It may be noted that Tolkien translated ancalima, not as "brightest", but as "exceedingly bright". When he describes an- as a "superlative or intensive prefix", he may almost seem to mean 'superlative or rather intensive prefix'. So perhaps an- implies "very, exceedingly" rather than "most" in comparison with others. It may be noted, though, that the context the in which the word is found does seem to imply a certain amount of "comparison": In LotR, ancalima occurs as part of Frodo's "speaking in tongues" in Shelob's lair (volume 2, Book Four, chapter IX): Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima. No translation is given in the LotR itself, but Tolkien later stated that this means "hail Eärendil brightest of stars" (Letters:385). In Tolkien's mythology, Eärendil carrying the shining Silmaril was set in the heavens as the brightest of the stars. So here, the meaning does seem to be that of a genuine superlative, "brightest" in the full sense of "brighter than all the others". In any case, no other information on how to form the superlative appears in published writings, so we have little choice but to use this formation. We must however be prepared that future publications may provide more information about this, involving alternative superlative formations.
	The prefix an- in this form cannot be mechanically prefixed to any Quenya adjective, or consonant clusters that Quenya does not allow would sometimes result. An- can be prefixed "as is" to adjectives beginning in a vowel or in c-, n-, qu-, t-, v-, w-, and y-: 

	an + alta "great (in size)" = analta "greatest"
	an + calima "bright" = ancalima "brightest" (our sole attested example!)
	an + norna "tough" = annorna "toughest" 
	an + quanta "full" = anquanta "fullest"
	an + vanya "beautiful" = anvanya "most beautiful"
	an + wenya "green" = anwenya "greenest"
	an + yára "old" = anyára "oldest"

Perhaps we can also include adjectives in f- and h- (no examples):

	an + fána "white" = ?anfána "whitest"
	an + halla "tall" = ?anhalla "tallest"

What would happen in other cases we cannot say for certain. Either an extra vowel (likely e or a) would be inserted between the prefix and the adjective to break up what would otherwise be an impossible cluster, or the final -n of the prefix would change, becoming more similar (or wholly similar) to the first consonant of the adjective. Such assimilation is observed elsewhere in our corpus, so this has to be our favourite theory regarding the behavior of an- as well. Before the consonant p-, the n of an would likely be pronounced with the lips closed because the pronunciation of p involves such a closure; hence n would turn into m. (Compare English input often being pronounced imput.) From pitya "small" we would thus have ampitya for "smallest", this being the impossible word anpitya reworked into a permissible form (Quenya does not have np, but the cluster mp is frequent even in unitary words).
Before the consonants l-, r-, s-, and m-, the final n of an- would probably be fully assimilated, that is, it becomes identical to the following consonant:

an + lauca "warm" = allauca "warmest"
an + ringa "cold" = arringa "coldest"
an + sarda "hard" = assarda "hardest"
an + moina "dear" = ammoina "dearest"

Cf. such attested assimilations as nl becoming ll in the compound Númellótë "Flower of the West" (UT:227, transparently a compound of the well-known words númen "west" and lótë "flower"). As for the group nm becoming mm, this development is seen in the name of the Vanyarin Elf Elemmírë mentioned in the Silmarillion: his (her?) name apparently means "Star-jewel" (elen "star" + mírë "jewel").

Summary of Lesson Five: Two major categories of Quenya verbs are the primary verbs, that represent a primitive root with no additions, and the A-stems, that have added an ending including the vowel a to the original root (sometimes -a alone, but more commonly some longer ending like -ya or -ta). The primary verbs form their present tense by lengthening the stem-vowel and adding -a, e.g. síla "is shining" from sil- "to shine". The A-stems form their present tense by somewhat the same rule, but when the ending -a is added to such a stem (already ending in -a), what would be -aa is changed to -ëa. In our one attested example of what may be the present tense of an A-stem, órëa from ora- "to impel", the stem-vowel has been lengthened. However, as far as we understand Quenya phonology, a long vowel cannot normally occur in front of a consonant cluster, and most A-stems do have a consonant cluster following the stem-vowel (e.g. lanta- "to fall", hilya- "to follow"). Presumably such verbs would form their present tense in -ëa, but the stem-vowel would remain short. Only the (relatively few) A-stems that do not have a consonant cluster following the stem-vowel can lengthen it in the present tense. (NOTE: Some consider all present-tense forms in -ëa speculative, and students should understand that given the scarcity of source material, new publications may significantly alter the picture. The use of such forms in the exercises below should be considered tentative reconstruction or extrapolation, not necessarily "Tolkien fact".) – A verb agrees with its subject in number, receiving the ending -r if the subject is plural: elen síla "a star is shining", eleni sílar "stars are shining".
	A superlative form of adjectives can be derived by adding the prefix an-, as in ancalima "brightest" from calima "bright". We must, however, assume that the n of this prefix is in many cases assimilated to the first consonant of the adjective, or consonant clusters that Quenya phonology does not allow would arise. For instance, an- + lauca "warm" may produce allauca for "warmest" (*anlauca being an impossible word).

VOCABULARY

canta "four"
Nauco "Dwarf"
parma "book"
tiuca "thick, fat"
mapa- verb "grasp, seize"
tir- verb "watch, guard"
lala- verb "laugh" (so according to a late source, PM:359; in earlier material the verb lala-, of a quite different derivation, has the meaning "deny": See the entry LA in the Etymologies. We needn't discuss whether one obsoletes the other; here we will use lala- for "laugh" only.)
caita- verb "lie" (lie horizontally, not "tell a lie")
tulta- verb "summon"
linda- verb "sing" (cf. the word Ainulindalë or "Music [lit. Singing] of the Ainur") 
mat-  verb "eat"
cenda- verb "read"

EXERCISES

1. Translate into English:

A. I nís lálëa.
B. I antiuca Nauco máta.
C. I tári tíra i aran.
D. I analta oron ná taura.
E. I nér tultëa i anvanya vendë.
F. I aiwë lindëa.
G. I Naucor mápëar i canta Eldar.
H. I antaura aran ná saila.

2. Translate into Quenya:

I. The woman is watching the greatest (/biggest) ship. 
J. The most evil (/evilest) men are dead.
K. The Elf is seizing the book.
L. Four men are lying under a tree.
M. The wisest Elf is reading a book (careful: what probably happens to the superlative prefix when it is added to a word like saila "wise"?)
N. The king and the queen are reading the book.
O. The birds are singing.
P. The four Dwarves are watching a bird.

Lessons 6-10 may be downloaded from this URL:
http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/less-b.rtf