Welcome Guest 

Register

Forum Home » Languages » Quenya Discussion » plural of nouns in "-s"
Author Topic:
Lex
Council Member
Posts: 131
Send Message
Avatar
Post plural of nouns in "-s"
on: July 22, 2007 01:33
a probably silly question:

how do we form the plural of nouns ending in -s? ex: málos, coimas and tirios.
i guess we just add -i so we would have málosi, coimasi and tiriosi, but these plurals sound a bit strange to me... i have a feeling they are not correct, though they must be.

thanks in advance
thorsten
Council Member
Posts: 271
Send Message
Avatar
Post RE: plural of nouns in "-s"
on: July 22, 2007 08:43
These seem to be two distinct cases:

málos and tirios are both Early Qenya. Early Qenya has plenty of nouns ending in -s which is the result of a shortening of a longer stem. For example we have

nes 'valley' ness- (PE12:66) or
nes 'food' nest- (PE12:66) or
peltas 'pivot' peltaks- (PE14:43)

For the latter example, the plural is peltaksi, so presumably we'd also have *nessi and nesti.

(As a side remark, part of this seems heavily inspired by Finnish - my wife's name 'Doris' changes in Genitive to 'Doriksen' 'of Doris', being adapted to the most common stem form in Finnish).

So, the solution for tirios is *probably* that it comes from *tiriost-, including the stem for 'walled city'.

coimas is actually quite a bit later, but it would seem the solution is in a sense similar, though not quite the same. Consider for example Valinor in which the last element is shortened from nóre. Similar, in coimas the last element seems to be shortened from massa. When inflected, the full form is presumably restored, cf. miruvóreva in Namárie but short miruvor, thus the plural of coimas would probably be *coimassar.
Lex
Council Member
Posts: 131
Send Message
Avatar
Post RE: plural of nouns in "-s"
on: July 22, 2007 11:21
Hi! I looked up these words in Quettaparma Quenyallo wordlist as well as in CoE's dictionary.
I found tirios with its stem form tiriost-. But málos lacks a stem form, as well as coimas.

However, i found two words for "bread" in Quettaparma Quenyallo, massa and masta, both of them, i believe, may well be in the stem form of coimas. So i think it could be coimassa- as well as coimasta-. Is that right?

However, i have no idea of what the stem form of málos would be. I found no clues.
thorsten
Council Member
Posts: 271
Send Message
Avatar
Post RE: plural of nouns in "-s"
on: July 23, 2007 07:21
However, i have no idea of what the stem form of málos would be. I found no clues.


Well - do you actually need the answer? It is an obsolete word in LOTR-style Quenya anyway, and I'm only going to put work into research for the stem if there's an actual reason you need it. At this point, in all likelihood it has an expanded stem, but it could be a lot of different things.

Btw - looking up the words in wordlists isn't going to help too much if no stem is given - you need to read the original context then, which means QL in most of the examples.
Lex
Council Member
Posts: 131
Send Message
Avatar
Post RE: plural of nouns in "-s"
on: July 27, 2007 11:27
do you actually need the answer? It is an obsolete word in LOTR-style Quenya anyway
Well, i don not really need it, except if i want to create a name, but since málos is an obsolete word in LOTR quenya (we have taurë), don't worry, i can live without it.
Members Online
Print Friendly, PDF & Email