welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the Ancient Tongue, Quenya.
we’re finally here. welcome to the season finale of Conlang Critic. and what better
way to close off this season than with one of the most beloved conlangs out there? it’s
one of the two languages someone means when they say “Elvish language”, and I already
reviewed the other one about a year ago.
Quenya is a fictional language created by J.R.R. Tolkien, made famous by its inclusion
in the Lord of the Rings series. as I said in the Sindarin review, it’s not accurate
to say that Tolkien created his elf languages for his fantasy books; the exact opposite
is the case.
unlike Sindarin, there’s a good amount of documentation for Quenya that’s easily accessible
for anyone who wants to learn about it, which is great for my purposes. the website Ardalambion,
from Helge Fauskanger, remains an extremely valuable resource for all of Tolkien’s languages.
in addition, there’s an easier-to-digest reference grammar on Wikibooks, which describes
a version of Quenya often called “Neo-Quenya”, a more formalized version of the language
pieced together by the Lord of the Rings fandom for use in fanworks.
in fiction, Quenya is the ancient language of the High Elves, and it has a role in Middle
Earth society similar to the one Latin has in the real world, to the extent that it’s
sometimes literally called “Elf Latin”.
out of fiction, Quenya is mostly based on Finnish, like how Sindarin was based on Welsh,
though there’s also some inspiration from Greek. before I started researching for this
video, I knew like three things about Finnish that a Finnish-inspired language would probably
copy: it has vowel harmony, a whole bunch of grammatical cases, and no gendered pronouns.
so let’s see how much of that made its way into Quenya!
Quenya’s consonants are:
/m n/ /p t k/
/b d ɡ/ /f s x/
/w l j/ /r/
okay, I’m actually unsure what the best way to analyze Quenya’s phonemic inventory
is, and I mean that in the best way possible. Quenya’s sound system can’t really be
described using a chart of individual segments like this.
for starters, the voiced stops only appear in consonant clusters.
I figured it might make sense to treat these nasal-stop clusters as their own phonemes,
which is a real thing in some natural languages, but this doesn’t quite work because the
voiced alveolar stop also contrasts with its voiceless counterpart after liquids. so, maybe
those clusters are actually phonemes too?
then also there’s a voiced labiodental fricative which I think is fine calling an allophone
of /w/, because they never contrast except after [l] so maybe they’re different phonemes
after all!
like, maybe I could do that. or maybe the consonant clusters that include [w] are actually
all their own separate phonemes?
but there’s also a bunch of consonant clusters with [j], are those supposed to be separate
phonemes too?
and what about those voiceless versions of the liquids? sure, they’re written as consonant
clusters, and the most common dialect of Quenya completely lacks them, but surely they too
must be separate phonemes?
I think the largest inventory it makes sense to analyze Quenya with is something like this?
but really focusing on individual segments is the wrong approach for this language.
unlike, uh, literally every language I’ve talked about on this show since the Sindarin
episode, Quenya’s phonotactics are precisely defined. there is a clear and consistent set
of structural rules that determine which sequences of phones can appear in Quenya words. it’s
honestly refreshing.
to be clear, the fact that it’s hard to analyze Quenya’s consonant inventory is
a good thing. natural languages don’t care how you analyze their segments, after all.
Quenya’s vowels are:
/i u/ /e o/
/a/
okay, it’s just the five vowel system. but, there’s also phonemic vowel length, so there’s
long and short versions of all of these, which I keep seeing described as having different
positions in vowel space.
I’m pretty sure this is a misinterpretation of the way Tolkien described the length distinction,
given that the natural languages Quenya was aesthetically inspired by don’t do this.
still, I’ve seen them transcribed this exact way multiple times so this is just me acknowledging
that I’m aware of this analysis.
there’s also some phonemic diphthongs, I guess.
okay, now let’s talk about phonotactics.
this is the full set of consonant clusters that appear in Quenya. now, a good share of
these can be, sometimes are, and probably should be analyzed as single segments and
not clusters, but as I said that doesn’t really matter for this language.
anyway, the result of these clearly defined phonotactics is that Quenya has a refined
aesthetic, one that’s intended to sound beautiful and elegant, and I think it succeeds.
as I briefly mentioned before, Quenya was heavily based on Finnish, and the most distinctive
phonological feature of Finnish is its vowel harmony. while vowel harmony isn’t exclusive
to Finnish and the rest of the Uralic language family, it is definitely the most interesting
aspect of the language’s phonology.
I’m not gonna get too far into what vowel harmony is for two reasons, first because
there’s this video from DJP that’s way better than whatever explanation I could come
up with, and second because for some reason Quenya doesn’t have vowel harmony! it just
feels like missed potential, you know?
one thing that I think is just lovely about Tolkien’s languages is the care taken for
the aesthetic of the Romanization systems used in the books. in a text based medium,
the Romanization is pretty much all you’ll get to experience of a language, so making
sure it looks the part can be even more vital than the rest of the design.
Romanized Quenya does a few distinctly illogical things for the purpose of aesthetic, like
using for /k/, and the use of and for /kw/ and /ks/.
my favorite thing, however, is the extensive use of the diaeresis diacritic. Romanized
Quenya uses a diaeresis whenever a word ends with the vowel /e/, specifically so that the
English-speaking readers won’t get confused and assume that the at the end of the
word is meant to be silent. there’s no reason to do this other than to make the language
look more unique, and I love it.
in universe, Quenya is a literary language, written using a writing system called the
Tengwar. a year ago, I called the Tengwar a featural abjad. individual letters represent
consonant sounds, and there’s diacritics used for vowel sounds. the way the Tengwar
work is different depending on the language, both in terms of what values letters are given,
and in terms of the actual structure.
so, in Sindarin, a vowel diacritic is placed on the consonant that comes after it, which
is the opposite of how it works in abjads and abugidas used for natural languages. but
Quenya is more like a traditional abjad slash abugida, with a diacritic placed on the consonant
that comes before it. as an example, if you wanted to transcribe the name “Misali”,
in Sindarin it would look like this, and in Quenya it would look like this.
one thing I didn’t really talk about in the Sindarin video is how the Tengwar are
a featural writing system, which I think is their most influential aspect.
here’s the boring summary: a featural writing system is one where “features” of the
shapes of individual graphemes indicate some information about what phonemes they represent.
every single linguistics youtuber has made a video about this topic, and most of them
use Hangul as the example. and yes, they are all correct when they say that this is a cool
thing to do.
the thing is, featural writing systems are used constantly in conlangs. like, okay, of
the twelve conlangs in this season, half of them don’t have original writing systems
at all and only use the Latin alphabet.
of the other six, all six of them have original writing systems that can be described as “featural”.
the only conlang I’ve reviewed this season that makes use of a non-featural original
writing system is Kēlen with its ceremonial interlace alphabet, which if you recall is
my all-time favorite writing system in any conlang.
I’m not saying it’s bad to use a featural writing system in a conlang. it is, indeed,
really cool! and it’s especially not a bad thing that Tolkien’s elvish languages use
one, since they predate all of these other featural orthographies. what I’m saying
is that, it’s hard for me to get excited about something that Quenya has in common
with Iqglic-with-a-Q.
while Sindarin leaned really heavily on its Welsh influence for most things in its design,
Quenya takes inspiration from a number of sources in a somewhat less direct way. the
language makes extensive use of suffixes for case and number marking on nouns.
now uh, having a bunch of suffixes for a bunch of noun cases is, in fact, a Finnish thing,
but the exact set of cases included in Quenya is different, so it’s not Tolkien literally
just copying the grammar of a natural language he likes. but yeah, there’s nine or ten
cases, depending, and four grammatical numbers.
I don’t think I’ve encountered this exact type of grammatical number in a conlang before,
there’s the pretty normal three-way singular-dual-plural thing going on, but on top of that there’s
the “partitive plural”, used for “part of a larger group”, which is another Finnish
thing, but in Finnish it’s a case instead of a number.
verbs in Quenya are marked for tense, in a way that’s slightly different depending
on the ending of the root form of the verb.
there’s a lot of other suffixes that indicate the person and number of the subject and object,
most of which function as shortened forms of pronouns. the one that doesn’t is for
when the subject isn’t a pronoun and also isn’t singular.
the pronominal suffixes are one of the more interesting things Quenya does, especially
since they’re not ripped from Finnish.
while standalone forms of pronouns are occasionally used in Quenya, most of the time that role
is filled by these suffixes. it’s common to see verbs in the form of a root, then a
suffix indicating tense, then a pronominal suffix indicating the subject, then another
pronominal suffix indicating the object.
so like, the word tompessen translates as “they covered me”, and it breaks down
as the root verb meaning “cover”, a suffix marking the past tense, a suffix indicating
a third person singular subject, and finally a suffix indicating a first person singular
object.
by the way, the past tense suffix does some funky things in there to avoid the consonant
cluster /pn/, because as you recall Tolkien cared a lot about phonoaesthetics.
oh yeah, and speaking of funky things dealing with phonoaesthetics, the present tense makes
vowels longer in some contexts. that’s fun I think.
Quenya vocabulary is distinctly better documented than Sindarin. I can confirm that there are,
indeed, attested words for both “bow” and “arrow”.
I always have a hard time coming up with interesting things to say about vocabulary. there’s
definitely a bunch of examples of individual words in Quenya that have well thought out
interesting details to them, and I don’t really want to spend a few minutes just listing
examples if I don’t have anything to say about any of them individually other than
“hey, this is an interesting detail!”.
I will say that due to the more fleshed-out nature of Quenya as compared to Sindarin,
those interesting details are far more numerous than they were for the other elf language.
some of those details are from worldbuilding things, and other details are just the result
of Quenya being a language that changed significantly over the course of Tolkien’s life.
it’s also fun seeing words that are pretty obviously just like, Tolkien came up with
a name for a character and then said okay now what should this name mean then, like
it’s absolutely not subtle.
in general, it’s clear that a lot of love and care went into Quenya vocabulary, both
by its creator and by the people who have worked hard compiling its creator’s original
writings. I just don’t really have that much to say about it. it’s really good,
but not in a way that’s fun to talk about.
is there anything else? uh, Quenya uses base twelve, right? I know Sindarin doesn’t,
so I’m pretty sure the Tolkien elf language that uses dozenal that I had heard about before
is this one.
[typing sounds] wait, this thing on Wikibooks is distinctly describing a base ten system!
does Quenya seriously just use decimal?
no, seriously, this part goes into talking about how writing numbers using the Tengwar
uses base twelve, and then says that we don’t actually know what names the base twelve numbers
had?
do you mean to tell me that in the Lord of the Rings universe, elves historically used
dozenal, and they invented a positional notation system designed for their base twelve numbers,
and that at some point after that they switched to using base ten? literally why would they
switch from dozenal to decimal if they already had a fully developed completely functional
base-twelve positional notation system that’s, apparently, used throughout Middle Earth?
who else in this universe invented math and how influential was their math notation that
it completely changed the way elves say numbers?
the following is part of a poem called “The Markirya Poem” on Ardalambion and “Makirya”
on Wikibooks. it’s the longest text written in Quenya by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Man hlaruva rávëa súrë ve tauri lillassië,
ninqui carcar yarra isilmë ilcalassë,
isilmë pícalassë, isilmë lantalassë
ve loicolícuma; raumo nurrua,
undumë rúma?
all in all, Quenya is really good. I think I understand why it’s more popular than
Sindarin. it’s not just that Sindarin happens to not be as well documented as Quenya, it’s
also that Quenya just happens to have more of its own identity in general.
the significance and impact of Tolkien’s worldbuilding cannot be understated. the conlang
community as it exists today would not be here if it weren’t for Tolkien. his languages
remain among the most naturalistic, grounded, well-developed conlangs in the medium. there
is no aspect of Quenya that feels artificial.
however, part of the reason Tolkien was able to have his languages feel like they would
be at home in our world is that their features are taken directly from our world. this somewhat
extends to the rest of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, and as a result the entire high fantasy genre.
the parallels between the races of Middle Earth and the actual human cultures of the
real world aren’t exactly subtle.
Quenya is Elf Latin, with a Finnish aesthetic. the distinct European-ness of the Elvish languages
shouldn’t be overlooked. I understand why this influence exists, and why Tolkien chose
to represent his elves this way, it’s just that after a full century of fantasy languages
inspired by Tolkien, stuff like this feels way more boring than it did when it was new.
but outside of that context, looking at it as a standalone work, Quenya is nothing short
of good art. Quenya is believable, it’s beautiful, it’s alive.
that in mind, Quenya is one of the greatest fantasy languages ever created. the influence
it has had was completely deserved.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
I... don’t know what will come after this. for the first time since starting this show,
I don’t know what I’ll be reviewing next time. Conlang Critic Season 3 has been such
an important period for me as a creator. it’s been a time of growth. I’ve started to get
an understanding of what I actually want this show to be, and miraculously I’ve begun
to reach an actual platform at the same time.
I’m going to be taking a break from Conlang Critic for a while. there’s some other projects
I’d like to focus on for a few months before I’ll be ready to get back to this show.
thank you to everyone who has supported this show, on top of everything else I’ve been
doing. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around just how many of you there are
now. I mean this as sincerely as possible. thank you for watching. I’ve been jan Misali,
and this has been Conlang Critic Season 3. mi tawa.
(Vötgil!)
tenpo mute la, mi tu li lon poka ni li nasin taso lon tenpo
sina olin pakala, li tawa anpa taso, sina awen pilin pona
(Vötgil!)
pakala la, sina awen lon nasin sina, li weka e jaki
o sona e ni: ike li pini ala
ike la, o kute e ni:
(Vötgil! Vötgil!)
o tawa waso! o pali e ale!
sina ken, tawa mi! mi ken kute e
kalama sina tan insa pilin mi
(HEY NOW HEY NOW)
o tawa waso lon sewi laso!
o pilin e suno (pilin e suno)
tenpo kama la mi lon wile pi
kulupu jan tenpo
(Vötgil! Vötgil! Vöt-Vötgil!)