Q. subordinate clauses grammar.
A subordinate or dependent clause is one that is not a sentence on its own, but modifies the larger context in which it appears: “the man who came here yesterday was very angry”. Many subordinate clauses begin with relative pronouns, as in the previous example: “who”. In English relative pronouns are the same as question words, but Quenya question words (based on ma) are distinct from relative pronouns, which are based on i or ya.
Indeclinable i: Most attested relative clauses are formed with the pronoun i:
The pronoun i has a broad meaning. In the examples above, it functions as the subject of the subordinate clause, and essentially means “who” (both singular and plural). There are other examples where it functions as a subordinate conjunction “that”:
In these examples i is not the subject of the subordinate clause, and simply joins the subordinate clause to the main clause. These examples are all from Late Notes on Verb Structure (LVS) from 1969, but similar examples appear in the Quenya Verbal System (QVS) from 1948:
In QVS pronominal subjects were prefixed to the verb rather than suffixed. In later syntax these phrases might be:
Finally, there are some examples where i functions as the direct object of the subordinate clause:
In the first example i is the thing that “you judge good.” The second example uses late 1940s QVS syntax with prefixed pronominal suffixes and the indefinite subject ᴹQ. a; in later syntax it might become: vahaia ea nóre i mo esta Valinor. Here i is the thing that “one calls Valinor”, with the indefinite pronoun (a or mo) as the subject and i as the object of the subordinate clause. Likewise the third example would in later syntax become manar i lie i cennelme , with i being the object “that we saw”.
Thus it seems that i can be used (a) when it functions as the subject of the subordinate clause, (b) when it functions as the object of the subordinate clause or (c) when it functions as a subordinating conjunction. It seems i is indeclinable, and its referent can be both a person (our Father) or a thing (a land), and can be singular (Eru) or plural (us sinners). Tolkien briefly described the function of i in QVS:
But in the latter case (with nouns) a clause was far more usual, and could be used in all cases where the subject of the second verb was not the same as that of the first. A clause in such cases is introduced by i, before vowels in. The tense inside the clause depends on that of the first verb: the time of which becomes the present of the second verb (PE22/118).
In this context he was comparing i to the use of the infinitive, as in mernenye care sa “I wished to make it” vs. mernelye i carinye sa “you wished that I make it”. In the former, a subordinate clause is not required, because the subject of the second verb is the same as the first; in the latter a clause is required because the subjects (“you” vs. “I”) are not the same. In QVS, the relative pronoun i becomes in before vowels, but there is no sign of this in Tolkien’s later writing; see i úcarir and i Elessarno above.
Also of interest is the fact that the tense of the subordinate clause is determined relative to the tense of the main verb, not unlike the infinitive. In particular, in mernelye i carinye sa the subordinate clause (with an aorist verb) is in the same time frame as the main verb, whereas with mernelye i carnenye sa the subordinate clause (with a past tense) is even further in the past, hence the translation: “that I had made it” despite the fact that the subordinate clause’s verb is only in the simple past rather than the pluperfect.
Declinable ya/ye: In addition to the very generic relative pronoun i, Quenya has a more specific pronoun ya. Its references can only be things, and in the examples where it appears it is declined into a noun case:
In the second example, the thing given kisses appears to be the snowdrop, not the maiden, so despite the gloss “whom” it still refers to a thing rather than a person. There is at least one phrase where ya seems to be used as a subordinate conjunction, however:
In the prior version of this sentence, the relative pronoun was yá with long á (VT43/27), so it is possible that rather than relative pronoun ya “what”, this was the subordinate conjunction yá “when” (lit. “when we die”), also seen in yá hríve mene, ringa ná “when winter comes, it is cold” (VT49/23). It seems likely that short ya is used as a (neuter) relative pronoun, whereas long yá functions as subordinate conjunction “when” vs. the more generic subordinate conjunction i “that”.
In addition to neuter ya, Quenya also has a personal/animate relative pronoun ye “who(m)” which can likewise be inflected into noun cases: genitive yeo, allative yenna, ablative yello (VT47/21). Compare inanimate ya “what”/animate ye “who” with inanimate sa “it”/animate se “he, she”. Note that ya may still be applied to persons, as in the examples above, so it seems ye is optional and can be used to emphasize that the referent is a person. Interestingly, this “inflectable who” ye had a plural form of i:
who rel. per[sonal] ye, pl. i
that rel. imp[personal] ya
yenna leltanelyes “to which [?whom] you sent him”
yeo / yello / ion / illon camnelyes “from whom you received it” (VT47/21).
Unlike indeclinable i, both ya and ye are inflected for noun case and number. Indeed, where they appear in example sentences from Tolkien’s later writing, they are always inflected for noun case (not so in Early Qenya, see below). This may be the distinction between indeclinable i and declinable ya/ye: the latter are used where case inflection is required. Tolkien does not give a plural form of ya, but it might be *yai; compare ta vs. tai (VT49/32). However, with adverbial cases (-sse, -nna, -llo) it seems the plural suffix is added directly to ya: ya-ssen tintilar i eleni “wherein the stars tremble”, referring to the vaults (telumar) of Varda.
Origins of ya and i: Tolkien discussed the origins of ya in notes associated with Galadriel’s song (NGS) written in the late 1950s or early 1960s:
ya-, used in Quenya as stem of relatives, being originally a demonstrative referring back to something behind, or previous in time (PE17/66).
Indeed, the root ᴹ√YA appears in The Etymologies from the 1930s with the gloss “there, over there; (of time) back, ago”, and is also the basis for words like yára “old”. As a relative pronoun, it may have originally meant “that thing previously referred to”. The use of ya as a relative pronoun dates all the way back to the Early Quenya Grammar (EQG) of the 1920s, though at this earlier stage it was indeclinable:
The indeclinable relative pronoun is ya, which is either to be understood in any relation, or, very frequently, is defined by demonstrative or pronominal or adverbial words inside the relative clause (PE14/54).
The etymology of i as a relative pronoun is less clear, but its use must have been ancient because it serves a similar function in Sindarin. Most likely it was connected to the definite article i “the”, whose root in The Etymologies was glossed: ᴹ√I “that (deictic particle)”. It was also mentioned in the Gnomish Lexicon of the 1910s as the “root of relatives” (GL/50), though in the contemporaneous Qenya Lexicon this root was glossed “here it is” (QL/41). It may have been influenced by the plural i of ye “who”, as noted above.
As for the relative pronoun ye “who”, it was probably derived from ya “what” by analogy with animate vs. inanimate se and sa.
Other subordinate conjunctions: In addition to relative pronouns i (indeclinable) and ya/ye (declinable), Quenya had a number of specialized subordinate conjugations such as yá “when” mentioned above: yá hríve mene, ringa ná “when winter comes, it is cold” (VT49/23). One conjunction of particular interest is sa “that”, which seems to have a more general function:
The second example is from QVS of the late 1940s, and in later syntax might be quenten sa tulis. In QVS Tolkien said “In reporting or stating a clause is introduced by sa or nil” rather than i, but this is our only clue to its distinction from i. In the small number of examples where it appears, sa is used only as a subordinate conjunction and not as a relative pronoun. The conjunction sa also seems to follow the same rule for tense as the conjunction i, with the tense of the subordinate verb relative to that of the main verb. The English paraphrasing “I said that he came” (past, past) would be expressed in Quenya as quenten sa tulis (past, aorist).
Neo-Quenya: Given the various options discussed above, here is how I recommend forming subordinate clauses in Quenya.
If the subordinate clause follows the main clause, the tense of the subordinate verb is relative to that of the main verb so: istan i tulis “I know that he comes” (aorist/aorist) and istan i túles “I know that he came” (aorist/past) but sinten i tulis “I knew that he came” (past/aorist) and sinten i túles “I knew that he had come” (past/past), where in the last example the past of the subordinate clause is further in the past than the main clause, equivalent to English’s use of the pluperfect.
It is less clear what would happen if the subordinate clause preceded the main clause. My intuition is that in that circumstance, the subordinate clause would be declined into the tense of the time frame under discussion, not relative to the main clause: i atan i túle náne hlaiwa “the man who came was sick” (past/past) vs. i atan i utúliéne náne hlaiwa “the man who had come was sick” (pluperfect/past).
This assumption is based on Tolkien’s phrasing: “the tense inside the clause depends on that of the first verb, the time of which becomes the present of the second verb” (PE22/118), which seem to imply that the word order matters. The examples given in QVS are also analogous to the behavior of the infinitive, which likewise derives its tense from the main verb and must follow it. However, it is possible my assumption is wrong, and that the tense in the subordinate clause is always relative to the main clause and thus remains indeterminate until the main clause is expressed.
Element In