Elementary Phonology
Quenya has five vowels, a, e, i, o,
u,
short and long; the long vowels are marked with an accent: á,
é,
í,
ó,
ú. The vowel a is extremely frequent. The quality
of the vowels resembles the system in Spanish or Italian rather than English.
To clarify the pronunciation for readers used to English orthography, Tolkien
sometimes adds a diaeresis over some vowels (e.g. Manwë rather
than Manwe
to indicate that the final
e is not silent,
or Eärendil
to indicate that the vowels e and a
are pronounced separately and not drawn together as in English
ear - the dots are not necessary for the meaning and can safely
be left out in e-mail). The
diphthongs are ai, au,
oi, ui, eu,
iu. (A seventh diphthong ei
seems to occur in one or two words, but its status is uncertain.) The consonants
are for the most part the same as in English, with the sibilants as
the main exception:
Ch as in
church
does not occur, neither
does j as in joy, and instead of sh, zh (the
latter like s
in pleasure),Quenya has a sound like the German
ich-Laut, spelt hy by Tolkien (e.g. hyarmen "south").
The h of English huge,
human is sometimes pronounced
as a weak variant of the sound in question. Quenya also lacks th (unvoiced
as in thing
or voiced as in the); unvoiced th did
occur at an earlier stage, but merged with s shortly before the
rebellion of the Noldor (see PM:331-333). It should also be noted that
the voiced plosives b,
d, g only occur in the clusters
mb,
nd/ld/rd
and
ng (some varieties of Quenya also had lb instead of lv).
There are no initial consonant clusters, except qu (= cw),
ty, ny and nw if we count the semi-vowels
y,
w as consonants. Normally there are no final clusters either; words
end either in one of the single consonants
t, s,
n,
l, r or in a vowel, more often the latter. Medially between
vowels, a limited number of consonant clusters may occur; those described
by Tolkien as "frequent" or "favoured" are in italics: cc,
ht,
hty, lc,
ld,
ll, lm,
lp,
lqu, lt,
lv, lw,
ly, mb,
mm,
mn,
mp, my,
nc, nd,
ng,
ngw,
nn,
nqu, nt,
nty,
nw,
ny,
ps, pt, qu(for
cw),
rc,
rd, rm, rn,
rqu,
rr, rt,
rty,
rs, rw, ry,
sc,
squ, ss,
st,
sty, sw, ts,
tt,
tw,
ty,
x (for ks). A few other combinations may occur
in compounds. Quenya phonology is quite restrictive, giving the language
a clearly defined style and flavour.
Note that in Quenya spelling, the letter c is always pronounced
k
(so cirya "ship" = kirya). Tolkien was inconsistent about
this; in many sources the letter k is used, but in LotR he decided
to spell Quenya as similar to Latin as possible. In some cases,
k
in the sources has been regularized to c in the following discussion.
http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf
©Helge Fauskanger