G+ LoME Archive
Post cvY6jd4tQvn
Ицхак Пензев, Koirea Quenya, Lokyt L., Paul Strack, Tamas Ferencz

Tamas Ferencz Jan 24, 2018 (14:35)

A conceptual question.

We know that in Q adjectives can act as nouns (A Vanimar etc.). Would you agree that the same concept could be true for adjectival participles, in particular for future imperfect participles?
In my native Hungarian the future imperfect participle ("is to/bound to do/happen") exists (although it is relatively rare compared to the present imperfect participle which is very widely used in both adjectival and nominal roles) and is the basis of a lot of nouns. For example
jövendő "is to come = future"
teendő "is to be done = task"
halandó "bound to die = mortal"
even beadandó "to be handed in = essay to be written at home and handed in at university"
and more.

If the same concept can apply in Q that would yield another legitimate way to derive words. E.g. *ahtaruvaila "(person) to react = responsible (person)" > *ahtaruvailasse "responsibility".

Paul Strack Jan 24, 2018 (16:57)

My intuition is that this is probably possible, but shouldn’t be common. Otherwise I think it could become quite confusing.

Tamas Ferencz Jan 24, 2018 (17:10)

+Paul Strack thanks. One thing that would help to mark these forms as nouns would be that most of the time they would be preceded by a definite article: i karuvaila "the task" and could be regarded as an elliptical construct: i karuvaila [nat], i ahtaruvaila [quén].

Paul Strack Jan 25, 2018 (02:13)

+Tamas Ferencz Syntax like the above doesn't feel natural to me. Use karuvaila for "task" seems to me as awkward as using "future doing thing" for that purpose in English.

Where English uses adjectives as nouns, they are frequently collective, as in "the wicked will punished", with the understanding that "wicked" is plural. I can see Quenya using a construct like i hrúar in a similar way, clearly distinguishable for adjectival use because it has a noun plural instead of an adjective plural.

The handful of examples of Quenya adjectives-as-nouns seem to follow this pattern. For example, alómear "the voiceless" for voiceless consonants.

Ицхак Пензев Jan 25, 2018 (06:32)

It's a tough question. I need to think. But anyway it is good you remind us about the existence of these participles. They may be convenient epithets, as Esperanto experience shows.

Tamas Ferencz Jan 25, 2018 (08:15)

+Paul Strack just exploring possibilities! The beauty of NeoQuenya is that our individual approaches to it is greatly coloured by our native language and individual lambetyáve.

Tamas Ferencz Jan 25, 2018 (08:20)

+Ицхак Пензев yes, it is good to have so many different forms - in this respect PE22 is a veritable treasure trove and boon.
Somehow I feel that creating neologisms using attested and productive formative suffixes (-ta, -inqua, -ite, -ima, -ula etc. etc.) is a more natural way of getting results than for instance trying to make cognates. It is in keeping with the agglutinative features of the language to the extent that - tome at least - they don't even feel like neologisms, they are a natural part of conjugation.

Lokyt L. Jan 25, 2018 (13:10)

If it's any help, Latin (one of the languages Tolkien drew his inspiration from) does use future participles in a noun syntactic role quite widely. After all, the famous "Addenda et Corrigenda" literally translates as "(those) to be added and (those) to be corrected".
However, both active and passive future participle in Latin are modally potential (they express an intention, not a statement) and the same seems to be the case in Hungarian as well (or am I wrong?). Quenya future participles, on the other hand, are plainly indicative, are they not?

Tamas Ferencz Jan 25, 2018 (13:33)

+Lokyt L. well, for Hungarian, in some cases it's intention, in others a statement (e.g. the already mentioned halandó "mortal"; állandó "sg bound to stand = permanent => mathemathical constant").

Ицхак Пензев Jan 25, 2018 (13:34)

In Esperanto, future participles are in the very basic grammar arsenal from the very first day when the Fundamento was published. And yet they aren't popular, because most people don't understand how they can use them, for the very concept seems pretty foreign to Indo-European mind. But some of set phrases give good precedents, like daŭrigota "[bound] to be continued" in the end of a film or publication.