Quenya Learners discussion

Here you can discuss and ask about the sounds of Quenya: What does a certain vowel sound like. Where the stress falls on a word. How something is pronounced.

It is not always easy but it is worth knowing and recognizing these.

Vowel pronunciation

a, like the a in father, never that in mad

e, like the e in scent or bent

i, like the i in ring

o, like the o in soft, never like in book

u, like the o in fool

In Quenya there are short vowels and long vowels. Short ones are like the i in the word pit. Long vowels are marked with an accent: á, é, í, ó, ú. (In some cases you can write them just aa, ee, ii, oo, uu.) There are also diphthongs such as in mate, foul, rice,... but next to each other. It is a combination of two vowels in a word.

Examples:

ondo - rock
parma - book
namárië - farewell
Ainu - a 'Holy One'

It is worth noting that the quality of the long é and ó is sightly different to their short counterparts. Here is the wikipedia IPA pages for the sounds (with audio examples):

a/á: a/aː
e: ɛ
é: eː
i/í: iː
o: ɔ
ó: oː
u/ú: u/uː

Long vowels should be twice the length of short vowels.

There are six diphthongs, written ai, oi, ui, au, eu, iu (the last two are very uncommon). All other vowels in combination are in dieresis - are pronounced separately as the short vowels above.

The combinations ei, ao, ae, ue, ou are not present. When they would be formed grammatically (genitive suffix -o for example) or in combination words one of the vowels will drop out (perhaps changing the length of the preceding vowel).


The phonology section on the Quenya wikipedia page is very good.

Thank you for clarification!

The link for e isn't working...

Do you know something about the aspiration? I can't fully remember what I read on it so I think I should search for some info. I just know some words had a different sound for a consonant in the beginning, or such. Although there was something related to it on the wikipedia page it has many words that I'm not familiar with.

There is a change in certain initial sounds over time - ñ => n, þ =>s, initial w => v. (I try to use the original sounds.) These words would still be written with the original Tengwar.

None of the stops are aspirated (in English, the unvoiced stops are aspirated initially).

There are a few consonants that only exist initially but they are written differently (hl, hr, ñw*)

*As opposed to nw which exists medially.

(Fixed the link.)