From: "Helge K. Fauskanger" To: elfling@egroups.com Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1999 16:54:49 +0100 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 Message-Id: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Archive: Reply-To: elfling@egroups.com Subject: Lambi or Lamber? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Jerome S. Colburn wrote: > I thought I'd seen the derivation _lambe_ *lambi in Etymologies, but it's not there s.v. LAB, nor does Helge's wordlist point to a plural form. In the meantime we have from WotJ p. 394 that _lambe_ < *lambee. If so, the plural should (alas?) be _lamber_. In Quenya, final _-e_ primarily comes from two sources: primitive Elvish short *_-i_, or primitive Elvish long *_-ee_. So you assume that words that have -e from *-ee form their plurals in -er rather than -i? I'm afraid the evidence is against this interpretation. According to both Letters:282 and LR:367 s.v. LAS1, _lasse_ "leaf" represents primitive *_lassee_; yet in Namaarie and the Plotz letter, the plural is seen to be _lassi_, not **_lasser_. According to LR:366 s.v. KWEN(ED), the word _Quende_ "Elf" represents older *_kwenedee_; yet the plural is as we know Quendi, not **Quender. The etymology of _Quende_ is explained somewhat differently in the essay "Quendi and Eldar" from about 1960; yet this post-LotR document confirms the same general pattern. The part of "Quendi of Eldar" that was omitted in WJ but later appeared in Vinyar Tengwar #39 is relevant here: When Tolkien first used the word _tengwi_ "signs, tokens" he added a note stating that this is the plural of _tengwe_, and supplied a primitive form: *_teń-wee_ (VT39:16-17). The plural is not **_tengwer_ just because the -e comes from earlier *_-ee_. I could go on with even more examples. > Or might one refer to an insistence on the plural being _lambi_ as the "Shibboleth of Fauskanger" ;-) ? I would like to think that this is how Tolkien, not I, imagined it...in WJ:361, he explicitly confirms that nouns in _-e_ normally have plurals in _-i_. There are a few exceptions, such as _tyelle_ "row", pl. _tyeller_ instead of **_tyelli_, but the general pattern is very well established. So I'm afraid the title of the journal _Parma Eldalamberon_ does contain a grammatical error, and I probably won't be renaming my site _Ardalamberon_... - HF