Talk:Quenya

DYK???

Since Quenya is a good article, couldn't we make a DYK for it? TuorEladar (talk) 21:00, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Language cleanup

Non-English text on English Wikipedia, must be tagged as such. See MOS:LANG and MOS:FOREIGNITALIC. I put effort into this article to bring it up to this standard but did not complete it (1, 2, 3), so I added Template:cleanup lang. @Chiswick Chap: removed the notice. The edit message reproduced here is:

well tbh it's going to be qya wall-to-wall; if you feel it's worth doing then do it but don't leave it tagged for ever and a day

This leaves little in the way of rationale, and in my view since the problem has clearly not been adressed amounts largely to drive by de-tagging. But it is correct that there will be a lot of tagging, this article has a lot of Quenya text, and it seems prior none of it was tagged. Simply because meeting the standards of accessibility and style might require work or because one user does not care about them, does not mean that this article gets a free pass. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 10:48, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Um, I explained as clearly as possible in the edit-comment. Since you have brought it here, you are evidently one of the (extremely few) people who think that tagging every single occurrence of Quenya in an article all about it is worth doing, so I repeat my suggestion that you might like to fix the "problem" that you have raised. I don't think it a problem at all: the article is properly tagged in the infobox, and the subject of the article is unambiguously Quenya, so tagging every instance (we don't wikilink every word, now, do we) seems like ridiculous overkill. But hey, let's compromise: you're a busy person: take a month, and if it's still not "fixed", I'll remove the tag then, on the assumption that neither you nor anybody else thinks the task worth doing. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:58, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Tagging non-English text is required by MOS:LANG and MOS:FOREIGNITALIC. If you think that this is incorrect, then this is not the appropriate place to voice that concern. Take it up on those pages. This is not comparable with wikilinking since that runs counter to MOS:OVERLINK while tagging all foreign text is not only in line with MOS:LANG, but required by it. Your personal feelings of what is enough are irrelevant here since there is a clear standard of accessibility that must be met. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 14:09, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

You're hardly making the page more accessible by "welcoming" all visitors for the next decade with your introductory mega-tag. Bye, I've had enough of this time-wasting. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:22, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

The page being welcoming is hardly a concern, we don't remove Template:citation needed because it is unfriendly, we remove it because the issue is resolved. The page has an issue. You and anyone else are free to ignore the notice, but as long as the issue persists it should be categorized as such. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 14:38, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

I usually agree. I myself have spent a lot of time tagging Welsh language in English Wikipedia articles because it helps text-to-voice software to correctly pronounce words for those who are visually impaired. However, will a text-to-voice reader be able to correctly pronounce Quenya? It is, after all, a conlang with no real-world speakers. – Dyolf87 (talk) 11:11, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Screen readers, although very important to consider, are not the only consideration for language tagging. You can see more at Template:Lang/doc#Rationale. However really this isn't the place to discuss this. If you feel that conlangs or languages with few speakers should be exempt from this accessibility guideline the appropriate place to take that up is really on WP:ACCESSIBILITY. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 13:59, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Template:Lang or Template:Transl? It's not that Latin alphabet is native to the language, although it may be the most frequent. --Error (talk) 17:02, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

That is getting terribly academic, and if you read the above you'll see what I think of the templates anyway. Tolkien wrote Quenya in more than one alphabet. Feel free to tweak the templates as you please. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:21, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Stress

The section talking about stress is very short and contains no examples. Seeing as this section closes by stating that syllable weight is important in Quenya verse, I think this needs to be addressed (with citations where possible). – Dyolf87 (talk) 11:05, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

IPA for 'Quenya' correct?

I'm wondering if the IPA for the word Quenya is actually correct. Does ⟨qu⟩ represent /kʷ/ or /kʷw/? After all, [kʷ] isn't the same as [kw] nor is it a [k] with a [w] off-glide, it's a [k] with rounded lips. – Dyolf87 (talk) 12:29, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Tolkien doesn’t use IPA, so the matter is a bit complicated but in Parma Eldalamberon 22, p. 66 he tells us: “q (kw) consists of a lip-rounded k̊ followed by a partly unvoiced w-offglide (more marked medially than initially)” (the ring above k might be Tolkien’s way to represent roundness, I doubt its the devoicing diacritic the IPA uses). In IPA that would be something like [kʷw̥w], but I really wouldn’t be that narrow. (This quote is from the text Qenya Spelling from the late 1930s, but many of the ideas also survive in later concepts) Lammengollon (talk) 11:50, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

So are we saying that /kʷw/ would be a more accurate IPA rendering of Tolkien's description than simply /kʷ/? – Dyolf87 (talk) 11:18, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I’m saying that the realization is [kʷw̥w] but I don’t think there is a problem with assuming it’s underlying /kʷ/ (see Help:IPA#Brackets if you aren’t familiar with the difference) For one that’s the analysis inherent to the Tengwar distinction of the calma- and quessetéma. I think there is a note somewhere in PE19 (I can’t find it right now) that long vowels are permitted before kw, ty (but before other consonants they are not). having aid that, analyzing it as /kw/ should work as well. Lammengollon (talk) 12:15, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

And what about the [n.j]? The problem I see here is that I'm pretty sure Tolkien describes ⟨ny⟩ as [ɲ] (maybe [ɲj]) rather than [nj], in which case surely the syllable break cannot conceivably be between the [n] and [j]? – Dyolf87 (talk) 05:11, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

For the introduction I would suggest [ˈkʷwɛɲja]

• QU “consists of a lip-rounded k̊ followed by a partly unvoiced w-offglide (more marked medially than initially)” [Qenya Spelling, PE22:66] I‘d read that as implying “initially less marked but still existing”, so I would keep the separate w but including the ”partly unvoiced” is probably a too narrow transcription for the intro.
• E as [ɛ]. AppE has “were”, RP [wɜː(ɹ)], but it’s consensus that this is not the sound Tolkien meant to describe, such a vowel system could hardly be described being “of normal kind”, perhaps RGEO contains a better example.
• NY as [ɲj] per “n in ny is palatal n but followed (cf. ty) by a y-offglide, more marked medially (where ny counts as a group), less so initially.” [Qenya Spelling, PE22:66] or [nj] per “In ñy [=ŋj] ñ [= ŋ] was not lost, but as in the other similar groups became dentalized. Thus ŋy > ny (with a sound as in English new [in RP [njuː]])” [Outline of Phonology, PE19:74, comments are mine]. Since the former is the clearer statement, I’d prefer it here. In the second quote, perhaps Tolkien used “dental” just as “fronted compared to velar” and it’s still realized as a palatal? As for the syllable break, the cluster is probably ambisyllabic to some extent, so I would just not opine on the question.
• A as [a] “father”: [AppE] RP [fɑːðə(ɹ)], but this is perhaps not a reliable way to tell the exact quality of Quenya, that’s just the one a that English has to describe a five vowel system. Personally, I think Quenya a is unmarked for backness, but I don’t think thats written anywhere we could cite (unless Wikipedia accepts this).

Lammengollon (talk) 14:21, 26 August 2022 (UTC)