question for those who have some quenya

[arethinn]

Is it more usual to say essenya ná, "my name is", estan imne, "I name myself" (I couldn't find a verb for "call" in this sense), or nán, "I am"? All of these are valid in English, of course, although they are used in different ways (particularly "I name myself" carries a connotation that it is a deliberate act with some specific meaning to the name, and "I call myself" sounds like something temporary, or dissembling, not wanting to tell a real name), so I wonder if these wordings are all equal in Elvish, or how they stand in relation to each other if not.

Comments

[michiexile]

I am pretty certain that the available canonical quenya corpus doesn't give enough information to answer the question.

Thus, it'd end up being up to whatever reconstruction you want to use. These come in very many flavours - LARP-languages, Tolkienist reconstructions, pseudo-elfish reconstructions or just funky conlangs - and with very varying loyalty to Tolkiens corpus. But the kind of pragmatism you're asking is most probably an artefact of the reconstructor more than anything else.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

So, "we don't know if any one is better, so use what you like"? I can dig it. ;) Often with Elvish I have been unsure of whether I can put words in a certain order or not, for example, so usually I have gone by "what sounds better or more musical?" since I think that would be a value in Elvish language.