User:Sage/PQ/-rô

From Tolkien Gateway

-rô and -ro are masculine endings in Primitive Elvish which indicate agentival formations[1] or just masculine endings.

Its feminine counterpart was -rî, -rê.

-rô was usually suffixed to a word root with or without n-infixion, and produce the word. The short form -ro is used after a suffixed stem-vowel; a possible exception to this was kwentro instead of *kwetro or *kwentrô. In a few cases, it seems to be suffixed to a verb stem.

The ending was frequently extended with -ondô, like lansrondo, kalro-ndo.

Etymology

Perhaps it is related to sô, so "he". In later Quenya, the sound r is related to s and it's possible that this connection existed even back in Primitive Elvish.

-rô was perhaps related to -nô, another coexisting agentival ending and the two were perhaps sometimes interchangeable, as seen with the alternate forms stabrô/stabnô.

Definitely it contains the simple masculine ending -ô, -o, also often having agentival meaning.

Derivatives

In Quenya (and likely also in Telerin) -rô/-ro were to be seen as the ending(s) -ro/-r, since the final short vowels of Primitive Elvish were lost, and the long vowels were shortened.

In Sindarin things were a bit more complicated, as the final vowel was lost in all cases; this bought a final -r adjacent to a consonant (eg. tamrô > *tamhr) and as a reaction, a vowel evolved between them to make the word pronounceable, resulting thus in the ending -or[2] (hence *tamhr > tavor).

In other cases, the extended form -rondô was preferred in the Sindarin branch, which allowed the word preserve the ending -ron.

Examples

Hypothetical examples

The Primitive words below are unattested but can be easily deduced by Quenya and Sindarin words. Note however it's possible that most of these words did not exist in Primitive Elvish but were coined later; eg. in early Quendya or Old Sindarin.

Finally, there are some words whose forms suggest that their stem is verbal, not the sundocarme; again, it's possible that these words were coined later and did not exist in Primitive Elvish:

Words that do NOT contain -rô

See also

Other agentive suffixes are

References

  1. ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The War of the Jewels p.371
  2. ↑ http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/sindarin.htm#syllables
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