Creating personal names from adjectives in Quenya

Silmalassë #3098

Hello,

I'm working on a project of converting real-life personal names into Quenya, by creating a Quenya name with the same meaning as the personal name. A lot of the names I'm working with have a meaning that is just an adjective, such as "beautiful". My understanding, though, is that just an adjective is not an acceptable name in Quenya, and I would need to do one of (at least) two things.

  1. I can add a noun of some sort to the meaning, like "person" or "woman". So Alba, meaning "white, bright" can't just be named Fana, but she could be something like Fanaheri "white lady."

  2. I can turn the adjective into an abstract noun, as with Ancalime and Vanimelde. This works nicely with three-syllable adjectives, but is less satisfying with tw0-syllable adjectives. Also, I've only seen this used with feminine names, so while I could convert Alba to Quenya this way, I'm not sure how to convert Albus.

Does anyone have any other rules of thumb I could use?

(Also, if someone could tell me how to insert letters with diacritical marks here, I would be grateful.)

Thank you!

elluenda #3100

Hi! I've been playing around with making names with friends in Quenya for a while! If you like simple adjectival names, you can add an agental suffix like -mo, -ion, -iel, -r(o) (thats an older one), or additional words to finish it off like gem or flower or tree, based on the person's temperament. Some of the suffixes are specifically gendered, some of them are not.

As far as using diacritic marks, this is fairly easy to do on mac where you just hold the vowel key down and it pops up a selector for the marks. For pc, you will need alt codes: you hold down the alt key and enter four numbers. á is alt-0225, for example.

Ellanto #3102

Hey Silmalasse!

You may be interested to know that a similar project was undertaken by Fiona Jallings some time ago, you can find a number of names she analysed and translated here. You can also learn from her methodology.

I should note that Ancalime and Vanimelde are not abstract nouns. Ancalime is a feminised form of the adjective, which I suppose could perhaps be seen as a feminine agental formation; I am not convinced that this is something an Elf would consider to be a suitable name though (note that the bearer of the name was not an Elf herself). Vanimelde was not an Elf either, but this one can work as an Elvish name because it is a compound (with two possible interpretations: "fair-beloved" or "fair-elf/elven-fair"), again feminised.

As elluenda mentioned you can use a variety of agental suffixes, that can be attached to verbs (e.g. Þerinde), to nouns (e.g. Curumo), or adjectives (e.g. Maitimo).

Here are some of the attested agental suffixes. Check out the "Element In" section for each of them to see how they are used; it may be that some carry slightly different connotations, or cannot be used the same way as the others.

I hope this helps!