elyë

even thou

elyë pron. "even thou", emphatic 2. person sg. pronoun (Nam, RGEO:67, VT43:26, 27, 28, 30)

elyë

pronoun. thou (emphatic polite)

lye

thou/thee, you

lye pron. "thou/thee, you", 2nd person sg. formal/polite (corresponding to familiar/intimate tye, q.v.) (VT49:36) It seems the original stem-form was le (VT49:50), distinct from de as a plural "you", but when initial d became l and the forms threatened to fall together, le was apparently altered to lye by analogy with the ending -lyë and the emphatic pronoun elyë. Stressed lyé (VT49:51). For lye as object, cf. nai Eru lye mánata "God bless you" (VT49:39). Allative lyenna "to you, upon you" (VT49:40-41). Compare the reflexive pronoun imlë "yourself, thyself", q.v. (it did not have to be *imlyë, for the corresponding pl. pronoun indë "yourselves" is distinct anyhow).

ellë

came

ellë vb. "came", pl. eller with a plural subject (MC:215; this is "Qenya"; in later Quenya, ellë could be the emphatic pronoun "you", pl., corresponding to singular elyë "thou" at least in the conceptual phase where -llë was the ending for plural "you".)

aistana elyë imíca nísi

blessed art thou amongst women

The third line of Aia María, Tolkien’s translation of the Ave Maria prayer. This is a declarative statement. The first word aistana “blessed” is the predicate. The second word elyë “thou” is the subject, the emphatic form of the pronoun lye “you (polite)”. The last two words are the prepositional phrase imíca nísi “among women”, the latter being the plural of nís “woman”. As in the second line, there is no Quenya equivalent of the English word “are (art)” in the final version of the prayer.

Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:

> aistana elyë imíca nís-i = “✱blessed [art] thou among woman-(plural)”

Conceptual Development: The first two versions of the prayer used manna for “blessed” instead of aistana. Tolkien considered several different prepositional elements for English “among”: mil (I deleted), mi (I-II), mitta (III deleted), mika (III) before settling on imíca (IV).

In version I-II, he used another word for “women”: nínaron, apparently genitive plural of an otherwise unattested word nína. In version I, he considered and deleted many variants before settling on nínaron. I’ve omitted them from this discussion because they appear nowhere else, and including them would obscure the development of the phrase. For further details, see VT43/27, 31.

| |  I  | II |III|IV| | |elye|manna|aistana| |{manna na >>}|na manna|nalye|elye| |{mil >>}|mi|{mitta >>} mika|imíca| |[various >>]|nínaron|nísi|