cen- ("k")vb. "see, behold", future tense cenuva ("kenuva") "shall see" in Markirya. Imperative cena ("k"), VT47:31.Also #cen = noun "sight" as the final element of some nouns (*apacen, tercen, q.v.) Compare the root KHEN-, KEN-, KYEN- "look at, see, observe, direct gaze" (VT45:21)
Quenya
man cenuva lumbor ahosta?
Who shall see the clouds gather?
Changes
- Man kenuva lumbor na-hosta? → Man kenuva lumbor ahosta? “Who shall see the clouds gather?” ✧ MC/222
Element in
- Q. Markirya “The Last Ark”
Elements
Word Gloss man “who, who; [ᴹQ.] what” cen- “to see, behold, look, to see, behold, look, *perceive” lumbo “cloud; gloom, dark, shade, cloud, [ᴱQ.] dark lowering cloud; [Q.] gloom, dark, shade” a- “infinitive prefix” hosta- “to gather (hastily together), collect, assemble, pile up” Variations
- Man kenuva lumbor na-hosta? ✧ MC/222
- Man kenuva lumbor ahosta? ✧ MC/222
cen-
see, behold
cenya
verb. see, perceive
tunta-
see, notice, perceive
tunta- "see, notice, perceive", pa.t. túne (QL:95)
véla
verb. see
véla (2) vb. "see" (Arct); present/continuative tense of a verbal stem #vel-? The context of the sentence where it occurs ("till I see you next") suggests that this is "see" in the sense of "meet".
>> yomenië
a-
see
a- (2) a prefix occurring in the Markirya poem (Tolkien first used na-, then changed it). It may be prefixed to verbal stems following a noun that is the object of sense-verbs like "see" and "hear" when the verb it is prefixed to describes what happens to this noun, as in man cenuva lumbor ahosta[?] (changed from na-hosta), "who shall see the clouds gather?" (hosta = "gather").
The twenty-third line of the Markirya poem (MC/222). The first word is man “who” followed the future tense of cen- “to see”. The object of the phrase is the subordinate clause lumbor ahosta “clouds gather”, with the plural of the noun lumbo “[dark] cloud” followed by the infinitive of the verb hosta- “to gather”. The prefix a- in ahosta marks the infinitive as an object of the primary verb “see” rather than its subject.
Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:
> man cen-uva lumbo-r a-hosta = “✱who see-(future) cloud-(plural) (object)-gather”
Conceptual Development: In the first draft, Tolkien used na- for the object-prefix, which he retained initially in the second draft before changing it to a- (MC/222).