Origin
According to the Elvish tale Cuivienyarna:
" Imin, Tata and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn. And the next thing they saw was their destined spouses lying asleep on the green sward beside them. Then they were so enamoured of their beauty that their desire for speech was immediately quickened and they began to ‘think of words' to speak and sing in."The stars were the first thing seen by the three Elves as they awoke. The first spoken word was ele, according to Elvish legend and originally it was an exclamation "lo! behold!" in Quenderin. It gave rise to the first Elvish root ever invented: EL-, from which the Common Eldarin word ēl ('star') is derived.
In The Silmarillion (chapter 3), it is told that the Elves devised a language while living in Cuiviénen:
| “ | began to make speech and give names to all things that they perceived. Themselves they named the Quendi, signifying those that speak with voices; for as yet they had met no other living things that spoke or sang. | ” |
An important PQ word was *kwende. It was made from PQ *kwene "person" by primitive fortification of the medial n to nd. It was used in PQ only in the plural, *kwendī, with the sense "the people as a whole", sc. embracing all the three Elven clans.
Over time the Elves modified their language, adding to it words and grammatical rules to their liking. Later still the god or Vala Oromë came to them and invited them to come with him to Valinor, his marvellous land in the West.
Read more about this topic: Primitive Quendian
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)