Quettali contains a lot of Quenya-related material, and we hope it contributes to your enjoyment and learning journey. If you would like to contribute some of your time, knowledge and effort to improve this site and the materials on it, even if only in small details, please read on below for ways of doing so.
This site itself is not interactive, it has no way to post comments directly. Instead, in general, the best way to provide feedback or ask questions about Quettali is through the Vinye Lambengolmor server on Discord (often abbreviated to just VL here), specifically on the #projects > Quettali channel, but there are several channels and threads for more specific topics. You can also message me there as @chaered.
Note that any material provided for use in Quettali has to be public domain or creative commons licensed (typically CC-NC-SA 4.0), or fall under small excerpts covered by fair use, to prevent copyright infringement issues.
Here is how to:
If you find errors like typos, omissions, wrong glosses, webpage glitches, and so on, please drop a post in VL.
As a living project, Quettali has its share of unresolved open issues and ideas for improvement that are already known and may be worked on in future. You might want to see if an issue is alread in there: please see the (somewhat chaotic) Notes page.
If you have suggestions for new Neo-Quenya words that we currently lack, the best course of action is to propose them on the Discussion > #origins thread on the VL server. You can check that there is no such word yet by looking at the Search page, the Eldamo NQ word list, and Parf Edhellen.
In your post, please provide the intended language (always “Q.” for Quenya), the word category (e.g. “n.” for noun), the English gloss(es), and from what roots or other words the new word is derived. Also disambiguation for the glosses if needed; many English words can be quite ambiguous, especially in isolation.
The separate Discussion > #neologisms thread is similar, but has different rules for moderation and participation. Then there is the Neologism of the Day forum on VL, which has its own process.
Quettali monitors these VL channels for new words, and well as neologisms appeaing on the Eldamo site. For suggestions for changes, additions or corrections to that site, you can post something in VL’s #Eldamo thread.
If you would like to help coin words in general that are likely to be needed, you could look at the missing Quenya words in the English most frequent words list and the Fluent Forever 625 list.
On sample text pages, under the heading “Attribution”, we generally show the author(s) of the text, the Quenya translator(s), and who reviewed the Quenya text. This information can also be listed in the “Notes” section, especially for references to people who are not active on VL.
In dictionary entry pages, at the bottom, after “Created:”, we may list who coined the word, for which project, on which site, and when. The attribution information is partial or unknown for many words. To check all the available attributions for a specific person, look them up in the Users page and follow their link.
If have additions or corrections for the attribution information, please post them on the #Quettali channel.
For humans, the best way to remenber words and understand their meaning is to see them used in the context of a sentence, rather than as entries in a list. Also, when the meaning of a word is not quite clear, or what subject and object and cases it works with, seeing it in a sentence that demonstrates its actual use can help a lot.
For this reason, one goal of Quettali is to provide enough sample text to show every dictionary word used in context at least once. Unfortunately, this goal is still far off. You can find the list of words that currently lack an example use on the Unused words page. Click on “Split by user...” to see the list for individual users.
One particular set of example sentences, aimed at Neo-Quenya words specifically (because we mostly know who coined the words, and they are mostly still around to tell us), is the NQ examples text collection. If you would like to help cover some hitherto NQ words with a fine example, please post it on the #submissions > NQ use-in-sample thread. Or of you are the coiner of an NQ word and someone posted an example there, please give it a 👍 thumbs-up response to confirm that the example correctly shows the intended use.
This site hosts a number of (Neo-)Quenya texts. They are useful to practice your reading, to provide examples of how to use the language, and to see words used in context. They stem from various sources. New texts now generally come through VL.
Sample texts are listed on the Quettali Texts page. The texts can be viewed either in a 4-column “parallel text” format (e.g. like this), or in a “narrow-screen format” optimal for reading on a phone (like this). Some texts include lexical tagging, and will let you view the text in a “word-aligned format” more suitable for study and in-depth reviewing. Some texts have multiple non-Quenya language sides to choose from, like a separate literal back-translation, or a non-English original.
If you have written a new original text in Quenya, or translated an existing one into Quenya, and would like to have it added to the collection of samples, the best process to follow is:
Since well-read Elves from the Third Age are rather a minority among the authors of Neo-Quenya sample texts, these texts stand to benefit from review by a “second pair of eyes”. Where known, the reviewer of a text will be listed as such under the “Attributions” heading of the sample text. If the notes on a text explicitly state “not reviewed yet”, presumably no review has taken place yet. For texts without either, we would have to ask the author or translator about the state of review.
Since reviewing a Quenya text, especially a longer one, can be quite a demand on your time and mental bandwidth, we are most thankful to those who would be so gracious as to lend us their efforts in this way. If you would like to act as one of these selfless individuals, please provide feedback on the VL postings for a text submitted there, in the same thread it is posted in. For any text not found on VL but shown in Quettali, you can also comment in the #Quettali thread directly.
When providing review comments, please make sure to state:
For authors or translators: please message me to add someone as a new reviewer for your text, if they provided helpful editorial feedback on it. If a text on this site needs an update, please let me know the what and where.
If you find any cool online Quenya-related sites or other resources that may be of use and interest to others, and that are not yet on the Resources page or the Videos page, please post a link and description on the #Quettali channel.
For the Crossword puzzles and the Hangman game, we use “clues” associated with the words in the quettali Quenya dictionary. Unfortunately, many words to not have an associated clue yet. If you have any suggestions for clues in this No-Clue list, please post them on the VL #Quettali channel. You can see the level we aim for (pretty simple) in the existing Clues list.
Each word in the quettali Quenya dictionary can have an assigned “semantic role”, placing it in one of the groups shown on the Semantic roles page. They are currently mainly used as a kind of fall-back clue in the Hangman game if no puzzle clue is available, and also to narrow down word lists for study; e.g. the regular Noun list will give you all nouns, but adding “?role=animal” to the URL narrows it down to just animals.
However, not all words have been classified yet, and we may need more roles to meaningfully group them. You can find the list of unclassified words on the Unknown role page.
Sample texts in Quettali can have one or more associated sound recordings, which will show up playable under the “Sound” heading. They are a great help for learning to listen to Quenya, and for poems and songs they are very useful to indicate the desired cadence. In the Sample text list, the “Aud” column counts the number of audio tracks for each sample text; if blank, the text lacks any audio tracks.
To provide an audio track for a sample text, please post it on the VL #Quettali channel, including your permission to make that recording public domain or creative commons, and with no copyrighted content (like music by others).
As a special case, the Tongue-twister page welcomes and
dares you to provide recordings for the existing set, or provide your own
for others to try their hand tongue at it!
For recordings that you cannot or do not want to release this way, or that are not a recording of a sample text being spoken or sung, or that includes video, you could instead post it somewhere else online and provide a link to that. The sample text notes can then include that link. See also Resources.
Audio is minimally processed to include it on this site: converted to MP3, normalized volume, trim silent ends, added ID3 tags (author, year, title); if you already did that, it saves time on this end.
Adding an illustration to a sample text can make it come more alive; the human (and elvish?) mind is favorably predisposed to visual content. If you have an illustration for a sample text that still lacks one, or for a sample text you would like included, please let me know on VL. A good picture can create a deeper conceptual and emotional context for how the reader interprets and enjoys the text.
A sample can include multiple pictures, and chapters can include their own. The first picture is also shown in the Quettali samples list (click it to magnify). Because pictures take more bandwidth and storage than text (by a lot), they may get scaled down to a lower resolution, under a megapixel. The only supported picture format currently is PNG (no animation).
As with text, it is important that any picture included here should be freely publicly distributable, so please do not submit anything unless it is public domain, or under a creative commons license, or you made it and are granting that right.
Please note that many on VL have expressed a (strong) dislike of the use of generative AI for producing art and text for their community of Elvish language and lore enthusiasts, so be mindful of that.
—generated by quettali version 0.33.3