Pleonasm after "you" (Quenya)

Tom Bombadil #439

If someone would like to say "you" and add a noun which describes who/what you are, what will he/she have to do? Is it like in English, where it is just necessary to say "you" and the noun?

Take for example "How could you Greeks handle a number system without zero?" or "How do you people handle (...)?". Could that simply be "Manen le mor mahtea (...)?"? That sounds too easy to me ...

PS. Basically this question could be asked more generall: Are there any known precedents of pleonasm, or some very self-evident theories about their possible application?

Paul Strack #461

We don’t really have a large enough sample size to answer questions like this. We only have a few hundred attested phrases, barely enough to puzzle out basic grammar, much less idiomatic usage.

What I’ve seen is that, in practice, most people lean on the idiomatic usage of their native languages when writing Neo-Quenya.

Ríon Gondremborion #462

It's sort of the same case as with filler words: Quenya slang is something we cannot predict for certain. For all we know, fully developed Ñoldorin Quenya may not even had had filler words/slang aside from a few interjections: Tolkien put forth the Ñoldor as having a love of experimenting with many things, including their language (take for example the fact that it was a political conflict over the change of "th" to "s").

Unless Tolkien wrote up a few notes on how an actual Quenya conversation may have occurred we cannot say anything for certain: audiotapes of adolescent elves would be useful but I doubt they exist (tbh it'd be hilarious to hear a recording of teenage Galadriel insulting her brothers).

Tom Bombadil #464

Or her uncle. Yes, that would be funny ... and useful too.

But hear two last ideas:

At first: Wouldn't it be right to translate wrong English into wrong Quenya?

Secondly: It sounds awful, but we could use relative pronouns. "You people" could be "Elle i naille mor", couldn't it?

Paul Strack #465

There is a difference between “bad English” and “colloquial English”. Saying “how do you people do this?” is colloquial English. It’s not “wrong” it’s just less formal. Saying “how people liking you are be doing such things” is bad English. It sound like you are a foreigner who doesn’t really know how to form English sentences. Or more accurately, like a foreigner applying the idioms of your native language to English.

Since we know so little about ordinary daily speech in Quenya, most attempts at “colloquial” or “informal” Quenya are going to sound like “bad Quenya”, not “informal Quenya”.