Article plural (in), nasal mutation for Gwedhron n. ally, one bound by oath + plural Final i-affection o → y = wedhryn, passive participle covannen v. “met”. When a noun is used as the subject of a sentence, it precedes the verb. So, there should be mutation for covannen correct? Also if I wanted it to be The gathering allies would it be I-GOVADOL WEDHRYN using the -ol suf. “continuative participle”?
In “the allies gathered,” do you intend “gathered” as a predicate or an adjective? I assume the former but I’m not sure. :)
Covannen is the correct verb form if “gathered” is an adjective. If “gathered” is a predicate, the verb cova- “to gather” needs to be conjugated to the third person plural > covanner.
Some other notes:
Thank you once again Gwilithiel. You are correct. :) Not knowingly intend to use it as a predicate. I guess I had to think of it as in a sentence with "Gathered" as Adjective it would be "The gathered allies" and as a Predicate it would be "The allies gathered". I had to look up the rules for third person plural lol. I don't know where I got covad, I think I got confused when I was reading out the -ol suf. “continuative participle”.
A few comments.
The verb cova- “to come together, meet; to gather, assemble” is intransitive, therefore its past tense form would be covast(t), 3rd person plural covasser; covanner I would say is likely ungrammatical.
There is some debate on whether or not active participles agree in number with the noun they modify. The sole example of a present participle attached to a plural noun in the entirety of the late Elvish corpus (both Quenya and Sindarin) does not have plural agreement, so there is no strong case for either approach.
A technical point (somewhat pedantic of me, admittedly): numbers or not adjectives, they are quantifiers, and need not behave like adjectives (as indeed they do not).
So “the allies gathered” = iñ-gwedhryn covasser, “the gathering allies” = iñ-gwedhryn govol or iñ-gwedhryn gevyl as mentioned, and “the gathered allies” = iñ-gwedhryn govassen (lenited passive participle of cova-).
Again a plethora of knowledge Ellanto. More for my notes. -sser is an intransitive pronominal suffixes for (they) so in essence it is the allies (they) gathered. Just curious though could it not be covas confused on the st? Sorry for all the questions just trying to learn as I do all this small translations. Could you point me in the right direction so I a can read more about it.
Thanks so much Ellanto! I completely forgot about transitive vs. intransitive verb past tense conjugations. But I am just a student after all. :)
Ufgor -
-st is the intransitive past tense suffix used for derived verbs (i.e. verbs whose dictionary form ends in a-). On its own it is often shortened to -s, hence in 3rd person singular it could be either covas or covast.
Since the subject of the verb in this case is plural, the bare form cannot be used, and you need to use the 3rd person plural form (3rd person is the one to use for all cases where the subject is stated explicitly). When attaching a suffix after the past tense -st, it becomes -sse-, thus covasser.