A word for “supper” in the Declension of Nouns (DN) from the early 1930s, a combination of ᴹQ. ahto “maker” and ᴹQ. mat “meal” (PE21/33, 37) hence more literally “maker’s meal”, likely a reference to a meal taken after working. Given that the stem of mat “meal” is matt-, this word might be expected to have the stem form ahtumatt-, but its inflections show both single t and double tt, indicating that the historical stem might have become archaic and reduced to ahtumat- instead. Since the reduced stem is trisyllabic and ends in two light syllables, it often triggers prosodic lengthening as in genitive ahtumáto with lengthening as opposed to (archaic?) ahtumatto from the original stem ahtumatt-.
Qenya
mat-
verb. to eat
mat
noun. food, meal, meal, [ᴱQ.] meal time; [ᴹQ.] food
ahtumat
noun. supper, supper, *(lit.) maker’s meal
mattima
adjective. edible
má
noun. hand
vanima
adjective. fair
A noun glossed “food, meal” in the Declension of Nouns from the early 1930s with a stem form matt- (PE21/27), clearly based on ᴹ√MAT “eat”. Tolkien specified that as the suffix -mat, it was the basis of names for meals (PE21/32). The Qenya Lexicon of the 1910s also had ᴱQ. mat (matt-) “meal, meal time” under the early root ᴱ√MATA “eat” (QL/59).
Neo-Quenya: For purposes of Neo-Quenya I would use this word only for “meal”, and would instead use Q. matta for “food”.