ya, relative pronoun which, that: lúmesse ya firuvamme *in the hour that we shall die. Nothing can be said of the etymology of ya; the Primitive Elvish form would probably be similar. This is our first attestation of ya as a separate word in a text that is indisputably Quenya. Previously we knew ya by itself only from the Arctic sentence published in The Father Christmas Letters: Mára mesta an ni véla tye ento, ya rato nea – translated "good-bye until I see you next, and I hope it will be soon", more literally probably *"…which I hope will be soon". While this comes from a work that has few connections to Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythos (indeed a work that does not belong to Tolkien’s serious literary production at all), it has long been recognized that the "Arctic" sentence represents some kind of Quenya or "Qenya". In LotR-style Quenya, ya has up till now only been attested with a case ending; Namárië has yassen for wherein (or *in which, the ending for plural locative being suffixed to ya). Some, indeed, have assumed that ya- is simply the form the relative pronoun i (q.v.) assumes before an ending, and that ya would not appear as an independent form. This theory must now be abandoned; the manuscript before us clearly demonstrates that not only does ya appear independently but ya and i coexist as Quenya relative pronouns, both of them occurring here. This, of course, raises the question of when to use ya and when to use i. Are they interchangeable? I suspect that one would always use ya- when case endings are to be added; i is "indeclinable" in its capacity as article (LR:361 s.v. i-), and this may be true when it functions as a relative pronoun as well. But when i and ya occur by themselves, it may seem that i refers to sentients (or perhaps more generally animates), while ya refers to inanimates and situations (the Arctic sentence would be an example of the latter). In short, i vs. ya may represent a distinction roughly similar to English who vs. which, what. Another theory, still not disproved, may be that i is used when it is the subject of the following relative sentence (e.g. *Orco i tirë Elda an Orc that watches an Elf), while ya is the object (*Orco ya tirë Elda an Orc that an Elf watches).
yáve, noun fruit. As indicated above, Tolkien’s manuscript may seem to read yave with a short vowel, but since there just might be an accent merged into the letter above, we read yáve as in all other attestations of the word. These include the Silmarillion Appendix (where yávë fruit occurs as the very last entry) and the Etymologies: LR:399 s.v. yab- lists the same word with the same gloss, and the root itself is also glossed "fruit". The QL (p. 105) indicates that in Tolkien’s early "Qenya", this word appeared as yáva instead, and there was also a verb yav- bear fruit (listed in the form yavin, perhaps intended as the third person aorist; in later Quenya it would be first person instead). If such a verb was still valid in Tolkien’s later incarnations of Quenya, yáve could be seen as being basically or originally an abstract formation derived from this verb. Cf. a Quenya word like ráne straying, wandering, formed from the verbal stem ran- wander, stray (LR:383) by means of the same devices: lengthening the stem vowel and adding -e. Such abstracts may (later?) take on a more concrete meaning, denoting what is produced by the action rather than the action itself; hence the word núte, formed from the stem nut- tie, bind, does not mean tying, binding but rather bond, knot (LR:378). In a similar fashion, the meaning of yáve may have wandered from full abstract fruit-bearing to the concrete meaning fruit.
Yésus, masc. name: Jesus. As in the case of María for Mary, Tolkien’s "Quenya" form of the name seems to be based on the pronunciation of the Latin form, but spelt according to the normal Roman conventions for the representation of Quenya. The underlying Semitic form (probably something like Yêshû´, that could have been Quenyarized as *Yéhyu) may not have been considered at all, nor did Tolkien try to render it by its meaning ("Yahweh’s Salvation"). The name is not fully Quenyarized; intervocalic s would normally have become voiced to z, later becoming r in the dialect of the Noldor (e.g. olozi > olori as the plural of olos dream, UT:396; cf. our theory that aire holy, q.v., was originally meant to represent primitive *gaisi). If Yésus were a true Quenya word, it would have to represent older *Yéþus, since s altered from þ never became z > r (see nísi). But since this is not meant to be an inherited Quenya word, such diachronic considerations are irrelevant; synchronically speaking the Latin pronunciation of Jesus violates no rules of Quenya phonotax, and so it is used here. It would have been interesting to know how Tolkien would have inflected this word, though. Would we have seen *Yésuss- with double s before an ending, e.g. genitive *Yésusso or dative *Yésussen? That would follow the pattern of a noun like eques saying, dictum, which becomes equess- before an ending: hence the plural equessi in WJ:392. It is there said that this form is "analogical", evidently suggesting that very many words ending in -s doubled this sound to -ss- before endings (e.g. nissi as the more orthodox plural of nís woman; see nísi), so new words in -s tended to slip into the same pattern. Perhaps this would then also be applied to a borrowed name like Yésus, so that a phrase like "the love of Jesus" would be *Yésusso melme.