* A single illustration may serve. Tolkien decided that a primitive ‘root’ LIŘI had survived almost unchanged in Qenya as liri-, the stem of a verb meaning ‘to sing’. By adding various noun-forming suffixes, it also produced liritta, ‘poem, lay, written poem’, and lirilla, ‘lay, song’. However, the past tense was lindë, apparently formed by inserting an ‘infix’, -n- (a morphological change), which combined with the original -ř- shifted to -nd- (a phonological change). But lindë acted as a stem in its own right, adding a suffix to produce lindelë, ‘song, music’, or losing its unaccented final syllable for lin, ‘musical voice, air, melody, tune’. It also appears in compounds with other Qenya words as lindorëa, ‘singing at dawn’ (applied especially to birds), and lindeloktë, ‘singing cluster’, the name for the laburnum (where we see the semantic process of metaphor at work). All these transformation-types have their equivalents in real-world languages.