Comments by Gilruin
These are the 10 posts of 226 by Gilruin.
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Contribution “Únirna” by Miril
Thanks for contributing to Parf Edhellen!
I like this word, though it would probably be a good idea to record nirna “forced” separately. Also, depending on how old you want the word to be, it might come out as √NIDnā > ninda and I’m still pondering whether √NID or thakta- would be the preferable source ‘non-physical force’. For ‘voluntarily’ specifically I’d also like to throw nirmenen/nirmello “of/with will” based on Tolkien’s lintiénen “quickly, with speed”. I’ll ask for some other opinions.
Regarding the technical side of things, you should change the Group from “Eldamo — fan inventions” to “Neologism” since your formation doesn’t appear on Eldamo and I would encourage you to at least add links to the words mentioned, which you can do with the shorthand
[[q:ú-]], [[q|nir-]].gilruin · Gilruin
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Name translation
Don't worry, your English is fine. If I understand your explanation of the Chinese correctly, what you are asking for is almost exactly the meaning of Valandil "Friend of the angelic Powers", who in Tolkien's stories is the name of a few Lords of Men. If you don't want to use an already attested name Maiandil, Ainundil would have a similar effect (Maiar are lesser spirits compared to the Valar; collectively both groups can be referred to as Ainur).
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[Deleted]
Totally optional studying suggestion from me: I'd focus more on practicing translating sentences instead of names, it helps to put things into context. If you can't come up with sentences, usually Grimms' fairy tales are about topics where most of the words are known but the sentences remain fairly simple or can be rephrased easily (but only pick a couple of lines at a time, doing a whole story would take ages).
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[Deleted]
I would just go for Hoatal (Hoatál-), Alattal (Alattál-), Poldatal (Poldatál-) (with alta, polda respectively) where the long vowel shortens word-finally but remains long when it’s protected by further suffixes. In my opinion, we don’t need to be particularly ingenious when adapting words from the primary world, the Elves won’t get them anyways, so they should be tailored towards us humans of the Seventh Age and then simply “Bigfoot” is probably the most recognizable.
Regarding the etymology of “Sasquatch”, I don’t think we know a how to express “hairy” with negative connotations, but I suppose Hrávafindon(d-) “Wild-haired one” (← hráva, finda, -on). One could shorten it to Hávafin(d-), but I doubt that the even hráva could prevent the association with the Finweans here. Regarding woodwose, Q. Rú(atan), S. Drú(adan) “(wood)wose” definitely refers to people who are human, later even being counted among the Edain and are actually smaller then other Men, so I don’t think it’s fitting. Of course you could do something like Rútorco, Rútaurauco “Wose-troll” to combat this, but ultimately I think it’s unsuitable. “Woodman” is to unspecific for my taste, but would be Taurener, or without reference to gender Tauremo (or Taureon(d-), but I would leave that for Orome, cf. S. Tauron). Also, case suffixes should never appear in compounds (the only instance you could see one in would be Feanáro “spirit of fire”, but the consensus is that it’s best explained as a masculine name suffix). Usually you have: cirya calo “pass of light” → Calacirya “Light-pass”, ner taureo → Taurener.
To your questions: the genitive of taure is taureo, only nouns in a drop their final vowel cala → calo, for nouns in o no change is visible rauco → rauco, the rest keeps its vowels. The word rútaure as a hypothetical form should be stressed rútaure (but it would mean “wose-wood” rather than “wood-wose”), taurerú is unlikely to be a valid Quenya word, because final vowels usually shorten and Quenya tries to avoid r-vowel-r sequences.
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Upright or Upside-down — A Small Exploration of the Variants of Silmë and Essë
This is a repost from Aglardh — Upright or Upside-down which is currently down, but I hope will be available again eventually. This post is intended to make the overview available in the mean time (but will still stay up when Aglardh is working again to ensure all links keep working). Because Parf Edhellen does not accept arbitrary Tengwar text and can’t render Tengwar inside of tables, the respelling of the attestations is left out in this version.
If you have studied Tolkien’s attested Tengwar writings yourself, you probably wont get anything new from this, the distribution of silmë and essë and their respective nuquerna forms have been known in theory for quite a while now and the conclusions I draw aren’t don't add anything new. However this comes up quite frequently, so I wanted to write a slightly more extensive explanation.
Silmë and essë are special in having two variant forms: a normal or upright form an one turned upside down, known by the Quenya adjective nuquerna “reversed, (lit.) under-turned”.
- upright silmë s vs. silmë nuquerna y
- upright essë ss vs. essë nuquerna ss
In the Lord of the Rings, Appendix E Tolkien tells us about their relation:
29 [s] represented s, and 31 [ss] (with doubled curl) z in those languages that required it. The inverted forms 30 [y] and 32 [ss], though available for use as separate signs, were mostly used as mere variants of 29 [s] and 31 [ss], according to the convenience of writing, e.g. they were much used when accompanied by superimposed tehtar.
Many have derived a stronger claim from this, namely that silmë and essë always take their nuquerna forms when they carry a tehta. This is however largely unsupported by the attested examples from Tolkien.
Quenya and Sindarin
In the Classical Mode for Quenya and the General Mode for Sindarin silmë has its usual value s and essë is used for ss, because both languages don’t have a voiced z sound, at least not at the time of the narrative. Whether the upright or nuquerna form is used, appears to be largely unsystematic and is decided “according to the convenience of writing” and not as a hard rule:
DTS 20 — Namárie (Quenya, Classical Mode)
word Tengwar Attestation sinda 
lissë 
lassë (read lassi) 
yassen 
oiolossëo 
DTS 49 — King’s Letter, Third Version (Sindarin, General Mode)
Word Tengwar Attestation ennas 
estathar 
(b)ess [the b occurs before a line break] 
Elessar (Quenya) 
In the main text, there actually aren’t any examples of nuquerna forms. This might be, because in the Mode of Beleriand, a full mode for Sindarin, a sign commonly identified as silmë nuquerna (though possibly unrelated in origin) is used for y, so avoiding it in the General Mode when applied to Sindarin might be a measure to avoid confusion.
In the post scriptum however, silmë nuquerna appears once. It is unclear why Tolkien chose to use it here but perhaps the lesser line height might be the conditioning factor making the nuquerna form more convenient to write
Word Tengwar Attestation minas 
English
In the General Mode for English silmë and essë are used for s and z respectively. While essë occasionally shows up in its nuquerna form much like it does in the Elvish Modes, silmë is always upright:
Source Word Tengwar Attestation DTS 5 of Westmarch 
DTS 5 the histroy 
DTS 5 is 
DTS 5 as 
DTS 10 this is just [1] 
DTS 10 Christmas [1] 
DTS 84 best 
DTS 84 across [2] 
[1] Here e is used for “i” and i is used for “e”.
[2] Here o is used for “u” and u is used for “o”.There are no attestations of soft c pronounced like s (e. g. peace, since) in the General Mode for English. However in the English Full mode silmë nuquerna is used for soft cs:
This suggests that the English Modes are an example of the second possibility outlined by Tolkien, namely that they are “available for use as separate signs”, in this case as s and soft c respectively.
Conclusion
- If you are writing Quenya in the Classical Mode, you don’t need to use silmë and essë nuquerna in all instances where they take a tehta. You certainly can do so, but don’t need to adhere to this when you think something would look better otherwise. Especially with the acute e and the dot i there are many examples for upright silmë and essë.
- When writing Sindarin in the General Mode, it might be better to avoid silmë nuquerna due to its collision with y in the Mode of Beleriand, but it might be equally acceptable to use silmë nuquerna like in the Classical Mode. Essë and essë nuquerna can both be used interchangeably.
- When writing English in the General Mode do not use silmë nuquerna for s, it is unattested. Write s with an upright silmë in all cases and use simë nuquerna for soft s as exemplified in the English Full Mode. Essë and essë nuquerna can both be used interchangeably.
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Elvish from Amazon’s Rings of Power
Runes on Durin’s Collar
English in Angerthas
Prime-only Teaser (picture) — 6th July 2021
On Durin’s collar appears:
reading “...eathless...” probably as a part of Durin’s longer title “Durin the Deathless”. This reading is supported by glimpses in other shots of the trailers. Note that the transcriber did not use the Certh for the English diphthong ea
attested in the Book of Mazarbul.
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Gloss “oment-” by Eldamo Import created 1 miesiąc temu
I agree, Eldamo (the original source for this entry) displays it like this:
So it's a old neologism from the NQ-Wiki (which had many problematic ideas) and Paul Strack recommends to use (practically) attested omen- instead (and I agree).
Eldamo records those old problematic neologisms so it can propose a better replacement. When Parf Edhellen imports Eldamo data it unfortunately ignores all deprications and words choice suggestions.
(small note: In Earley Qenya Tolkien has a few stem verbs ending in clusters especially with qu (=kw), so I wouldn't put it beyond Tolkien to have some verbs like this. However nothing safe for neologism formation IMO)
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How to say “are” in Sindarin?
We only have one good example from Sindarin's predecessor Noldorin: lheben teil brann i annon “five foot high [is] the door” that indicates "is/are" can be left of in Sindarin and is inferred by the listener if there is no other verb (which is a construction we also know from Quenya). To make it more obvious, the word order is inverted: glyss in-eryd "white are the mountains" vs. in-eryd 'lyss "the white mountains" (this time with different word order and soft mutation) from gloss, orod
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Elvish from Amazon’s Rings of Power
Inscription on Gil-galad’s spear Aeglos
A Neo-Sindarin translation in the Mode of Beleriand
Nerdist-Article — June 30th, 2022
On the blade of his spear is written:
Gil-galad maetha maegar aith, i-orch tôl gostad helui naith, ceniel ni, di ñuruthos enethen tôl istad, Aeglos.
“Gil-galad wields a well-made spear, the orc will fear an (it’s?) icy point, seeing me, under the shadow of death will know my name: Snow-point”.- Gil-galad “Starlight, (lit.) Star of Radiance”.
- maetha- “to handle, wield, manage”.
- *maegar “well-made” ← mae “well” + soft mutated car- “to do, make”, compare constructions like fair “quick, ready, prompt” + car- → fergar “soon done”. Alternatively it might be a neologism for “sharp” derived from *maikrā, but that seems unlikely since there is an attested word maeg “sharp” already.
- aith “spear-point” (updated from N. eith). It is somewhat unusual that the adjective maegar precedes aith instead of following it, but it is possible in poetry (cf. galadhremmin ennorath “tree-tangled middle-lands”).
- i-orch “the orc” with a definite article.
- tôl gostad “will fear” ← N. gosta- “to fear excedingly”. Per PE22/168 Sindarin expresses the future with tol- “to come” and the main verb as a gerund. Tolkien exemplifies this with tolen cared “I will do”, where tolen is a otherwise unknown tense form (for the present one would expect telin based on other forms), but here the translator has decided to use tol-’s present forms.
- *helui, probably “icy, cold” ← √KHEL “ice, freeze” + -ui, an adjectival suffix.
- naith “spearhead, gore, wedge, narrow prominitory; angle”. Helui naith again shows the unusual order adjective-noun. As the phrase lacks a definite article, it means “an icy point”, but from context it’s clear that something like “it’s icy point” must be intended (even though we don’t have any evidence that Sindarin can drop possessives like this).
- ceniel “seeing”, present active participle of cen- “to see”. While Tolkien at least at some point conceived of such participles ending in -iel, the better attested formation uses -ol: cenol “seeing” (attested in it’s soft mutated form -genol in fergenol).
- ni “I, me”. In Sindarin, the pronouns can appear either with an -n in the end or without it. The evidence is a bit tangled, but a common theory is that -n marks object pronouns: ni “I”, nin “me”. As it’s clear from context that “me” is intended here, the translator doesn’t seem to follow this theory, but whichever else they assume the trigger for the -n to be, the discrepancy with tiro nin “guard[/whatch] me!” is odd.
- di ñuruthos “in dread of Death, beneath Death-horror” ← di “under” + [soft] mutated ᵑguruthos “death-horror”.
- enethen “my name” ← eneth “name” + -n “my” as seen in lam → lammen “my tongue”. It is somewhat unclear if this suffix preserved the lost ancient vowel (which in this case is not clear but might be a by comparison to Telerin’s suffix -(s)tā > -tá for verbal nouns) or just always adds -e-, but nallan “a/to/my? call [reading uncertain]” ← nalla might indicate the former, which would make enethan more likely. Most Neo-Sindarinists use a seperate possessive pronoun to avoid this problem: i eneth nín.
- tôl istad “he will know” ← ista- “to know”, again with the same analytic future as above.
- Aeglos “Snow-point, icicle”. At one point Tolkien wrote the name as Aiglos for the benefit of an English audience that would have a hard time distinguishing ai and ae. It is hard to see whether ai or ae is written in the inscription, but as Aeglos is the more proper spelling, I will assume that.
The intended meaning is close to David Salo's translation for the movies but the translation differs considerably.
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Name translation
Listing some options for the elements [Sindarin equivalents in brackets]:
- bloom/flower: loa “blooming” (though in Quenya primarily used as “year” as one cycle of growth), alalme, lós [S lûth], olos [S goloth] “inflorescence”, alma, losse, lóte, lotse [S loth] “flower”
- blonde/yellow: vaina, vanya [S gwain] “blonde”, malina [S malen] “yellow, golden” (Vanyarin tulca), laurea [S glaur, glóriel, glóren, mallen] “golden”.
There are also Q lávar “golden blossom”, S mallos “golden flower” as already existing words. One could combine these as Q Mallos (Mallóþ-), Laurelos (Laurelóþ-), Lávarmo/Loarmo..., S Mallothron, Glorloth... Tell me if there are any words in the lists above that you find particularly beautiful and want to include them, but I don’t think its useful if I write down all possible combinations.
