Contribution “Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!” by Gwilithiel

Thanks for contributing to Parf Edhellen!

This already looks quite good, only a couple of things left to fix before publishing:

• There is something wrong with the translation in the gloss for the second verse. You have split “Ride now, ride now!” and “Ride to Gondor!”, which makes the translation switch from the top to the bottom of the gloss.
• pothatha is a bit questionable, Sindarin tends to avoid double th/dh: Hadhathang → Hadhafang/Havathang, úthaeth → úthaes/úsaeth, so I would suggest ?pothasa (though this being a grammatical ending might make things more complicated?)
• Lastly, I’d suggest to spell na ‘Ondor with a capital letter, that’s the usual practice for mutated proper nouns, cp. Caras i·Ngelaidh instead of Caras i·nGelaidh.

Gilruin · gilruin

I don't think pothatha dissimilating into pothasa is likely. Sindarin disfavours intervocalic [s], and Tolkien's example with úthaeth > úthaes had the úsaeth option struck out, probably for this very reason.

I think in cases like this, when the normal dissimilatory process of [θ] > [s] can only result in an intervocalic [s], the solution is what we see in Haðathang > Havathang/Haðafang where the dental fricatives become labial instead (and of course [ð] cannot dissimilate into [z] in any case).

That being said, I don't think any dissimilatory process is likely in this particular place. As you noted, this is not a case of derivational morphology, but of inflexional morphology and part of the normal conjugational paradigm for this verb. It is not impossible, of course, but we have no examples to tell us one way or another as far as I know. I would assume that preserving the verb stem intact would take priority over dissimilating, and preserving the future suffix intact would take even higher priority due to analogical levelling.

So I'd say pothatha is still the likeliest form, with pophatha being the likeliest dissimilated alternative, if dissimilation would happen (though admittedly the lack of any attested forms with p...p(h) makes me slightly wary of this one as well).

Thank you both for the feedback! I believe I have fixed everything that you mentioned. Let me know if there is anything else I need to do.