Archaeology in Sindarin?

Greetings all!

I hope I do not bother anyone by asking for some guidance here. I am a long time Lord of the Rings fan and when I was young I did try for a while to learn Sindarin but I never could figure it out. Alas, my time for Sindarin is taken now by other matters so I turn to you for help.

I am an archaeologist by trade and lately in the field I have been misplacing my tools and such in large projects. My crew mates all have ways of marking their equipment to keep track. I figure it is time for me to follow suit and I figure why not do in Sindarin Tengwar?

So my idea is to create a phrase that works as a sort of "tag" in Sindarin Tengwar that I can attach to my equipment. Obviously, I would like it to be archaeological in nature and to be accurate to the language. So I started poking around and found a few words I might be able to use. I'd like to keep it in the shorter side as I don't always have much room.

First question: Is there anyway to imply archaeology in the language as such a mark? Such as "history", "cultural", "dig" or "artifact" ? Or perhaps something with burials, tombs, and graves? Or "Artifact Seeker" for a laugh haha. Second: I found two words that might be along what I'm thinking. "Rosta-" and "Cef" for excavate and soil. Is excavate used the way I'm thinking it is? To dig? Would these two combined (rostacef?) be grammatically correct? [To] Dig Earth? And Three: where would be the best place to translate the final phrase into Tengwar? Some of these sites seem ... off.

Thank you so much in advance!

Using rosta- by itself wouldn’t work. You want an agental form, e.g. English “digger” vs. “dig”. In Sindarin the agental form of rosta- might be rostaron or rostron. Normally the modifier follows the modified element in Sindarin, so rostrongef, but I like the sound of cevrostron myself better. Note that f at the end of a Sindarin word represents the sound “v”, which is why it becomes cev- as the first element in a compound. As the second element, it undergoes soft mutation which is why the c becomes g

As for a Tengwar Transcriber, I prefer Glaemscribe, but Tencendil is also good. They produce the same result.

www.jrrvf.com

www.tecendil.com

Actually, if you want to keep it short, you want wanted to use the Tengwar General Use mode rather than the Mode of Beleriand

www.jrrvf.com

www.tecendil.com

Thank you so very much to the both of you!

• Regarding cevrostron, what would be translated out to? "Soil digger?"

• And just to make sure before I set my heart on any one thing, would there be any other way to express archaeology in Sindarin? Again via some combo of "history", "cultural", "dig" or "artifact" or what have you etc? Or perhaps something with burials, tombs, and graves?

• Is there a way to say "Digger of history" or "History digger"?

The cevrostron roughly means “soil excavator”. There is a word pennas for “history” but that is in the narrative sense, since it is derived from pent “tale”. It’s probably not appropriate for archaeology.

There is a word haudh for “grave, tomb”, so haudhrostron “tomb excavator” is another possibility. The word haudh originally referred to burial mounds, so it’s a good fit for archaeology.

@Paul Strack: *cevrostron should either be *cevrothron or *cevrostor. And only a few late (and mostly Mannish) formations have following modifiers in compound form, so this word is more in tune with a larger number of examples.

Ugh, Elaran is correct: str > thr in Sindarin. I had a brain hiccup when I wrote the original post. I even wrote about this phonetic change a few months ago. It should be -rothron or -rostor as he said.

Thank you! I very much like haudhrostron as it has that vibe of archaeology and I have dug burials before. So with the corrected str > thr, it would be haudhrothron or haudhrostor? What is the difference between them?

The difference is simply two different agental suffixes, -(r)on vs. -or. Like English “-er” vs. “-ist”: digger vs. cyclist.

In most cases we don’t know which agent suffixes go with which verbs, so we have some freedom to chose. Pick whichever sounds best to you.

Actually no ... there is a difference. -(r)on is properly a masculine suffix, vs. feminine -(r)il, whereas -or is gender neutral.

Like English, however, the “masculine” suffix can be used for gender neutral words as well. Compare English “master” vs. “mistress”, but neutral “digger”