Counting in Sindarin

Does anyone know numbers in Sindarin? I could only find one (min) in the dictionary.

Here is one through ten for you.

• min¹ “one”
• minui “first”
• tâd “two”
• tadui “second”
• neledh “three”
• nelui “third”
• canad “four”
• canthui “fourth”
• leben “five”
• levnui “fifth”
• eneg “six”
• enchui “sixth”
• odog “seven”
• othui “seventh”
• tolodh “eight”
• tollui “eighth”
• neder “nine”
• nedrui “ninth”
• pae “ten”
• paenui “tenth”

Wow! Thank you so much!

If you wanted to make, say, 18, would you say paetolodh? Or paetollui? Or is it another word completely?

pae-a-tholodh "ten and eight"

Thank you!

I do not think pae-a-tholodh is the best option. (Disclaimer: very little is actually attested (i.e. found in Tolkien's own notes) when it comes to numbers in Sindarin, so most of the following is extrapolated.)

tl;dr: I would recommend tolob or paedolodh for "eighteen".

There are exactly two numbers above 10 attested in the Sindarin corpus: minib "eleven" and ýneg "twelve". The latter is not helpful for figuring out how other numbers are formed, because it has its own special derivation (it essentially means "two sixes"). So insofar as numbers attested in Sindarin go, we only have minib to go off of, which is not the best foundation because it is not inconceivable for 11 (and 12) to behave different from higher numbers - see English eleven, twelve vs. thirteen, fourteen, etc. This slight uncertainty is why I am not going to say that pae-a-tholodh is wrong, because there is a chance that it could be right - but IMHO that chance is slim.

We do have another source of information though, and that is Quenya, where the -teen numbers are well attested. In fact, we can see that S. minib is a direct cognate of Q. minque, both deriving from Common Eldarin ✶minikwē. This is informative, because Quenya's minque is formed similarly to higher attested -teen numbers: nelque "13", lepenque "15", etc., all formed with -que. Since Sindarin has minib as an equivalent to Quenya's minque, it stands to reason that other numbers would also be cognates.

This is not the only valid option, however. Quenya, in fact, has a second attested series of -teen numbers, e.g. quainel "13", quaican "14", quailepen "15", etc. Here the first element quai- is a derivative of the word for "10" and a cognate to Sindarin pae(n). Based on this, Sindarin might also have this alternate series of numbers. It is also possible, however, that Sindarin retained only one of them, or a mixture of both; it is also technically possible that this alternate series is a Quenya innovation that never occurred in Sindarin at all. I leave it up to the readers to make up their own mind here.

Without going into the details of the derivations, here are the reconstructed numbers following from the discussion above (attested words in bold):

11 - minib / paevin

12 - ýneg / paedad

13 - neleb / paenel

14 - canab / paegan

15 - lebemp / paeleben

16 - eneph / paeneg

17 - odoph / paenodog

18 - tolob / paedolodh

19 - nederph / paeneder

These forms are, to the best of my knowledge, generally accepted in the Neo-Sindarin community.

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Unrelated to the above, two notes on the ordinal numbers provided by Celebrinor above (ordinals = first, second, third, etc.):

First, note that specifically "1st", "2nd", and "3rd" also have archaic forms main, taid, nail, respectively. The forms minui, tadui, and nelui are the result of later regularisation.

Secondly, and more importantly, there's a nuance regarding the words for "fourth", "sixth", and "eighth" which mustn't be ignored. This has to do with the historical development of a specific type of consonant clusters and the spelling conventions surrounding them. I won't dive into the full details, but what's important here is internal consistency. In the list provided by Celebrinor above, the forms canthui and enchui are inconsistent with tollui. Below are the possible internally-consistent sets - pick one and don't mix them. The first set is what I would recommend using.

• cannui, engui, tollui

• canthui, enchui, tolthui