Translation check

Hi everyone,

I've been fascinated with the Elvish ever since I've started watching Lord of The rings with my father. Next summer I will marry a guy that shares my love for fantasy and we want to have a message in Elvish engraved on the outside of our rings. I am just trying to do some translations in Quenya (exilic) and would like to know if I'm doing it right. Currently (still have to check with my fioncé) I have following scentence: I will love you for eternity - Meluvan tye tenn’ oio

I could also use some tips on how to get this to the correct Tengwar script because the online translators don't seem to give the same result as this site nor realelvish.net

apparantly the tengwar did not show up, I came up with this: ibb.co

I've got an extra one as we're still nog sure what to use: Two rings to show our love and in eternity bind us - Cormar satto tanien melmenqua ar oiosse nutien me ibb.co

Especially with Sindarin, I prefer receiving translation requests rather than feedback requests, since otherwise things tend to get out of hand (case in point). But Quenya is safer in that regard. Evidently so, considering that your first translation has almost no issues (other than "tenn' oio" which I would suggest replacing with tennoio). The second translation could use feedback however.

That satto is an "Adûnaic" word, not Quenya, which should be atta. And dual suffix would likely be preferable here, thus simply cormat (without atta). Continuing, there are two attestations of the first person dual inclusive suffix as "-nqu(V)" and "-ngw(V)", so using -nqua for "our (yours and mine)" is not wrong, but most Quenya experts seem to gravitate towards "-ngw(V)" forms instead, melmengwa may be preferable. Speaking of inclusive pronouns, you should consider whether it should be inclusive.

Do you imagine the phrase to be spoken by you to your spouse (and vice versa), or is it to be spoken by you two to everyone else? If the latter, the phrase should use exclusive pronouns instead, which it already does in a way, with that me at the end. The nominative/accusative form of the first person inclusive pronoun was ve (older we) but this fell out of use and more or less replaced by me (partly due to its coinciding with ve "as, like, similar"). So using me in the same line as -ngwa is not wrong, but it's not quite the only option. Also it should be met, and this dual differentiation could be enough to "resurrect" ve in the form vet (since other varieties of ve seems to be used still, only ve itself is rather archaic).

Finally, "oiossë" uses a locative suffix on an adverb, it needs fixing. I would have said "... and eternally bind us", but I'm guessing that that "in" is required for the One-ring similarity. In which case you can use oiressë instead. Now for the Tengwar transcriptions (which should not be called translations). That particular font in Tecendil does not place the tehtar correctly. Perhaps you would like the "Annatar Italic" font, made to be similar to the Ring Inscription (though there is a slight problem with it as well, the "co[rmat]" part so I fixed it manually). I will offer them in image form, here:

meluvan tye tennoio
cormat tanien melmengwa ar oiressë nutien vet

I can imagine that this took a lot more time and effort then just translating the frases indeed. But I did learn a lot more from your explenation then I would have from just getting a translation. Thank you so much for this. I used to study latin but life directed me towards science and thats what I do for a living now, diving into Elvish has rekindled my love for languages. But as you can see there's a lot of work to be done on my understanding of the grammatics. I've also been going through different dictionaries but it is not always clear to me what language the word belongs to. Like satto, which did show up in the Quenya dictionary on this site.

I also noticed that the different languages are split up in different sublanguages like vanyarin and exilic for Quenya. Makes it a bit confusing at times.

Do you generally do the transcription to Tengwar yourself or do you use a tool like Tecendil?

About "satto", I just realised, the "Adûnaic" form is actually satta. Thus "satto" is indeed Quenya, but not straightforwardly so. The real "two" in actual / canon / (Post)LotR Quenya is atta, and that "satto" is rather what Pre-LotR Quenya (from around 1920) had with the sense "both, the two". I know that the appearance of draft words without much of a disclaimer causes a lot of confusion, so I would very much like to change it, but it is not within my power to do so (as I'm the admin but not the founder). Hopefully the website will receive a new update soon enough, and (if my suggestion could be implemented exactly as I described) the users will need to select an option that says "show draft / non-canon words" to be able to view entries that should best be avoided.

I would say that, if this was your first attempt, it was quite good. The fact that it was a Quenya translation helps, since it doesn't require learning about extensive mutation rules that govern Sindarin grammar, but still most of it was fine. If you would like to continue your studies, I recommend joining Vinyë Lambengolmor, a discussion, study, and practice group for Quenya and Sindarin, with members like David Salo, Helge Fauskanger, and more (alongside beginners to whom we are always happy to help). As for Tengwar, my usual approach to transcriptions is a mix. I do use tools like Tecendil, but sometimes they yield undesirable results due to a bug or some other problem, so then I edit the result manually to correct it, which was the case here.