Hey all!

In Unfinished Tales, there is a short story called 'The Faithful Stone' about Aghan, one of the Drúedain, and he has a few lines of spoken text which end with:

"Alas! If some power passes from you to a thing that you have made, then you must take a share in its hurts."

I'd love to be able to translate this into one of the languages that might be applicable to the time or place of the story, but I'm having little luck given how small this niche is. After a bit of research, there is a named language used by the Drúedain, Drúadan, but its corpus seems to be only three words — not too helpful. The other character in this story, Barach, is one of the Folk of Haleth who had their own Mannish language of Halethian, though this seems to be just as limited apart from several names. The Folk of Haleth also used Sindarin in their dealings with elves, so that might be another option for me.

SO!

All of that being said, I am wondering if anyone has any experience in or advice for the use of very small languages like Drúadan or Halethian. There must be dozens of these smaller languages in the Legendarium, and if anyone knows of any resources or explorations of these that people have done in the past, I think it would be a really interesting thing to delve into.

My other question is if anyone would be able to help me in translating that quote above into Sindarin. There are plenty of Tengwar transcription tools out there, but obviously actually translating it is a completely different ball game.

Many thanks! Fig

Unfortunately there is not enough information known about any Mannish languages (with the possible exception of Adûnaic) to reconstruct any of them to any useful extent. I vaguely recall mention of an unpublished document about Taliska, but nothing that’s available now.

Sindarin is the best I can offer; however I should note that this was a rather tricky phrase to translate, and I am not at all confident in the result.

Nae! Pi maes curu laetha ed len na nad i agórel, eth moe allen geded maes i-naeg dín.

Literal translation: “Alas! If a portion of skill/power crosses out of you to a thing that you made, then you must take a portion of its pain(s).”

Here I reconstructed maes “portion, handful” as a cognate of Q. masse, but I am not entirely confident in the derivation since this is a tricky case and I don’t have my computer with me. Additionally I reconstructed laetha- “cross” as a cognate of Q. lahta-, but there is some debate on the semantics and roots of words relating to “cross”…

So take all of this with a grain of salt.