Help with some Sindarin translations

Galathilros #4776

Hello! I was wondering if anyone could help me translate a few phrases.

  1. "I love you". I searched it up but there's no referring translation, I searched up "love" instead but all of the results seem to be factors in a word.
  2. I know Sindarin is incomplete yet, so I would like to know a few known numbers, colours, animals in Sindarin
  3. "Fairytale". There are words for "tale", and I guess "fairy" is similar to "elf", so does that mean I have to combine them...?
  4. I already know that "a star shines on the hour of our meeting" in Quenya is "elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo", and I think the Sindarin translation is "Él síla erin e-govaned lû sîn", correct me if I'm wrong (I don't know if the words are in the right order, and I'm unsure of the spelling of the word "sîn".

Thank you!

Ellanto #4778

Hey Galathilros

I would recommend you use Eldamo as your primary dictionary. You should easily find some numbers, colours, and animals there.

However, bear in mind that without some understanding of Sindarin grammar no dictionary will really help you. To give you an example, if you see a sentence like Avannen golof, you wouldn't know that the words you need to find in the dictionary are mad- "to eat" and colof "orange" (a neologism) (the sentence means "I ate an orange"); and even after you find these words in the dictionary, you wouldn't know how to say "I will eat oranges (pl)" (Madathon gylyf).

To your questions:

"I love you" = Melin gin.

There is no attested word for "fairy tale" and we don't currently have a neologism either. However, I am not sure that such a word would even exist in Elvish. Not all human languages have a dedicated word this either. Perhaps simply using narn should suffice.

For "A star shines upon the hour of our meeting" I can offer Êl híla na lû e·govad bín.

Aldaleon #4779

This is probably a very common term to look for – I'll go ahead and add it to the dictionary tonight! 😁

As for recommending Eldamo as their primary dictionary, that does seem like a damning verdict of Parf Edhellen! I'd be happy to look into what features you think are missing from our website to improve the experience for people more junior/unfamiliar with Elvish.

Cheers!

aldaleon

Ellanto #4780

I meant no offence 😅​ It's just that Eldamo is slightly more "curated", in a way, since Elfdict also imports entries from other sources. And I'll admit that I've never used Elfdict as a dictionary that much myself, and as a consequence I am not too familiar with the layout and so I sometimes find it confusing. For example, I am not really sure why searching for gail yields (amongst other things) the word iath...

Regarding the phrase, if you're adding it to the dictionary, let me add some commentary for the sake of completeness, since this is a Neo-Sindarin phrase after all.

The most notable deviation here from previously prevalent formulations is that I lenited the verb síla-; this follows from PE23/142 §4, where Tolkien states that verbs immediately following their subjects are lenited. This statement is evidently contradicted by the example of Celebrimbor o Eregion teithant [...], but since the CEA document is otherwise largely or even entirely in line with the attested material in LotR, the working assumption for reconciling the two is that verbs only lenite after simplex subjects, i.e. subjects that do not contain adjectives and relative clauses and such. This also makes sense from a prosodic point of view, so I like this hypothesis. Looping back to "a star shines", since the subject is simplex, I lenited the verb.

The other thing to point out is that lû e·govad "the hour of the meeting" follows the theory that Sindarin juxtapositional genitive constructs behave the same was as they do in Welsh (and incidentally also in Semitic languages), in that the definite article only appears before the last element. This is generally borne out in the attested corpus. If you look for Sindarin translations of this phrase on the internet, you might come across versions where the article appears before both elements, but I believe this to be incorrect.

Aldaleon #4781

All good, I just want to make sure I'm focusing my efforts in the areas that matter!

The general idea is for the dictionary to share words that are related to what you are looking for, either by being more precise (tree → elm, spruce, fir, etc.) or linked thematically (light → bright, spark, brilliant). The results are supposed to be ordered to best match your search query though, with more expansive results being pushed to the end.

For example, I am not really sure why searching for gail yields (amongst other things) the word iath...

I looked into that specific example and it appears that iath for some reason has gail as a keyword, most likely because of cail and thangail. I'd have to look into what exactly happens during Eldamo import that causes those edges to be created.

But since the dictionary is over 14 years old, there are still some strange artifacts from when the first version was created all those years ago back when I was parsing glosses from Word and PDF documents... cases which needs correction! 😄 There is no simple way to get to those other than reviewing each odd case case.

Thanks,

aldaleon

Galathilros #4783

I had been lectured about quite a few basic Sindarin grammars and the sort, so if it's not too complex, There'll be no problem recognising the original form of the word that I'm looking for (or I could just search it up in the dictionary - handy tools after all 😄)

As for Eldamo... I looked up the words for animals at the site, but the section seems to be marked as "Noldorin", which makes me unsure, so I went here for a confirmation instead.

Thanks for the informations, especially the part about neologism! Though I though that "Êl híla na lû e·govad bín"'s "bín" could be translated as" 'wín "? Is there a difference between the two words?

Ellanto #4784

Noldorin is the conceptual precursor of Sindarin, "draft-Sindarin" if you will. It largely belongs to the 1930s-1950s, whereas mature Sindarin is later. You are right to be cautious - many Noldorin words cannot be used in Sindarin without some adaptation, due to Tolkien's conceptual changes. For example, Noldorin auth ought to be oeth in Sindarin; the difference arises due to slightly different historical phonological developments.

Feel free to ask when in doubt about a Noldorin word.

Note that whilst most Noldorin words can be adapted to Sindarin at need, the same is not true for even older conceptual stages, such as Early Noldorin (1920s, marked as ᴱN on Eldamo) and Gnomish (1910s).

Regarding bín vs. 'wín:

There are two different and mutually incompatible theories as to what the 1st person plural inclusive pronoun ("we [including you]") in Sindarin should be. Of course neither form is directly attested, so we are forced to reconstruct something.

One theory (which I believe is also the older theory) takes the attested Common Eldarin form ✶we, from which the equivalent pronoun in Quenya derives, ve. This results in the form gwe in Sindarin, and its possessive form would be gwín, lenited to 'wín.

The problem with the above derivation is that it does not fit in with the 1st person plural inclusive suffix found in a document 1969 (which is very late in Tolkien's life): -b, attested in athab. In Quenya, as well as with other pronominal suffixes in Sindarin, we always see a direct relation between the suffixes and the independent forms, but there is no straightforward way for -b to be etymologically related to gwe.

As such, an alternative theory arises. Note that -b, as mentioned, is attested in athab. This contrasts with other pronominal suffixes, where the vowel before the suffix is o (e.g. athon & athof, attested besides athab). Given this, the only reasonable etymology for this -b is from ✶-kw(e). The likely explanation is that the older ✶we is further reinforced by attaching ✶ki (2nd person singular [informal]) to it, emphasising that the listener is included. With this in mind, and since other pronominal suffixes are consistent with their separate forms, it is reasonable to suggest that the separate pronoun would be ✶kwe > pe, and thus its possessive form would be pín, lenited to bín.

Both theories have their advantages and disadvantages. The gwe theory derives the pronoun from an attested CE form and goes for analogy with Quenya, but raises the question of why the Sindarin pronominal suffix -b would have a different etymology. On the other hand the pe theory relies on a reconstructed etymology based on that suffix, resulting in internal consistency in Sindarin, but at the same time it claims that the CE ✶we, which survives in Quenya, is altered in Sindarin's history.

I personally prefer going with the form that is based on something attested in Sindarin itself (i.e. pe). It would also be unsurprising to find differences in the Sindarin and Quenya pronouns, since we already have some other differences attested independently. But I'll leave it to you to judge which form you find better, given the above discussion.