English to Adûnaic

[Erick Corbelli]

Can someone help me to translate the phrase "Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silve glass."?

I've made some progress, I'm learning the language from the zero, so I guess a lot of things of my translation its wrong: "agâni *erdô *ekha bâthan, *în ha-na kâtha *nêmak. *mithran *kholazak ha n'aban kallab, kâ kâtha yad gimil *aleth"

I needed to create a lot of words (words with *) because there are few adûnaic words. Most derived from the sindarin and quenya, just one from khuzdul:
-erdô from er (quenya) means "only";
-ekha from exa mens "another";
-în from mîn (sindarin) means "one";
-mak from mapa (quenya) means "take" (the "nê" its a infix);
-mithran from mithren (sindarin) means grey;
-kholazak (thats the most weird one lol) from cloak + rain, khola from colla (quenya) means cloak, razak from razkh (khuzdul) means rain, kholazak means "rain cloak";
-aleth from heledh (sindarin) means glass.

I'm accepting any kind of help, even tips for words created.

 

[Elhath]

Some observations:

- the first "X is Y" part would be Agân(a)/Agnun [+words meaning "only", "another"] batân. . .; agan requiredly being in the Subjective case, albeit the noun's proper Declension Class is nowhere specified

- -dô seems to form adverbs, rather than adjectives

- Eldarin /m-/ (word-initial) often corresponds to Adûnaic /ph-, p-/; consider the Q. equivalents of Ad. aphan "bliss", pharaz "gold" and pâ "hand" — of course, _urug "a bear" (= Eld. MOR-OK) obviously starts with the glottal stop (Hebrew "aleph"/Arabic "alif") instead

- "to take a path" is a Modern English phrase; a more common (panlingual) verb would be "to tread/walk/go" (Ad. #bat-, #yad-)

- for "rain-", maybe use *ubur/ubru- (< Early Eldarin UQU-) — a "(woven) curtain or veil" could very well be an Elvish loan, making e.g. *phana(m) or *phânik an acceptable choice, whereas a more native-looking word would be *zaphan or *ziphan (< the root SPAN-, or PHAN- by imitating ZI|MIR, the root of zimra [S. mîr])

- "to turn" = "to become" : *(h)akh- or *(h)ak- < Quenya ol- ? (modeled on tul-, S. tol- = Ad. nakh-, _OTOS = HAZ'D and SOL/SPAL/PHAL = sak-al)

- "silver" : *gim-az, -iz ? (but see also this entry) || A name of a precious metal can also be expected to end in -Vb or -Vd [V = /a/, /i/ or /u/], in light of substance-nouns in Semitic, Westron, Khuzdul

- given the apparent ancient Khuzdul influence on Adûnaic, a word indicating "a glass-like substance or surface" might have been borrowed already from Dwarves, rather than from Elves later on — which would suggest an Adûnaic form *khilid (= SD:414) or *kheldu

- before attempting any kind of reconstruction, it's of course absolutely essential to take good, long multiple looks at The History of Middle-earth Volume 9: Sauron Defeated (from page 413 onwards) for Tolkien's view on Adûnaic phonology and the "what can go where" conditions of word-formation (regarding the "defensible appearances of basic-form nouns and adjectives" issue, the form buruda on page 312 is also important)

- it may also benefit the gap-filling effort to notice (and to consider the possible word-formational applicabilities of) the sound-correspondences in form-pairings such as ban- = Eld. PER- (kan- = GAR, GAN = ÑGUR..), bith- = KWET, karab = S. lobor, hazid = OT-OS, and balak ?= Q. calpa

- some more easily attained reconstructions:
*anakh or *nâkh "coming, arrival"
*anazûli "eastern"
*âr-î, -ê, *arâth "queen"
*-(â)ubad vs. *-obad "in or to the front of"
*huz-, *huzug- (huzgâ-) "to hear, listen" (respectively?)
*igmilôn "starshaped"
*-nad(ad) "at or to behind of"
*sattasulumôn "double-masted"
*ûriyôn "sunny"