Help needed re Sindarin + Tengwar

[Melan]

There's so much info on the various languages of middle earth and the various translation types online that it is quite overwhelming! This place seems to have the human experts vs the machine, which keeps giving me different results, and this is for a tattoo so I would like it to be as accurate as I can get, so would you help me please? I am trying to get a correct Sindarin words for "accept . allow . trust . flow " written in Tengwar.

 

[Elaran]

I assume, you want imperative (command/instruction) forms of the verbs. I will need to offer two forms of "accept", and some amount of (peer-reviewed) reconstruction for the other verbs.

• savo "accept!" (accept as fact, believe)
• cavo "accept!" (accept in hand, receive)
• davo "allow!" (permit, give way, make room)
• sadro "trust!" (rely, have faith in)
• sirio "flow!" (like a river)

Click here for the Tengwar transcriptions, and remove whichever "accept" word that you do not need.

 

[Melan]

fantastic, thank you so much!

Dear Elaran

I appreciate so much your reply because I had found some difficulty using English to Sindarin Translators for these words.

Now I am wondering why is there such a discrepancy if it's one language?

For example, in https://funtranslations.com/elvish there is no result for accept and the other words are given as dab- estel dui. Can you help me understand why this is?

 

[Elaran]

I don't know what to say besides that they are just terrible. It is simply a fact that no "auto translator" on the planet is made with any care whatsoever. And if their makers would have been capable of achieving any amount of accuracy, they would have known better than to attempt building such a tool for an unfinished, poorly attested, and still evolving language (due to new publications of the linguistic notes of Tolkien). Then again, even had things been better, I would not trust even Google Translate (a tool that is made with advanced machine learning by one of the richest companies in the world) to translate something between two unrelated real languages (let alone constructed languages) to the point of tattooing the result on my body.

 

[Melan]

That makes a lot of sense. I am Maltese and Google Translate for Maltese is an absolute disaster hahaha!

So is that Tolkien peers get together on some forum to build on his notes to evolve Sindarin into a complete language?