Translations — General Assistance

[Naergon]

Greetings and thank you in advance for any assistance you might be able to offer. I am hoping that there will be some experts here who can assist in a project I am working on.

The project is a musical composition that includes samples from EastWest Fantasy Voices software, which says it includes a list of about 60 words in Elvish that were created by Tolkien. However the list in the manual doesn't include the English translations for those words.

Note that I have contacted their support requesting a translation, but no reply as of yet. I've also tried several translators and consulted a few websites — with mixed results. Naturally, I don't want to be composing gibberish for Tolkien fans, so I need help determining what the words mean, as well as any tips on how they might be properly used in phrases and/or the context of a musical composition.

The manual spells the words phonetically using a Western Alphabet and breaks them down into the syllables used in the samples. Consequently, some of the words might not be spelled correctly, or maybe they're word concatenations — maybe they don't even exist. I hope I haven't been misled by false advertising!

I'm not sure the best way to go about this, so rather than posting the whole list here and now, I'll just post the "A" words as they appear in their manual so that you have an idea what I'm looking at. If we can get through them fairly easily, we can move-on to the rest. I'm sure this would be a very helpful resource for more than just me !

Words ( syllabic breakdown in parenthesis )

Agorech (A-go-rech)
Anglenol (An-gle-nol)
Anirach (A-ni-rach)
Anon (A-non)
Antonyel (An-ton-yel)
Aphado (A-pha-do)
Arm

 

[Tyelkormo the Fair]

Our of all these, only 'Anon' sounds familiar to me. According to Parf edhellen, it means son in Quenya.(The language of High elves of Valinor)

Welcome! - Parf Edhellen: an elvish dictionary

Search 136,999 words and 84 phrases in Tolkien's elvish languages — Sindarin, Quenya, and more. Parf Edhellen is a free, open-source elvish dictionary.

www.elfdict.com

Here's the link of the website, btw. I use it to help me with my writings and it's the most accurate Tolkien Dictionary out there as far as I know.

 

[Naergon]

Our of all these, only 'Anon' sounds familiar to me. According to Parf edhellen, it means son in Quenya.(The language of High elves of Valinor)

Welcome! - Parf Edhellen: an elvish dictionary

Search 136,999 words and 84 phrases in Tolkien's elvish languages — Sindarin, Quenya, and more. Parf Edhellen is a free, open-source elvish dictionary.

www.elfdict.com

Here's the link of the website, btw. I use it to help me with my writings and it's the most accurate Tolkien Dictionary out there as far as I know.

Thanks — I've been using their search feature, and as you suggest, it does seem to be very good, but here's what I'm getting a lot of:

"No words matching “Anglenol” were found in the dictionary."

Same from other translator/dictionary resources. It seems that real people are needed for this. Maybe they've run across some of the words, but spelled differently, yet sound similar — or with their experience can determine whether or not some words are even valid. I just don't have that kind of expertise — but why do I get the feeling that by the time I'm done this I will ( lol ).

 

[Tyelkormo the Fair]

I suggest splitting the words much like you did above and try them this time. Or you can wait for some of our language experts.☺️

 

[Naergon]

I suggest splitting the words much like you did above and try them this time. Or you can wait for some of our language experts.☺️

Thanks — I've been doing that with mixed results. And of course, then the translations might be wrong, sort of like splitting-up the word "baseball" into "base" and "ball" — if you don't know it's a game, you'd never guess from the two words that it was.

The first word "Agorech" is in the Elfdict, but the translation makes no sense ( to me ). It says: "car" and list a bunch of examples of "car" — which make no mention of the word "agorech".

It looks like they have a discussion forum there, which I'll also try.

 

[Elthir]

Agorech seems to mean something like *have we done in the context of a sentence found in an issue of Vinyar Tengwar.

In note 30 to Quendi and Eldar (The War of the Jewels), Tolkien wrote: "*ekwē was probably a primitive past tense, marked as such by the "augment" or reduplication base vowel, and the long stem vowel. Past tenses of this form were usual in Sindarin "strong" or primary verbs: as *akāra "made, did" > S. agor."

And we also have the sentence (published in Vinyar Tengwar 50, possibly written in the early 1950s): arphent Rían Tuorna: man agorech? for example, which all appears to mean, according to expert Carl Hostetter *and said Rían to Tuor: what have we done?

:cough: full disclosure -- I have Vinyar Tengwar issues 1 through 49. . . but not 50!

And if car- "do, make" is accepted as the Sindarin verbal stem, then for agorech it looks like we also have mutation c > g for example, plus other "stuff" like a connecting vowel and pronoun. . .

. . . anyway, I'll put it this way: note 30 is what JRRT thought at the time of writing this note, and similarly I'll add: this pronoun means whatever Tolkien imagined it to mean when he wrote the above sentence. Basically, I'm not expert enough to know how the real experts explain this form within the larger, story-internal history of "Sindarin".

Also, experts have explained that the S. verbal stem aphad- means "follow", with infinitive *aphado "to follow". This would take the same form in the imperative case as well.

And now, a nap of course!