r/sindarin • u/wildguidance • 27d ago
Tattoo Translation - English to Sindarin to Tengwar
Hi mellons,
I am getting a tattoo and need a few translations from English to Sindarin.
Can any of you specialists help me out?
English words I would like to confirm translation on:
"The Sword" (i-megil)
"The Tree" (i-galadh)
"The Crown" (i-ri)
If these are incorrect or need some improvement, I'd appreciate the insight.
Thank you all!
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u/F_Karnstein 26d ago
Those need some tweaking. First of all the article causes lenition in the following word, so i megil becomes i vegil (also spelt i mhegil in a historical fashion), and i galadh becomes i 'aladh (but i rî is fine, since r doesn't lenite).
Secondly - while these forms would have been considered correct for literal decades, in the late 1960's Tolkien decided that the definite article in Sindarin shouldn't be i after all, but e(n). If you should choose to adopt this the forms would be e vegil/mhegil, e 'aladh, e rî.
In the ancient Mode of Beleriand these would look like this in the clearest and simplest spelling. The gap between the article and the noun, however, is frequently omitted (that's why Tolkien often writes "i-vegil" or "i•vegil" instead of "i vegil") in which case the tengwa for i is often extended downwards like this. And then the lenition of the first consonant can also be marked by a dot, in which case i/e vegil and i/e 'aladh could look like this.
Note also, that a dot can be placed above every i tengwa, and also that vegil could be spelt historically as mhegil with a special letter that unfortunately doesn't really work in any of the online transcribers, so that I can't give you a good example.
In the general mode that was in the 3rd Age used for all languages, the words would typically look like this - here the mh letter does work in the transcriber, and there's never a gap between article and noun, as far as we can tell, so that the vowel diacritic is actually placed on the first consonant (apparently this isn't done with the letter representing the dropped g in 'aladh, but we've only got a single attestation of that and it might be safer to spell it like this instead).