Thread: Languages
View Single Post
Old 04-19-2001, 08:14 PM   #2
Orald
Shadow of Malice
 
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: right behind you
Posts: 843
Orald has just left Hobbiton.
Send a message via AIM to Orald Send a message via Yahoo to Orald
Ring

Well I personally would love to learn an elvish language. Sindarin would probably be the best, since it was so widely used. Why just earlier today, I was going over pronounciations of elvish words when I was visiting a link on the Ardalambion site.

Now to your question. Bereth, seems rather similar to the beruth in beruthiel, do you think they are the same? However in the etymologies in HoME V there is a stem under Berèth meaning birch tree, this seemed unlikely to me though, so I shortened it down to ber- which means valiant. When I looked under the entry for ber- I found a lead, and in the first conception ber- is what JRRT had in mind, but he decided against it and CT assumes that JRRT went for bereth as being a corrupted form of Barath. Barath doesn't have an exact definition under it, but it does say that it could be related to Bar- and Barad. This seems to make sense since Barad means tower and towers reach high into the sky and I hope I don't have to explain the rest of that.

I would break down Gilthoniel into what seems to be the most likely way, Gil-thon-iel. Gil of course being star. The -iel if I recall is shortened from -riel which means garlanded maiden. Thon- is tough, in the etymologies it says pine-tree, but this doesn't really correspond, so I am going to make a safe guess and say that it is a corrupted form of something else. I can't seem to find any thing else from which it could have originated, so I will make a stop over at Ardalambion, and perhaps it may be known over there.

Edit:

I did find something. Gilthoniel roughly translates to Star-Kindler. I don't really see where the stem -iel goes, unless thoniel is actually one piece and -iel is not shortened from -riel.
Orald is offline   Reply With Quote