Hello. I have returned from an absence of years; my interest in this project has recently been renewed. You're still doing such excellent work after all these years. I've not had much of a part aside from offering simple suggestions here and there, which I'm about to do again.
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Originally Posted by Findegil
Gwarestrin. This must stand as there is nothing newer and nothing in published Sindarin corpus that helps in either determining its validity in Sindarin or in creating a possibly more correct Sindarin form. At least gwar- seems still valid as in Amon Gareth/Gwared upon which Gondolin is built. Also valid is the stem TIR- which is contained in –estrin according to the explanation of the name in BoLT 1, Appendix.
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I'm afraid this won't work, for phonological reasons if nothing else. The consonant cluster -str- appears to be disallowed in later Sindarin. For example, the terms
nothrim 'house' and
nothlir 'family line' come from the word
nost; when the word is compounded,
-st because
-th- to avoid the disallowed combinations
-str- and
-stl-. This process also happens in the very term Gondothrimbar, one of the other names of Gondolin: it is
gond +
ost +
rim +
bar. The compound **
ostrim is impossible, so it becomes
othrim instead. Thus, "Gwarestrin" as such has to be replaced by something else.
We seem to have a few options:
1. The most conservative one is simply to replicate the phonological process discussed above and replace Gwarestrin with Gwarethrin. I would have suggested this, but since Tolkien later replaced Gwareth with Gwared, it might be better to do something else, since the concept of a voiceless consonant at the end of the word has been done away with.
2. Therefore, another option is to use Gwaredrin, or something similar, thus preserving Tolkien's later preference of Gwared over Gwareth. (I am confused about the morphological boundary of this word. Is it Gwares-trin, or Gwarest-rin, or Gwar-estrin, or what?)
3. The third option would be to get rid of the (surely outdated) suffix
-trin or whatever it is, along with changing the phonology. I lean toward this, but it would require more conjecture and editorial intrusion. What I'm most tempted to suggest is Minas Gwared, since
minas was a common designation of citadels in later Sindarin. It works perfectly with the translation given in the text (Tower of Guard) and preserves the clear connection between the name of the city and the hill it stands on that exists in the original term Gwarestrin. The problem with this one, of course, is that it takes the most liberty with the text and ruins the alliteration of the Seven Names: all the names of Gondolin aside from Loth and Loth-a-laden start with
G. Perhaps Gwarmindon could work?
Mindon means an isolated hill with a central watch tower, which is essentially what Gondolin was.
EDIT: Okay, after having looked it up in the
Fall of Gondolin names list,
estrin apparently combines
esc and
tirin. If we want to be conservative, we could put that extra
i back in and call it Gwarestirin. The well-known
tir root would become more visible that way, in addition to the word being phonologically correct.
I don't know enough about Sindarin to come up with any other options. But it would seem that something has to be done about this glaring phonological error.