Ruin of Doriath - Attack on Menegroth

[Tar-Telperien]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

Nielthi: I'm not sure what the etymology of this would be, but at least there are no phonological problems that I'm aware of. It can stand.

This name does not "fit" into later Sindarin for me, and I managed to find out why: after scrolling through my Dragon Flame Sindarin dictionary, I discovered that the only multisyllabic Sindarin words ending in -i are those which have the adjectival ending -ui or verb stems that have been conjugated into the infinitive (e.g. giri 'to shudder'). Otherwise, -i does not appear at all. The consonant cluster -lth- is pretty rare too, although it does occur in a couple verb stems.

Even so, the problem of final -i in mature Sindarin is enough to cause the name to be entirely dropped in my opinion, especially in the case of such a minor character whose name is only used a couple times. I very much doubt that Nielthi's name was intended to be the infinitive form of a verb *nielth-, which is the only thing it could be in Sindarin as later envisioned by Tolkien.

An adjective form Nielthui might work, but this would be rather pointless: the name, while working with the morphophonology of later Sindarin, would be changed unnecessarily from the original, and its meaning wouldn't be at all clear. But if you want to retain it, I believe that is the only way it could be done. Again, better to just eliminate it altogether.