how durin founded the longbeards

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by mhagain

This opens with a discussion of the awakening places of the Dwarves, and Tolkien just drops it in like a bombshell:

The fact that it was a "Dwarven name" surprised me when I first read that essay a few years ago, but we can of course see a similarity between "Gundabad" and Finrod's epithet "Felagund", Hewer of Caves. Presumably "Gundabad" meant "cave of <something>" in Khuzdul. I have seen somewhere an association of the "-bad" element with the word "uzbad", Lord, so it could mean something like "Cave of the Lord/Lords" (Durin, perhaps? or representative of it being a meeting place) but that's highly conjectural.

I've for a long time thought that the addition of Gundaband as this especially primeval Dwarven site which predates even Khazad-dûm to be an excellent narrative flourish on the part of Professor Tolkien to give Dwarven history that extra touch of historical depth. It's also nice to have a Dwarven Cuiviénen or Hildórien, as it were, for Durin's Folk at least.

Regarding the Khuzdul-Adûnaic connection, incidentally, it's interesting to observe that the Adûnaic word for the number seven, "hazid," bears similarities to the Khuzdul consonant cluster "kh-z-d" which of course is used for words relating to the Dwarves themselves, who are very closely associated with the number seven. Working forwards, "hazid" might have come to mean "seven" based on its association with the word the Dwarves used for themselves, the "Dwarf-number" as it were. Working backwards, perhaps the Dwarves though of themselves as something like "the seven-part people" or something to that effect, assuming that element was also used for the number seven. Pure speculation on my part but it does make one wonder.
The pages found here are very interesting summations of a lot of the information sourced from The History of Middle-earth regarding languages:
http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/
The site's very "web 1.0" though.

I might also just throw this tidbit in about Dwarf writing, from Volume 12 of the History. Despite using the cirth publicly after they were introduced to it:
"They had, it is said, a complex pictographic or ideographic writing or carving of their own. But this they kept resolutely secret."