Let's learn Quenya on the Downs

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Alassë Estel

That is almost right.

The answer is: "The treacherous are ever distrustful." Said by Gandalf of Saruman in The Two Towers.

I found it a bit more difficult because there is not a word that means simply "trust".

I cuvoitë: This is an adjective being used as a noun. Apparently you can do that (just like in English: "Ming the Merciless"); it seems the way you can tell it's happened is that they switch from adjective-plural to noun-plural forms, and are often plurals. This one should be too, so becomes I cuvoiti. If we were being particularly bitter about The Treacherous, we could call them I cuvoitelië, The Treacherous Folk, but that might be a bit unforgiving.

After that I'm not sure. It depends on how we read "distrustful" - is that a noun, "distrustful ones", or an adjective, "the distrustful treacherous"? I think you've structured the sentence the second way, so we'll go with that. You've correctly dropped "to be" and moved the adjective "ever distrustful" to the end to get that meaning.

oio: Absolutely the right word. There is an attested word Oiencarmë, where oi- is used as a prefix before a vowel, but given how stacked the rest of the sentence is it's probably best to keep it separate.

ú estelinqua: I think you're right that estel is the best word for trust we have; it's probably best translated "faith", which ultimately is what Gandalf means. (amdir might be better, but is only known in Sindarin.) -inqua looks pretty good too; the attested examples use it to turn "one" into "alone", and "glory" into "glorious", so "trust" to "trusting" works. I think ú as an independent particle would imply "without trustworthiness"; there are examples ú+ópa = úpa, ú+Amanyar = Úmanyar, so I think you'd want ústelinqua as the final adjective

My final version of your quote would then be: I cuvoiti oio ústelinqua, which is only two vowels and a sapce off from what you had. Nice!

I'll try and come up with something in the next few days, unless someone else wants a go.

hS