2019/10/29

Quettasuligelliendor

Title is a fairly half-baked attempt at "land delighting in spirit-words" to Quenya, which translates Kotodama no Sakiwau Kuni, one of the poetic names of Japan.

Did some more thinking about Japanese translations of Lord of the Rings. "Brandybuck" would be "Sakaishika", which is bizarrely well suited to being nicknamed "Sakashika". Then "Oldbuck" would be "Furushika"; "Meriadoc" would be, say, "Tamnosiki" (an imaginary Ainu name meaning "sword center"—the important thing is just sounding alien to all the other names but similar to the nickname), because "Merry" would be "Tanoshi". "Gamgee" would be "Karimura", while "Samwise" would be "Nakamasa"; "Hamfast" would unfortunately have to be "Uchitsugi", losing the rhyming of Sam and Ham or Ran and Ban.

"Peregrin" and "Pippin" are a bit harder. The former I would render as "Hanasemono", and the short form to Hata—a bit of a stretch, but one I can probably get away with. "Took" is going to stay, of course (well, as Tûku), since it's just "Tûk" in the Westron and the Hobbits themselves don't know what it means.

"Baggins", of course, is "Fukuro"—Japanese is one of very few languages where Bilbo and Frodo's surname is not translated to a word involving the local word for "bag" already. "Bag End" would thus be "Fukurokôji", already the Japanese for "cul-de-sac" (maybe changed to "Fukuro Komichi", the second word being the native Japanese reading of kôji, the better to keep with the etymological rule). "Sackville Bagginses" would be "Byôchô Fukuro", using the Sino-Japanese reading because "Sackville" is from French roots (presumably it translates an ultimately Sindarin name that that branch of the Bagginses use, to be pompous). "Bilbo" apparently may mean "two-edged sword", which is of course "Mitsurugi" as a Japanese name; "Frodo" could be "Masaru" but that's the same element as in Sam's name; I'd go with "Satoru", different reading of the same kanji. Or we could go with the "Daur" epithet in Elvish, which also means "high, lofty, noble", and call him "Sugureru".

"Shire" becomes "Koori". "Hobbit" would be "Anazumi"—presumably you can use the Middle Japanese roots to come up with the equivalent of Rohirric "holbytla", but good luck finding Middle Japanese online (Old Japanese, which I said to use for Dalish and the Dwarf names, is even worse).

While I can't find the Middle Japanese words themselves, I can say that "Éomer" and "Éowyn" are "Noruaki" and "Noruyuki", respectively—or rather whatever are the Middle Japanese roots of those words, should they be different. "Éothéod" would likewise be "Norutami", and "Theoden" would be "Tamitake". "Riddermark" would be "Norukoori".

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