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Exclamations in Adûnaic
English
Adûnaic
Tengwar

  
Bā kitabdahē!
Don’t touch me!



    
Narīka ’nBāri ’nAdūn yanākhim!
The Eagles of the Lords of the West are at hand!



  
Urīd yakalubim!
The mountains lean over!

Commentary
These short exclamations are found in The Notion Club Papers, Tolkien’s sketched supernatural novel eventually published as the latter part of Sauron Defeated. They are uttered by two of the characters, Alwin Arundel Lowdham and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy, speaking in Adûnaic as they are reliving the fall of Númenor in a waking dream uncannily turning real. They appear on pp. 250-251.

Nothing is known about Adûnaic stress, its nature and position. In the records we chose the following system: each word bears an intensity stress on the last heavy syllable, i.e. containing a long vowel or a vowel followed by more than one consonant; when there is no heavy syllable the word is stressed on the first syllable. This stress system is very loosely inspired by Classical Arabic, on the one hand in recognition of Tolkien’s self-admitted reliance on some patterns of the Semitic languages to compose his Adûnaic, on the other hand on account of the relative likeness of the vowel systems and arrangement of sounds in the two languages. But it must be well remembered that this stress system is ultimately arbitrary: we chose it for convenience and it is not supposed to reflect Tolkien’s conceptions on those matters.

The Adûnaic text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to an adaptation of ours of the general use of the Third Age, in which the fourth row of tengwar (with raised stem and double bow) spells the prenasalized voiced stops nd, mb and ng. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe

References
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. Sauron Defeated – The End of the Third Age: The History of The Lord of the Rings, part four & The Notion Club Papers & The Drowning of Anadûnê. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2002. 482 p. (The History of Middle-earth; IX). ISBN 0-261-10305-9.

The works of John Ronald Reuel and Christopher Tolkien are under the copyright of their authors and/or rights holders, including their publishers and the Tolkien Estate.
Quotations from other authors, editors and translators mentioned in the bibliography are under the copyright of their publishers, except for those whose copyright term has ended.
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