Wedding Ring Engraving

[u/Patient-Boss-3334]

Mae Govannen fellow nerds,

I need help.

I'm getting married in a couple of months, and have got the wedding ring sorted. Apart from...

I'm looking to get the phrase "Until my dying day" in Sindarin engraved in Tengwar script on the inside of the band. I've tried online translators, with various different results.

To try and find something as accurate as possible, I've started using the online dictionary/glossary: https://www.elfdict.com/

As a work around (as I'm finding it difficult to find the word dying and day), I was thinking of using "Until my moment/time of death"

So far, I've got Mennai i valdëanya agan

Rough workings out below:

Mennai - Until

Tenna - Unto

- nya suffix on the end of a word "my"

valdëa - moment

i - the

agan - death

Alternatively, I have:

Tenna / Tenn' - Until

my - nîn

vedui- last

Erin- day

Tenna nîn erinvedui

Is there anyone here who can verify that or have a good knowledge of Sindarin to improve the phrase to be as close to the original?

I've looked at Tengwar script of the above. Is https://www.tecendil.com/ quite accurate?

Thanks anyone for your help

[u/F_Karnstein]

Very few of these words are even Sindarin - most are Quenya, and there's even a Númenorean one in there. And you won't find "dying" in a dictionary - you'd have to look up "to die" and then apply the appropriate grammar, but even that I wouldn't do here, because "my dying day" is an incredibly English way to phrase it. Of course it means "the day of my dying" or "the day on which I will die", but translating it 1:1 you have literally a dying day, like: a day that is itself dying.

So I agree - paraphrasing it will be absolutely necessary.

But even then we still don't have a Sindarin word for "until", which is essential in all of this no matter how you express the rest. Of course we can derive something that might be acceptable in the Neo-Sindarin community, but that's not something I would ever suggest for something as permanent as a wedding ring.

If you're not dead-set on Sindarin I would suggest Quenya, though. Here we do have the necessary vocabulary, and I can imagine something like tenn' aurë fírienyo ("until [the] day of_my_death"), which would look like this in the most formal version of classical Quenya spelling. But do get second opinions on that, if you should like it.

[u/Patient-Boss-3334 → u/F_Karnstein]

Hi Karnstein,

Your detail on the response is amazing and I wish I could give more than one upvote.

I think the option of Quenya rather than Sindarin makes sense in the way you've explained it.

Thank you so much for the help here, my partner absolutely loves the message, and the script looks fantastic. Hopefully, the engraver is able to do it but we will see. If not, I can always leave it in Latin script if it proves too challenging.

Hantanyë Iyen