Kuzel n'Zabar

In Words 1:2, Daymon glosses Kuzel n'Zabar as "It rests in Lands of Lords [zen'nabar]."

Ku- is presumed to mean "it," as in "Kutaerbo, kutaernu," though there is no basis for this in Tolkien (who instead has it as a prefix meaning "we two"). Based on Daymon's spreadsheet, where kuzel is given as "3rd,inan.ZE(at).L (mod)," the second part of this first word is apparently the Adûnaic prepositional suffix -zê "at," with -l added for no very clear reason. (What kind of "mod" would a preposition be subject to?) The problem with translating this as "it rests in" is that "at" should take as its object the word to which it is affixed, so kuzê should mean "at it," not "it [is] at."

n'Zabar is thus "Lands of Lords." The bracketed zen'nabar is apparently given as an analogous construction. This is zen "land" (later changed to zâyan) an- (genitive or adjectival prefix, with the vowel elided), and abâr, which originally meant "gift" but was later redefined as "strength, endurance, fidelity." In the spreadsheet, Daymon analyzes n'Zabar as "/n/za[in]bar[un]." It's not clear what the /n/ represents; if it were the prefix an-, as in zen'nabar, the apostrophe would be before the n rather than after it. Zâin is the plural of zâyan "land." Bâr means "lord" and has many possible inflectional endings, but bârun is singular, and bâri is plural. We would expect "in Lands of Lords" to look more like zâin'nbâri-zê.

I have no alternative reading to suggest, the only possible lead I was able to find being that sabar means "delving" in Sindarin, but I don't think Daymon's translation for this phrase really works.

Crash ma Kraw?

We already have at least one Amestrahan name in the Words: Ki-Abroam. Another likely candidate is k'rash-makar in Words 14:10, where Daymon translates it as "first made by the god of battle." This closely resembles Crash ma Kraw, one of the "fifteen moving planets" listed in the GAEL:

The Egyptian names of the fifteen moving planets are: [1] Oan isis, [2] Flos-isis, [3] flo’ese: [4] Abbesele, [5] Ele ash, [6] Sabble, [7] Slundlo, [8] ear roam, [9] Crash ma Kraw, [10] obbles isim, [11] Izinsbah. [12] missel, [13] Nah me, [14] sile ohee oop Zah, [15] Zool

Daymon's unpublished spreadsheet has "EAG or god of battle first made," so he apparently also made the connection. It's a particularly memorable name, since Crash McCraw sounds like it should be the name of a rockabilly singer or something. Some other names on that planet list also look potentially relevant: missel closely matches missil in our corpus, and Izinsbah is suggestive of Izilba.

Meneltermo, menel-termu

In Words 1:1, Meneltermo is glossed "Pillar of Heaven" -- i.e., Daymon sees it as a variant of Meneltarma, the name of the highest mountain in Númenor, from Quenya menel "the heavens" and tarma "pillar." The menel part presents no problems, but it's not obvious that termo is the same word as tarma.

The changing of the final vowel to -o perhaps reflects the adaptation of the Quenya word to the grammar of whatever we want to call the language of these Words. (We can perhaps call it Pengolodhin for lack of any better term.) With the exception of a handful of proper names like Izilba, no word in the corpus ends in any other vowel than -o or -u, and my default assumption is that this reflects some grammatical feature of Pengolodhin. It would thus be similar to the way masculine Hebrew names like Jonah and Elijah all end in -s when adapted to the Greek of the New Testament.

The change of the first syllable from tar- to ter- is harder to explain, since we have many examples of tar- in other words in the Pengolodhin corpus, and it suggests that this may actually be a different word, not a form of tarma. One possibility is terma, Quenya for "passage, aperture." Or it could be related to Quenya ter "through," from the root √TER "pierce," plus the Quenya suffix -mo, which Tolkien said "often appeared in names or titles, sometimes with an agental significance." Thus, meneltermo could mean something "heavenly passage" or "sky-piercer." This could still possibly be referencing the mountain Meneltarma via a bit of wordplay, as a high mountain could be said to "pierce the sky."

In Words 17:6, we have the very similar word menel-termu, glossed by Daymon as "high-heaven." The normal Quenya for "high heaven" (meaning the starry heavens, what we would call "outer space," as opposed to the atmosphere) is Tarmenel, with the prefix tar- meaning "high." So again we have the strange change from tar- to ter- if Daymon's published translation is correct. In an unpublished spreadsheet, Daymon instead translates it as "pillar of heaven," the same as meneltermo, which is more plausible. Given how many word pairs in corpus differ only in the final vowel (-u, -o, or -io), it seems most likely that these are grammatical suffixes. Since menel-termu is the subject of a sentence, while meneltermo is the object of a preposition, my default assumption would be that the final vowels indicate this difference in grammatical case, but I will have to see whether further study of the corpus bears this out.

Kutaerbo, kutaernu

In Words 1:1, kutaerbo kutaernu is glossed "it is directly onward, It is straight below." In Words 4:6, kutaernu kutaerbo is "It is underneath, it is straight ahead."

The element taer means "lofty" in Sindarin and "straight" in Noldorin.

Sindarin bo (soft mutation of po) means "on" and occurs in Tolkien's Sindarin translation of the Lord's Prayer: bo Ceven sui vi Menel "on Earth as [it is] in Heaven," where it is clearly a preposition, followed by an object. Daymon apparently reads taerbo as "straight on," with "on" in the English adverbial sense of "onward," but there is no evidence in Tolkien of such usage.

Both Sindarin and Quenya have nu as the prepositon "under." Again, it always appears with an object in Tolkien, as in Sindarin Dor-nu-Fauglith "Land under Choking Ash"; however, the word order appears to somewhat flexible, as in Quenya  Vardo tellumar nu luini "beneath the blue vaults of Varda."

Daymon's translation implies that ku- means "it (is)," but all I can find in Tolkien is the Early Quenya prefix ku-, defined as "dual 1(b)," presumably meaning the dual first-person pronoun ("we two"). Tolkien distinguished between inclusive ("I and thou") and exclusive ("I and a third person"), but I'm not sure which of the two is indicated by the parenthetical letter b.

Azanulbizar, azanulkizar, Azano, azan-kesh

These two words -- Azanulbizar and azanulkizar -- appear in Words 1:1. The first is the Khuzdul name for Dimrill Dale, for which Tolkien provided two possible analyses.

In the first analysis, azan is the plural of the noun uzn "dimness, shadow," and -ul is a genitive suffix ("of"), so that azanul means "of shadows." The final element is the plural noun bizâr "streams, rills." Thus the name means "rills of shadows." In the second analysis, azan is an adjective meaning "dark, dim," ûl means "streams," and bizar means "a dale or valley." Thus the whole name matches more precisely the English Dimrill Dale. Daymon's own gloss is "valley of shadows" -- taking azanul from the first analysis and bizar from the second.

Depending on which analysis we go with, then, azanulkizar could mean either "kizar of shadows" or "dim-rill kizar." In Faithful, Daymon glosses it as "the shadow of your king's," which does not seem possible. In an unpublished spreadsheet, he instead translates it as "canyon of shadows," which is more plausible, though there is nothing in Tolkien to suggest what kizar might mean. Searching Eldamo for kis- (since the spelling with z turns up nothing) yields Early Quenya (not Khuzdul) words like kirkis "cleft, crack" and kisin "cleft," so I assume that is where Daymon got "canyon" from. These are not all that similar to kizar, though. A single word containing both Khuzdul and Quenya morphemes doesn't seem likely, but we already know that these Words are a mishmash of different languages.

Related words elsewhere include Azano in Words 1:4, glossed "the Shadow"; and azan-kesh in Words 1:8, glossed "other shadows." The second element in the latter is apparently from Tolkien's early root √KES "other." Azano as "the Shadow" is curious since, as noted above, the singular of azan is uzn. Khuzdul never suffixes -o to words, and in fact that vowel is virtually nonexistent in the Khuzdul words we have. (I believe Gabilgathol is the only Khuzdul word to include the letter o.) So this is apparently a Khuzdul loanword inflected according to the grammar of some other language.

The name Ki-Abroam

Ki-Abroam, who appears as a character in the Words books and (in the form ki'abroan) in Words 14:7, has a name that pretty clearly comes from Joseph Smith's Kirtland Egyptian Papers.

Here, summarizing information from the GAEL and from Egyptian Alphabet documents A and C, and standardizing the spelling, are the five "degrees" of the name of Abraham:

1. Ah-broam: the father of the faithful, the first right, the elder(s)

2. Ah-broam: a follower of righteousness

3. Ah-broam: one who possesses great knowledge

4. Ah-broam: a follower of righteousness, a possessor of greater knowledge

5. Ah-brah-oam: a father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest

I believe this is the only name or word that changes its pronunciation in the highest degree, and the two forms Ah-broam and Ah-brah-oam are pretty clearly intended to correspond to the biblical names Abram and Abraham, respectively. The hyphenation indicates a different analysis than the biblical names, which are understood to be Ab-ram and Ab-raham, with the prefix ab- meaning "father." In Joseph Smith's version, the first element is instead Ah, which is defined in Alphabet documents A, B, and C as "the first being, who exercises supreme power" (comma only in Alphabet C, so it's not clear whether or not the relative clause is restrictive).

We also have the same name, in its two forms, prefixed with Ki-. Ki by itself is listed as the compounding form of iota, and is defined as "see, sight, saw, seeing, having seen" or, in the fourth degree, as "me, myself." (These meanings, together with iota itself, seem to be linked by the English homophony of eye and the letter and pronoun I.)

1. Ki-ah-broam: that which goes before, until another time, or a change by appointment, the first, faithful, or father, or fathers

2. Ki-ah-broam: coming down from the beginning, to some place or fixed period, the first in lineage, or right in lineage

3. Ki-ah-broam: first reckoned in chronology, coming down from the beginning, firstborn right or blessings

4. Ki-ah-broam: change from the first [degree] by coming from the beginning by right of birth or lineage

5. Ki-ah-brah-oam: coming down from the beginning, right by birth and also by blessing and by promise, promises made, a father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandment of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest.

The fact that we still have the two forms of the name, corresponding to Abram and Abraham in the Bible, seems to indicate that we are still talking about Abraham here. Part of the fifth-degree definition is identical to Ah-brah-oam in the fifth degree and thus also appears in Abraham 1:2, as shown in the table above.

Both the Ah-br(ah-)oam and the Ki-ah-br(ah-)oam definitions can be seen reflected in the text of Abraham 1:2-3. In the case of Ah-br(ah-)oam, the parallels are very exact, going through the five degrees in order and in almost the same language. The Ki-ah-br(ah-)oam parallels are less exact but are clearly there as well.

The relation of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers to the Book of Abraham is obviously far beyond the scope of this blog. The purpose of this analysis is to see if there is any significance to fact that the Words books preferentially refer to this character as Ki-Abroam rather than Abraham. Since the prefix ki- has no obvious meaning in any of Tolkien's languages or in other Words, I think the Kirtland Egyptian Papers are the only place to look.

As can be seen in the table above, Abroam emphasize righteousness and knowledge, while Ki-Abroam emphasizes coming down from the beginning and receiving rights by lineage from the first fathers. The longer form, Abrahoam, is essentially the same with or without the Ki- prefix: "a father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest."

After the death of Asenath, Ki-Abroam is suddenly referred to instead as Abraham. It is possible that these names are meant to have different connotations, following the definitions in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.

Words 26:4

enlarasu sutherol, speri, spole

Then the Wind happened,

being by Wind blown, scattering as grist.