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 In an unpublished spreadsheet, Daymon instead translates it as "pillar of heaven," the same as meneltermo, which is more plausible.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.