Let's try some Hungarian.

Nyíl = arrow
Számít = reckon

Thank you ! Arrow was a useful hint :)

I guess it must be Théoden to Hirgon:


Here I must disagree with you! The feeling of the book is often not the same when translated! There are two German translations and neither of them satisfies me. More in this thread (the only one I ever started...:o)

Yes, that's it. I thought that arrow would probably give it away.

I'm quite content with the Finnish translation- the translators have done wonderful work. I have the book also in some other languages, but eg. the Swedish translation is something I don't particularly like (I haven't read it, but leafed through it sometimes). Unless my knowledge of the Swedish language fails me, the translator has seemingly misinterpreted something and written that Treebeard had two lovers called Fimbrethil and Wandlimb (yes, the name is Wandlimb. It hasn't been even translated)... :D

OK, here is a quote in French again:

But that's easy. :D

Correct, of course!
 

Should I have picked an obscurer quote then? ;)

There aren't that many languages I can (grammaticaly correctly) translate into from English. There are more languages I can understand a bit, of course (Finnish, obviously, not being among them...)

Anyhow, it's your turn now, Thinlómien!

Possibly. ;)

Let's try some Spanish. This shouldn't be too difficult...

Could it be this? I put somewhat vague translation together from French, Latin and mere guessing and my brother helped me with translating a few words and prepositions :D

Well, that was quick. Your thread, Legate. :)

I decided to let you experience some language different from the most that appear around here. It's Hebrew, but it should not be that hard. If it is too hard, I may put in the names of the characters speaking, but personally I think it won't be necessary.

"Has! Dabber b'shequet! Raah!" amar _____ k'harot. "M'ad b'ha-yaar, gav b'ha-derek anakhnu ba'u ettah. Ha-zeh ha-hu. Lo attah roeh-o, over min-ec l'ec?"
"Ani roeh, ani roeh ettah!" amar b'seter _____. "Raah, _____! Ani lo hodati-kha? Sham ha-zaqen.(...)"

P.S. And I seriously hope no one who knows Hebrew reads this, or I am labeled as diletant. :rolleyes:

By saying that you probably scared off everyone who doesn't want to appear ignorant of Lotr. :p

I guess the character names might be necessary. That sounds rather orcish, though.

And if not the character names, then at least some other hint. Even though I think I might be closer to the answer if I had really concentrated on trying to find it even for five minutes. ;)

Okay, two possibilities. Choose for yourselves.

a) I will tell you what the characters' names are,
b) I will tell you what "raah"/"roeh" means (as these are forms of the same word - here you also have a hint).

The characters' names... well. This would make it very much easier, as it will definitely narrow the places where you should look for it. On the other hand, if I told you the word and it did not help, then saying the names will probably solve it for good.

So, choose (someone. Whoever posts here between this moment and the moment when I appear back on this thread, will choose which hint should I post... if there is more of you, I will choose by "votes" or by primacy or by something else ;) :p )

Lommy: Think for five minutes then ;)

I vote for raah.

Okay, raah/roeh is "to see", resp. "to look", you know, this stuff. I'm sure you can easily decipher the particular forms of the word in the text.:D

"Hush! Speak more softly! Look!" said Legolas pointing. "Down in the wood, back in the way that we have just come. It is he. Cannot you see him, passing from tree to tree?"

"I see, I see now!" hissed Gimli. "Look, Aragorn! Did I not warn you? There is the old man."

Correct, of course! Well done, Gwathagor! You may provide us with a new one. :)

In Finnish (spoken language, mainly), "raah" is a word used to express roaring or growling. That's why the orcish vibe. ;)

OK, let me work on that. Maybe I can do something in New Testament Greek.

Yes, yes, go on!

(mwahaha...) :D

:rolleyes:

"Isto é uma noite contanto que anos," disse. "Como longo o dia demorará?"

Portuguese! It's a Romance language, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

(EDIT: For the record, I don't speak Portuguese; I had to use a computer program. :) I ain't language-canny like the rest of you folks.)

Is this it?

Yes! Take it away.

All right, this one is in French, but I believe it is not that easy to connect it to context, so I would like to underline the fact that I want also the correct name of the book and chapter where this is taken from.

"Ta fenetre ne regarde pas a l'est?" il disait. "On peut amender ca."

I must add, it was very painful to refresh my French skills... :eek:

That is, of course, Faramir to Éowyn in LotR, RotK, Chapter V, The Steward and the King.

Oh, I hoped it to be harder. Apparently, I was mistaken. Okay, your turn :)

Lommy? Lommy! (...and his voice echoed between the steep rocky walls of Lammoth...)

:D

...I know...

I wanted to borrow Agan's Swedish version of LotR, since I think we could have something different for a change, but I forgot it so I wondered if I should do according to the original rules and translate some Swedish myself but it looked quite impossible (I'm not good at Swedish...) so...

But oh well, I'll try to come up with something in some language today, it's stupid to keep this thread inactive just because I seem to have a bit too specified criteria of what I want to post here... :)

Oh yes, it does not matter if you post something you just simply pick in Finnish, for all the foreigners it's as different as anything else, and while others are answering, you can prepare some more "high-class" quote so that the next time you get the chance to post you can do it (I was thinking along the same lines when choosing the French quote, at one time I wanted to drop it and give you something in Czech so that I don't have to bother :) ).

Today? That "today" sadly ended something like five hours ago. *sigh* Anyway, I'll plague you with more Spanish as I'm currently in Noggie's place and he doesn't have LotR in Finnish here and the passages I can remember straight from the book are the most obvious ones and the translation is so good I don't want to "spoil" it with dabbling at something of my own... ;)

Ah, of course. :) I have to (once again, when it comes to Spanish) give thanks to my brother, who alerted me of the word "espejo". At the moment I learned what "espejo" is (and from my own knowledge of languages guessed what "peligroso" is), it was easy to find where this is from.

Surprise, surprise, your guess is correct!
 

Take the thread, please. :)

Someone mentioned Koine Greek? :)

I must say I enjoyed making this one, not saying that it is perfectly correct; but when I finished it, the professional deformation worked on me: I immediately wanted to make a textual analysis to find whether it was some purpose to use the derivations of the word "balo" so often. :p And I'm mentioning this so that I can tell you in English, peribalousin and ekbalousin hardly have anything in common, so don't let yourselves confused by the similarity.

A suggestion: for non-Greek speakers, you can try to discern in some words the prefixes you know, as they are even in English or in internationally known words.

I don't suppose we can get it in actual Greek letters, can we?

Well it's the rule to post it transliterated to latin script. I believe it will not give you much advantage if I transliterated it back for you (it will be without all the accents still, but anyway), it will take a little time from me; I'm only afraid if others will not take it that you have some sort of advantage. Anyway, the script above is (almost, only you don't have the difference between o/o mega or e/eta) more or less letter-to-letter transliteration, so if you know the Greek, you can transliterate it for yourself...

EDIT: Okay, here is it in original, for comparison; so that if anyone is seriously linguistically interested he can check. I had to write it in standard Windows fonts (hope it shows to everyone), so I didn't know how to make the accents in there, but you can guess if you are familiar with the language. It is almost the same as in the text above, you can check in the two variants (even you who don't know the Greek script, if it will do you any good). η is long "e", ς is "s" at the end of a word, ω is long "o", χ is "ch"; and when standing alone, I transliterated υ as "y" (as that's how it's read) and when in double consonant ου, I transliterated it as "ou".

Good night and happy riddling. I want you to provide the quotation and where it comes from...

Hurrah! Thanks.

Since Uncle Gwathy hasn't provided us with a guess yet, I look forward to see Uncle Leggy provide us with a hint. :)

Uncle Leggy says...
 

All right. "Kai" is "and", "ymeis/ymas" is "you", "ymon" is "your".

And I suggest you to look at the words "myriona", "exo", and "echo", if they don't seem familiar to you or resemble some words you know from elsewhere.

If you wish other hints, you may ask me for specific words and I will tell their meaning to you. Or at least I could tell you what it is (like, a noun, a verb etc.)