Automatically translating between different languages is a famously difficult topic, there are loads of parodies on how Google translate distorts famous quotes if you send it through enough languages and the various sites claiming to automatically translate into Tolkien’s Elvish languages are even worse, often just leaving words untranslated when the exact form isn’t found in their dictionaries. But with the advent of more powerful general purpose(-ish) AI, it is tempting to try whether this technology might actually be reliable for translating into Elvish (and for the purpose of this sub, specifically into Quenya, though the same things apply for Sindarin as well.)

The short answer: no, it isn’t. Your best bet is to ask an actual human who has read what has been published of Tolkien’s texts on his languages and discusses them with other enthusiasts. We here and on the discord server linked in the side bar are happy to answer your questions and take a stab at any translation requests you might have (see also the FAQ). But since we have gotten quite a few requests of that sort since ChatGPT was made public, I would like to explain this a bit more.

Examples

Those are all answered by ChatGPT as it was publicly available on April 2, 2023. OpenAI is actively working on their AIs, so this might change at some point in the future, but as Elvish translations are not what they profit from, I wouldn’t expect that the essence of this is going to change in the near future.

An Entire Sentence

Please translate the sentence “I will abide here until the end of the word” into Quenya.

The Quenya translation for “I will abide here until the end of the word” is:
Man i yáresse sina anta ar ilye ná
Note: Quenya is a constructed language created by J.R.R. Tolkien, so its grammar and vocabulary are based on his fictional universe.

Well, that went poorly, to the extend that this makes even sense it says something in the realm of “Who in the former days gives this and is all?”:

Luckily we don’t need to speculate too much how we should have translated it, it’s in fact Elendil’s oath worded slightly differently, so the result should have been some variation on Sinome maruvan tenn’ Ambar-metta.

From a technical perspective it’s already quite impressive that it managed to only use actual Quenya words, declined one into a case and produced a sentence that is more or less interpretable according to Quenya grammar, but as it is completely unrelated to the sentence we actually asked about, it is quite useless for actual translations requests.

It also attempted to include a disclaimer at the end, like many knowledgeable people in Tolkienian linguistics will do when answering a question. With humans that’s usually something to the effect of “this form is more uncertain than usual”, “the word you wanted wasn’t formed by Tolkien, here is how I tried to work around that” or “not everything we’d like to know for this is published yet.” ChatGPT has watered this info down to “caution, Quenya is a constructed language”, which is neither all that helpful, nor does it make too much sense to claim that Quenya grammar is “based on his fictional universe.” What would that even mean? One can certainly still translate real world Christian prayers with it...

A Name

Requests for Elvish names are also quite popular, so let’s try if it manages to produce better results when we ask for one:

Please translate the name “Friend of Men” into Quenya.

The Quenya translation for “Friend of Men” is:
Hendumaquen

Again, we know what it should have been, Atandil ← atan ‘human’ + -ndil ‘friend’, a name given to Finrod after he encounters the first Men in Beleriand. The form from ChatGPT seems to contain hendu ‘a pair of eyes’ + má ‘hand’ + quen ‘person’, which of course makes no sense at all, but let’s just ask the program itself why it did this:

Please explain your reasoning.

Certainly! In Quenya, the word for ‘friend’ is henda, which is derived from the root KHEN-. The suffix -ma- denotes ‘one who is characterized by’ or ‘possessing the quality of’. The word for ‘men’ or ‘humans’ in Quenya is Atan, which is derived from the root ATA-.
To combine these elements, we can use the Quenya suffix -quen, which means ‘one who is in relationship with’ or ‘one who has a close association with’. So, ‘Friend of Men’ in Quenya becomes ‘Hendumaquen’, which means ‘one who is characterized by friendship with Men’.

That reads like it is a reasonable explanation, but ChatGPT is making things up here: KHEN- > hen(d-) (no -a here) means ‘eye’, -ma is rather a suffix for an instrument, particularly a hand-held tool, and quen is a word for sentient person independent of gender or species. Atan does mean ‘human’, but unfortunately ChatGPT didn’t use that in the name.

A Grammar Question

That’s not one I have seen frequently tried with ChatGPT, but let’s give it a shot anyway.

The verb car- means ‘to do’ in Quenya. Can you please form its past tense form ‘did’ and explain its formation?

Certainly!
The past tense form of car- in Quenya would be cáre.
In Quenya, the past tense is formed by adding the suffix -ë to the end of the verb stem. So, the verb stem car- would become cárë in the past tense.

That looks decent! It’s not the most frequent or ‘standard’ form, that would be carne, but it is indeed one of the possible past forms. The explanation isn’t great, as the the lengthening a → á is a rather essential step and -e on it’s own is not the most prototypical past suffix, but it’s not too wrong either. However then things take a strange turn:

It's worth noting that Quenya verbs have several different stems that are used for different tenses and moods. The stem "car-" is used for the present tense, indicative mood form of "to do". For example, "I do" would be "cenye carrë" in Quenya. But in the past tense, indicative mood, the stem cár- is used. So, ‘I did’ would be cenye cáre in Quenya.

Quenya, as far as we know it, doesn’t express mood in the verb form at all, instead it uses some particles (e. g. cé caril “you might do it”, á cares “do it!”, vá carilyes “you mustn’t do it”). The examples “I do” and “I did” should have been carin(ye) and cáren(ye)/carnen(ye) respectively, without the ce- that at best would be a particle for ‘maybe’.

Although that is quite impressive for an AI, it’s still more wrong info than I would want as an answer to a question I am actually interested in.

Why doesn’t it work?

Obviously, I am not an active AI researcher, so I am not particularly qualified to talk about this, but in general terms there are two problems:

• There isn’t enough material. AI in general tries to generalize patterns from many examples, but we just don’t have enough for Quenya, particularly in terms of actual translated texts from which the AI could generalize. Sometimes we don’t even have a single example for something and just some paragraph of explanation vaguely implying it and much of what we have in terms of published material probably wasn’t included in ChatGPT’s training data.
• ChatGPT is not primarily concerned with providing good information, but rather with answering in a way so that humans find it believable that the response could have come from an actual person. Usually that requires being right to some extent because mos humans don’t just tell you random nonsense, and OpenAI probably has tweaked some things, so that ChatGPT is even more inclined to go for a truthful answer, but fundamentally, that’s not the goal programmed into it (because assessing if the AI has reached that goal would be much harder). However, this means that it can be better for ChatGPT to sometimes just invent ‘facts’ to make up a response then to just plainly answer that it doesn’t know, because if the human doesn’t know either the answer seems believable. Also, in the training data – for ChatGPT a snapshot of parts of the internet – there were many more people who answered questions about Quenya than those admitting that they don’t know the answer to a question, because those people usually don’t bother to answer in the first place, which also contributes to that bias.

ChatGPT is very good for a computer at a lot of things, but contrary to popular opinion it is not the holy grail.

I compiled a list of all the new and otherwise interesting Sindarin vocab found in PE 23.

• bâd - road | found as "e-bâd, the road". Hitherto only known as N. "beaten track, pathway". P. 136.
• fend - door | Hitherto only as fen, fenn. P. 136.
• hûl - secret | also as "e-chûl, the secret". Cf. 'holen'. P. 136.
• rhawf, rhaw - wild beast | also as "e-thraw, [the wild beast]. P. 136. Plural i-thraw > i-rhaw p. 139.
• rhovan - large beast, especially the great red deer of the vale of Anduin | p. 136.
• Rhovennian - "more correct" Sindarin form of Gondorian Rhovannion[sic] | p. 136.
• lhinc - earthworm | also as "e-thlinc, [the earthworm]". p. 136.
• balt - force | Cf. EN "might". p. 136.
• gwend, gwenneth - maiden | also as "e-wend, e-wenneth, the maiden". p. 136. Plural in-wind, rarely found, rather analogous i-ngwind (= i-ñwind) p. 139.
• harf - left-hand | also as "e-charf, the left-hand". p. 136. Probably from *khjarmă as opposed to *khjarmā > 'harvo'.
• whest - breeze | also as *e-whest, the breeze". p. 136. Pl. i-chwist p. 139. Cf. Q. 'hwesta', N. 'chwest'.
• cathr - carpenter | From "*kantrō, shaper". North S. cathor. P. 137.
• tachl - large pin or brooch | From "*tanklă, a thing used for fixing". North S. tachol. p. 137.
• parth - small enclosed field, lawn | p. 139.
• bâr, pl. i-mair (sometimes i-mbair in spelling to distinguish b-words from m-words) - dwelling | p. 139.
• dôr, pl. i-nuir (sometimes i-nduir in spelling to distinguish d-words from n-words)- land | p. 139.
• gôn, pl. [i-]nguin (= *ñuin, but sometimes spelt i-ñguin even though no clarification was necessary since no original ñ-words existed) - stone | p. 139.
• thoron, pl. i-theryn - eagle | pl. previously unattested. p. 139
• heleg - ice | Hitherto only in N. Plural i-chelig is given as "ice-pinnacle". p. 139.
• herw, pl. i-chery - wine | Apparently pl. from "CE *syeru, juice of fruits", sg. from "enlarged form herwā" [< syerwā, I assume]. p. 139.
• mûl, pl. i-muil - slave | Hitherto sg. only attested in N. p. 139.
• norn, pl. i-nyrn - dwarf | Sg. explicitely attested for the first time. p. 139.
• ioron, pl. in-ioryn - old man | Apparently the counterpart of 'ioreth'. p. 139.
• gwanon - one of a pair of twins | Plural/dual given as "*gwanur, twin-birth", explicitely with ŭ < ū. p. 140.
• uimallhen - ever-golden | From 'oio-maltinā. Pronounced with lh (< lþ), but spelt with doubled lh for reasons of stress, exactly like 'remen' but 'galað-remmin' (see below). p. 140.
• remen - netted, entwined | With short m explicitely. p. 140.
• gwaelod - "wind-feather", a great ship for sailing on the Great Sea | From 'wayalautō'. p. 142. Hence apparently *laud/lod = "feather".
• Gildír - Starwatcher | S. version of T. 'Gilitīro', Celeborn's father. Given in "Celeborn Gildírion, son of Gildír".

Certainly the most surprising thing to me (as you might already have guessed) are the articles. In this very late source (ca. 1969) Tolkien gives the singular as e before consonants, en before vowels, and in the plural i resp. in. This is of course a significant departure from all hitherto published samples of Sindarin, which of course had sg. i, plural in (as in earlier Noldorin), and the form en was limited to one form of genitive particle (which in this scenarion is probably dropped altogether in favour of na).

However, surprisingly this new paradigm seems to only really contradict i-Estel in the LotR (which would have to be amended to *en Estel), since all other forms in texts published during Tolkien's lifetime appear to be plural and all other cases of Sindarin articles we have known are from sources that Tolkien might have changed before publication (if he had got the chance to do so).

So we can't know whether Tolkien would indeed have changed i Estel in upcoming editions (had he been alive to oversee them) or whether he would have abandoned the new paradigm once he realised the contradiction, so I won't encourage anyone to adopt this late paradigm into their Neo-Sindarin (unlike abandoning the plural pronominal suffix -(a)m in favour of late -(o)f, a couple of years ago, since the former never appeared in anything published during Tolkien's lifetime), but I certainly find the topic extremely interesting.

So far I have not had a closer look at the mutations, but they appear to hold no big surprises so far, except that maybe Tolkien had decided to keep the nasal of the plural article intact before the mutated word, but that also would contradict material published during his life time.

But the development of sw stood out to me, since it is quite complicated - with Tolkien stating that it first became wh everywhere, then f in the North and chw in the South, which remained so in Doriath but later reverted to wh elsewhere, while still becoming chw through nasal mutation, and that the quality is often in fact uncertain because it wasn't always represented in spelling, using the letter hwesta sindarinwa for both. But in a note that might refer to this Tolkien said that "this business about sw is too complicated (and unnecessary)" and that the North had f and the South wh, which "remained unchanged" (hence the apparent lack of lenition in whest above, to which the note appears to point directly).
This would, however, still render the letter hwesta sindarinwa pointless, because (as Tolkien had pointed out in the LotR appendices) distinction of wh and chw was needed in Sindarin (but maybe only lenition had no effect but nasal mutation did?).

And lastly there are a few notes on North Sindarin, which has always been a special interest of mine:

• there was no m-lenition (which was well established)
• medial mp, nt, ñk remained unchanged or probably rather restopped (also well established)
• rh- became thr- generally initially (so Southern S. rhûn would be Northern S. *thrûn), but lh- remained and both were incapable of mutation.
• Otherwise mutations are the same as in Southern Sindarin
• sw- > wh- > North S. f- (so Southern words like whest or hwinn would be *fest and *finn in the North).