Translating Calcelmo's Stone
So I'm a linguist who likes the Elder Scrolls. Naturally, I've started work on reconstructing all the languages we have any material for at all. This includes most elven languages, Ta’agra, Jel, and even Nordic, to some extent. (Though Nordic is actually just Germanic, from what I can tell. Jarl, for example, is the North Germanic cognate to English earl, and names like Asbjorn, ON Ásbjǫrn, pop up all over the place. It might have something interesting, but I haven't looked very far into it if I'm being honest.) I just made a reddit account today so I could share all this with you all. I’ve lurked on /r/teslore for a while, but I’ve never actually had an account, so here I am.
I’ve started my endeavor with an analysis of the largest language source in Skyrim: Calcelmo's Stone. I’ve noticed quite a few attempt this before, but they’re usually either really strangely worded, outdated, or just incomplete.
I'm gonna go through the stone sentence-by-sentence to get a translation, comparing Dwemeris with the corresponding Falmeris text (which we can partially translate thanks to Ayleid inscriptions) and other elven languages.
Dwemeris text will be in bold, Falmeris in italics. The partial Ayleid translation goes under the Falmeris.
Sentence I > Chun thuamer arkngd chend duathand, th ahvardn btham.
> ye sa sou meldi calne tarn va nou molagnenseliye trumbi nou bala
> and so your driven CALNE portal in our fire-water-halls-and[1] TRUMBI our power
[1] molag-nen-seli-ye
We see a discrepancy between conjunctions here. Ye se literally means “and so,” but Dwemeris uses a single word chun (translated as “thus”) in its place.
Thua- and dua- are likely possessive prefixes, given its general correspondence with sou and nou, which are known to be “your” and “our”; the two sets are likely cognates.
I've taken arkngd as a past (passive) participle. Similar words appear later in the text: ahrkanch and ahrk, which are either related to or are forms of the root a(h)rk-, which I've translated as “drive” or “exile”. These match with forms of meld- which is of the same meaning. (I'm wondering if ah is simply a long vowel /aː~ɑː/, while a is a short vowel; this could mean that vowels shorten after three or more consonants, causing some differences in pronunciation based on morphology.)
Calne seems equivalent to mer in this instance. The lack of the -i plural suffix means that calne is probably a singular noun, meaning something like “crowd,” “group,” or “people” in the sense of race.
Trumbi gave me a lot more trouble than I originally thought it would. Given that the Dwemeris and Falmeris parts don't seem to match up, I looked at any Ayleid texts to see if I could find anything. As it turns out, Trumbe is a place in Oblivion. I took a shot in the dark and translated it as “fortress” or “castle,” both of which match up nicely with ahvardn, which I’ve interpreted as cognate to vvarden. It’s plural because of the -i suffix. Dwemeris doesn’t mark number, from what I can tell (except in pronouns?); likely from some intense syncope which also caused a lot of syllabic consonants and/or epenthetic schwas. (Prefix ah- of indeterminate meaning; maybe vvarden went through apheresis and lost the initial vowel? More research/sources needed.)
Btham is probably related to bala in some way. Conversely, it could be a derivative of bthar which is established to mean “allied.” I’ve interpreted it as the former thanks to correspondences in the Falmeris.
The final analysis, with gloss:
Dwemeris: >Chun thuamer arkngd chend duathand, th ahvardn btham.
> thus 2P.GEN-people drive-PASS.PCP-PST? enter 1P.GEN-hall / and fortress power
Falmeris: >ye sa sou meldi calne tarn va nou molagnenseliye trumbi nou bala
>and so 2P.GEN drive-PST group pass into 1P.GEN fire-water-hall-PL-and fortress-PL 1P.GEN power
Translation: >And so, your exiled people enter our halls, and the fortresses (of?) our power.
Curiously, both sentences lack any sort of possessive construction in the final part, so it could mean something different, or it could be a case of dropped copula (fortresses are our power).
So far, Dwemeris, curiously, shows head-initial behavior, which contrasts with both English and Falmeris, which are both largely head-final.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to work on this right now thanks to my current schedule, so I'll update this post with the rest of the sentences if I can get around to them sometime soon. (Maybe I should’ve waited until I had the full text translated, but I wanted to get this out while I was working on it so you all could give critiques during, and not after, because certain things here might affect future translations.)