I'm wondering if there is a site that anyone knows of that has a list of Dunmer words and their english translations, like how this Ayleid translation is done: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tamriel:Ayleid_Language, or like this one: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tamriel:Ehlnofex_Languages (but with more words).

I have this document lying around on my computer that I found once on the internet with such a list, but I can't seem to find the website back. If I find somewhere where I can upload it, I'll gladly do so.

TIL has a dictionary which covers a few dunmeri words: http://www.imperial-library.info/translation/

That would be great, if you need a place to upload it I can help with that.

edit: You can upload it http://www.4shared.com/dir/3550800/bbcb7f65/upload.html.


I know, it's not exactly what I'm after.

It's uploaded.

That page is rather amusing:

Av: from, in, of, such as in avatar.

inwah: an insult

I will not comment on the "translation" of "Khajiit".

Oh wow, that's awesome. Thankyou!

Where did whoever wrote that get all those words from?

No offense, but the vast majority of that document seems completely fictitious. Not that it matters, because hoping for a dictionary of the Dunmeris language, is quite alike asking for an inventory of ancient Greek lingerie.

Also, the author of that text has a rather odd idea of what a subjunctive is.

Well I wasn't hoping for a dictionary, just a similar amount of words as what appears on the Ayleid language page. I gather that he created or found some kind of translator based off the few known Dunmer words and just produced all these words with it.

As for your comments on the Ehlnofex Languages page, it is a wiki - if you have more or new or better information, or you see misinformation or errors then it helps to correct it. You don't need to be signed up to edit it.

Just for information, I did not make the vocabulary found in the document- any insults should not be directed at me.

I highly doubt that, apart from a few words, this list has any kind of ground in lore. Just thinking of my experiences in Morrowind, I'd estimate we are offered about ten words (or better yet, root forms, because some of them are hardly words). Some of these, like "bal", through their use in other games, are arguable more "Aldmeris" than "Dunmeris". I do not believe that anyone could generate said list from such little input.

Again, I'd be the very last to say that making things up is wrong. If you want to make appealing names, though, I'd say that you might just as well follow your own sense of aesthetics and euphony and design a new name, with the same degree of "lore validity".



The thing that pains me about that page is that it hardly distinguishes between usage/encyclopedal information and interlingual translation. For example, I highly doubt that "Tsaesci" litterally translates to "Snake Palace" or "Meh Ayleidon" to "One Thousand Benefits of Hiding". They are cognates, but they are not translations.

Secondly, many of the Ayleid roots/words (which I prefer to neglect because of blatant Tolkien-parasitism) have their translation listed in one or another conjugated form, which stem from a few sentences in which the Ayleid and English words were correlated by virtue of having roughly the same syntactic position. It is rather like translating the Latin "salutant" in the phrase "Morituri te salutant" as "greet".

Unfortunately, it is rather complicated to make UESP list more accurate. Firstly, the already small number of words present would decrease even further with the elimination of uncertain forms, the collapsing of some verb forms into one entry, etc. Moreover, all entries in the "Snake Palace" style (cf. supra) would no longer really count as translations. Other forms, like the Ta'Agra "-iit" cannot be translated accurately, since they have a syntactic function, rather than some kind of semantic content (in this case making all classes of words into nouns that can roughly be rendered in English as "of x", "belonging to x", "x-er").

Is it the dictionary made by Majra long ago? If it has things such as "muhrsin" for light it is this one. Yeah, it can be used, but keep in mind three things:
1. It's not canon (except for the words that are from TIL's own dictionary)
2. Sometimes the words svck (such as the aforementioned muhrsin)
3. It lists one word by rough theme, without subtlety or nuance. For example, you'd translate wood, forest, grove, jungle, woodlands, sylvan and all derived adjectives as "mora"...

So, the conclusion of 1, 2, and 3: make up your own words and noun, and try to make sure it sounds right. It's a fictional language, there's no real Dunmer linguist that's going to get pissed at your inventions, so invent away and with an ear to obtain something that sounds like the other Dunmeri words without being ridiculous, clumsy or unwieldly.