We have picked up those Adûnaic names from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the collection The History of Middle-earth. Many of them come from The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadûnê, two major writings for the development of the legend of Númenor and the Adûnaic language, composed in 1945-1946 and ultimately published in Sauron Defeated. The names were there very much in a state of flux and many of them were replaced or altered, but they still illustrate the style of Adûnaic as Tolkien imagined it at the time.

Tolkien sometimes put a macron and sometimes a circumflex on certain vowels. In the grammar Lowdham’s Report on the Adunaic Language, attached to The Drowning of Anadûnê, they are used contrastively: there are three vowel lengths, short, long and overlong, and the macron denotes long vowels whereas the circumflex is used for the overlong ones. But the difference hardly appears in the names used in the narratives, and in later texts, notably the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the Unfinished Tales, the circumflex is used alone. Possibly the difference was lost with time: Lowdham tells that the distinction of overlong vowels is a feature of “the older language”, suggesting that they may have disappeared later. Or Tolkien may just have decided to drop them from the language. Here, we have regularized the spelling by using the circumflex everywhere and disregarded the difference between long and overlong.

Nothing is known about Adûnaic stress, its nature and position. In the records we chose the following system: each word bears an intensity stress on the last heavy syllable, i.e. containing a long vowel or a vowel followed by more than one consonant; when there is no heavy syllable the word is stressed on the first syllable. This stress system is very loosely inspired by Classical Arabic, on the one hand in recognition of Tolkien’s self-admitted reliance on some patterns of the Semitic languages to compose his Adûnaic, on the other hand on account of the relative likeness of the vowel systems and arrangement of sounds in the two languages. But it must be well remembered that this stress system is ultimately arbitrary: we chose it for convenience and it is not supposed to reflect Tolkien’s conceptions on those matters.

Following Tolkien’s statement in Sauron Defeated p. 434 we treated v as a spelling variant of w.

The Adûnaic text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to an adaptation of ours of the general use of the Third Age, in which the fourth row of tengwar (with raised stem and double bow) spells the prenasalized voiced stops nd, mb and ng. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe