Ad. personifications grammar.

Ad. personifications grammar.

In addition to gendered-nouns for people and animals, Adûnaic sometimes uses masculine and feminine proper names for places, especially lands and cities (SD/426). Several names for Númenor and its capital city are feminine: Anadûnê “Westernesse, Númenor”, Akallabêth “The Downfallen” (Númenor after its fall) and Arminalêth “Armenelos”. Such formations are similar to the way a Russian might refer to Russia as female: the Motherland.

Adûnaic can also have masculine and feminine proper names for natural objects and even abstract concepts, which coexisted with the ordinary neuter words for such things: masculine Agân “Death” beside agan “death”, feminine Ûrî “Sun” beside ûri "sun" and masculine Nîlû “Moon” beside nîlu “moon” (SD/426). The Númenóreans regarded such personified names as actual entities. Tolkien glossed Nîlû as the “Man in the Moon” and Ûrî as the “Lady of the Sun”, so these may simply be the Adûnaic names for Tilion and Arien (and perhaps Agân is Mandos).

References ✧ SD/426

Element In