Hello there chaps; I trust you’ve all been cracking on with some more awesome worldbuilding. In fact, I reckon we should probably all adopt the title of ‘Slartibartfastists’, or maybe codify the philosophy of Slartibartfastism in order that our endeavours are recognised in the right section of the Black Library (or pages of THGTTU, whichever you prefer).
Anyway, I pre-prepared this post at home on the understanding that my contribution would prove to be useful in the light of Schafe’s ‘solar cult’ ideas. Cough. Put simply, here’s my contribution on the naming of any such star cults should that idea get developed a little more:
Obviously, disregarding any kind of historically unusual name for the cults (they could be named after a bloke for instance), the sourcebooks on the Eldar language, such as their codices and the like, are remarkably generous when it comes to giving us cool words for things like stars and starlight. It’s probably the blatant poeticism, and the fact that Tolkien’s ‘Star of Earendil’ sounds almost impossibly cool, but for whatever reason the GW guys rolled with the idea.
Most prominently, there’s a great little flavour piece in the back of the third edition Eldar codex [G. Thorpe,
Codex: Eldar (Nottingham, 1999), p. 48] on the Eldar language supposedly written by someone called ‘Lexicos Aldus Mari’. So, to cut to the chase, we have the following passages:
’For example, rhiantha means, at the fundamental level, ‘starlight’. However, a full translation would read more like ‘the starlight which shines upon the waters of Rhidol during the winter’. Without knowing where Rhidol is, or even if it is a real or mythical place, the full meaning is impossible to ascertain.’So here we have a fully attested word with the translation of ‘starlight’,
rhiantha. Pretty good so far, but the full translation means that the word roots are still a little vague. Pan further down however and we are given the luxury of a full translation of some ‘learned Eldar’s’ name (incidentally, the next codex confirmed that Rhidol, or rather the ‘Dark Gates of Rhidol’, is indeed a real place: [P. Kelly,
Eldar (Nottingham, 2006), p. 15.]):
’The learned Eldar who was kind enough to educate me was called Alai-Eltanomorreiasalonethatil – Altai (of the Alaitoc craftworld) – Eltano (his birth name) – mor (the wise) – reia (rising star) – salo (the teacher) – nethatil (family name ending).’Cool on its own, but you’ll also notice that the chap has an honorific translated as ‘rising star’,
reia, so by my reckoning we can be fairly certain that we’ve isolated the common root word for ‘star’ and it’s derivatives,
rhia or
reia.
We could do a lot with this single article on its own even, constructing such names as ‘the rising star folk’,
Reianir (perhaps an informal, slightly derogatory term. Note that the suffix ‘ir’ is used to turn a singular noun into a collective one or into a group one in most cases), ‘the rising star warrior-folk’,
Reiannir, what about a philosophy called something like ‘the wisdom of starlight’,
Morhiantha. There’s loads of things you could do with this piece alone, but even more than that it seems that the GW blokes have peppered the Eldar sources with words for all sorts of related terms like light and fire (if you decided that the cults were a little more poetic or indulged in archaisms). For instance:
What about a machine for collecting the light or destroying stars, the
Maugetareia, ‘harvester (machine) of rising stars’, or perhaps
Maugan Rhian, ‘harvester (person) of starlight’?[Thorpe,
Eldar, p. 42.]
There’s a vaguer hint of a word for ‘burning’ with the translation of
Fuegan to ‘The Burning Lance’, and I’d bet it was ‘-gan’ or something similar.[
Ibid., p. 43.]
Of course, well-known is that
asur translates as ‘phoenix’, hence
Asuryan (phoenix king),
Asurya (phoenix lord/s),
Asurmen (hand of the phoenix (king)).[
Ibid., cf. Kelly,
Eldar, p. 5.]
At this point, I should advise that ‘stars’ for the Eldar have some very different connotations than we might attach to the concept ourselves. The rune for ‘The Eldar of the Stars’ (meaning Craftworlders, though also literally) carries the connotations of ‘imprisonment, eternity, rigidity and self-denial’, but which to me sounds perfect for some kind of sun-worshipping eremitic cult of ascetics.[Thorpe,
Eldar, p. 44.]
We get a translation for ‘enlightenment’ too in the name of the Saim-Hann;
saim (enlightenment/secret knowledge/snake/serpent).[Kelly,
Eldar, p. 17.]
More encouragingly, the Craftworld Iyanden is translated as ‘light in the darkness’; cross reference that with Karandras’ translation, ‘the shadow hunter’ and the relationship between
-den (‘darkness’) and
-dras (‘shadow’) would imply a common root if we weren’t dealing with a constructed language (and hence something toyed up by fallible humans). In any case, I think the relationship between
Kar- of Karandras and
Kur- of Kurnous (god of the hunt) gives us fairly solid grounds to consider that
Iyan- is the part of Iyanden which relates to, or possibly translates as ‘light’ by way of a few logical syllogisms. A hypothesis for the fundamental root word might rest on the occurrence of
-an in a lot of the related words I’ve listed (
rhiANtha, FuegAN, IyANden, ANaris).
Such as ‘Anaris’, the sword given to Eldanesh by Vaul and which translates as ‘dawnlight’.
Anyway, those are the words I could find (and verify by reference) for words relating to light, fire, stars, &c. For me, my best guess is that the bare bones root for ‘star’ is
rhi- or
rei-, while the root for ‘light’ might be something like
-an. Still, there are the translations as given so at least that’s something to work with.
N.B. Some bloke on the internet thinks that
Oriosa is ‘the name for “stars”’ but I don’t know where he/she got that from, plus the same person made a few elementary mistakes when compiling his/her Eldar ‘dictionary’ on TauOnline.[
http://tauonline.org/Article/88/EldarAtoZ/ (Can’t remember what year this was recovered, but around two years ago)] It contains the
ri- part as I would predict but otherwise I’m sceptical. Basically, what I’m saying is that a lot of the Eldar word lists you might come across online are replete with mistakes/useless, so trust me instead

At least I show my workings/evidence...
P.S. And… if you’re interested in a rambling critique of the TauOnline guy, here’s one:
The TauOnline guy gives the translation of
jain as ‘storm’ and
zar as ‘silence’, by literally translating Jain Zar (the phoenix lord) as ‘the storm of silence’ just like it says in the codex. However, look literally just a few lines down and you’ll see the weapon ‘…Jainas Mor (lit. Silent Death)…’, which when cross-referenced obviously means that
jain is in fact ‘silence’,
jainas is ‘silent’,
mor is ‘death’ as you would expect from a Romance language (but other sources give connotations/translations as ‘the wise’; probably just a homophone), and
zar is ‘storm’.[
http://tauonline.org/Article/88/EldarAtoZ/, cf. Thorpe,
Eldar, p. 43]