

Simple guide to writing Elvish - iamelgringo
http://www.starchamber.com/paracelsus/elvish/elvish-in-ten-minutes.html

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RiderOfGiraffes
He says that there are two forms of "R", one as in "red" and the other as in
"car". I've been sitting here reciting these to myself over and over, and I
can't hear a difference. Neither can my wife, who has a degree in linguistics
and speaks English and French fluently.

Can someone explain the difference?

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pbhjpbhj
I'm a native en-gb speaker: I'd say the R in red is hard (ruh! like huh!) and
the one in car is soft (aspirated; "ar") but I don't know IPA so couldn't
really give you any more than this.

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Rhapso
Reh-ed and ca-arrrr//the first is a soft sound, the second says itself.

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DeusExMachina
In the Appendix of the Lord of the Rings it's written that for languages like
English where a lot of words end with a consonant, the Sindarin version should
be used (the one with vowels on the following consonant).

I also made an adaptation of Elvish for italian, because we have different
sounds and the one proposed in the book for english does not work.

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teilo
This is one version of English using Tengwar, but there are several different
"modes" that may be used, and sometimes even Tolkein didn't keep his own
rules. The Tengwar system is rather fascinating. There is far more to it than
meets the eye.

<http://at.mansbjorkman.net/index.html>

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Elven_Writing_System...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Elven_Writing_Systems/Foreword)

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pan69
I see busy tattoo shops...

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hartror
Full of pale white screaming, crying geek flesh.

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Steuard
This is largely correct, but "largely" isn't the same as "entirely" and there
are some major blunders. (For heaven's sake don't use it for that tattoo!)

The first big one is that there is no letter for 'c' in any Elvish alphabet.
Elvish writing systems are phonetic, so English 'c' has to be written with the
character for 'k' or 's' as appropriate. (The character this site lists for
'c' is what Tolkien usually used for the English 'ch' sound. The character
later listed for 'ch' corresponds to the sound in the word "loch" or perhaps
German "ich".)

There are a number of similar errors later on, most of which boil down to the
same issue: Elvish alphabets aren't just a substitution cipher! They're a
distinct encoding of linguistic data.

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nyrath
Raphaël Poss adapted Tenqwar to the artificial language Lojban

<http://vodka-pomme.net/projects/tengwar-for-lojban/>

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yogsototh
My name is Yann Esposito. Here is the result I prefer (there are at least 8
different manner to write "Yann"): <http://i.imgur.com/sJBLz.jpg>

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steveklabnik
It's not really 'Elvish,' as you're just writing English in Tengwar.

Also, 'Elvish' doesn't really exist, it's either Quenya (high elveish) or
Sindarin (grey elvish)...

But this is still a great intro to the whole topic.

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defdac
So how many here is coding an app that does this now?

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teilo
Why code an app? Tengwar has already, tentatively, been allocated a block in
Unicode, and a number of fonts already address it.

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jason_slack
Elaborate more on this, speculating to the question above, how would one write
an app to display these characters?

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teilo
As I said, you don't need an app. All you need is a word processor and a
Tengwar font. There is a Unicode version, and there are several ISO-8859-1
encoded versions as well. Google them. You'll find them.

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sliverstorm
I'm impressed, I never realized it all worked out so well! It actually is
functional, and looks natural. Nice.

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astine
Tolkien was, by profession, a scholar of languages. He actually invented the
elvish languages, before he invented the stories in which they were used. So,
it would make sense if his alphabet made sense.

