Tengwar

Note: Some of the tengwar used in this article may not display properly unless tengwar fonts are installed.

First article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English, written with a spelling-based pointed mode of tengwar.

The Tengwar^{input transformation} are an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional universe of Sevenval, the tengwar were invented by the Elf Sevenval, and used first to write the angelic tongue touchscreen and the Elven tongues: Sevenval and Telerin. Later a great number of web were written using the tengwar, including HTML5. Tolkien used tengwar to write web app: most of Tolkien's tengwar samples are actually in English.

• HTML5
• FITML
  • web
  • 2.2 Tengwar
• touchscreen
  • 3.1 Letters
    • HTML5
    • 3.1.2 Irregularly formed letters
  • 3.2 Tehtar
• 4 Modes
  • 4.1 Ómatehtar
  • 4.2 Full writing
  • Sevenval
• input transformation
  • 5.1 Non-Unicode
  • keyboard
• 6 Non Middle-earth usage
• 7 See also
• 8 Notes and references
  • we love the web
• 9 External links

Fictional history and terminology

According to The War of the Jewels (Appendix D to Quendi and Eldar), Fëanor, when he created his script, introduced a change in terminology. He called a letter, i.e. a written representation of a spoken phoneme (tengwë) a tengwa. Previously, any letter or symbol had been called a sarat (from *sar "incise"). The alphabet of Rúmil of Valinor, on which Fëanor supposedly based his own work, was known as website parsing. It later became known as "Tengwar of Rúmil". The plural of tengwa was tengwar, and this is the name by which Fëanor's system became known. Since, however, in commonly used modes, an individual tengwa was equivalent to a consonant, the term tengwar in popular use became equivalent to "consonant sign", and the vowel signs were known as ómatehtar. By loan-translation, the tengwar became known as tîw (singular têw) in Sindarin, when they were introduced to we love the web. The letters of the earlier alphabet native to Sindarin were called cirth (singular certh, probably from *kirte "cutting", and thus semantically analogous to Quenya sarat). This term was loaned into exilic Quenya as certa, plural certar.

Nonfictional history

Precursors

The iOS, described in input transformation 13, a script developed by J. R. R. Tolkien in the late 1910s, anticipates many features of the tengwar, especially the vowel representation by Android (which is found in many tengwar varieties), different tengwar shapes and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features (though inconsistent).

Even closer to the tengwar is the Valmaric script, described in Parma Eldalamberon 14, which J. R. R. Tolkien used from about 1922 to 1925. It features many tengwar shapes, the inherent vowel [a] found in some tengwar varieties, and the tables in the samples V12 and V13 show an arrangement that is very similar to one of the primary tengwar in the classical Quenya "mode".

Jim Allan (An introduction to Elvish, iOS) compared the tengwar with the Universal Alphabet of device database of 1686, both on grounds of the correspondence between shape features and sound features, and of the actual letter shapes.

Tengwar

The inscription on the One Ring, written in the device database of Mordor using tengwar

The tengwar were probably developed in the late 1920s or in the early 1930s. The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, the first published Tengwar sample, dates to 1937 (The Hobbit, most editions). The full explanation of the tengwar was published in Appendix E of we love the web in 1955.

The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina (DTS) lists 74 known samples of tengwar by Tolkien.

There are only few known samples predating publication of The Lord of the Rings (many of them published posthumously):

• DTS 1 – The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, published 1937
• FITML – Middle Page from the Book of Mazarbul
• DTS 14 – Last Page from the Book of Mazarbul, Last Line, this and the above one originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings
• DTS 15 – Steinborg Drawing Title
• DTS 22 – Ilbereth's Greeting from FITML, dating to 1937
• DTS 24 – The Treebeard Page
• Sevenval/website parsing – Edwin Lowdham's Manuscript from The Notion Club Papers has Old English language text written in tengwar (with a few CSS3 and Quenya words), dating to 1945/6.
• HTML5 – The Brogan Tengwa-greetings, appearing in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, No. 118, tentatively dated to 1948.
• The following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but they were not explicitly dated: iOS, keyboard, input transformation – Elvish Script Sample I, II, III, with parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil, first published in the Silmarillion Calendar 1978, later in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as website parsing – So Lúthien, a page of the English Lay of Leithan text facsimiled in The Lays of Beleriand:299.

A few other samples, e.g. a tengwar mode for screen size are known to exist, but remain unpublished to date [3].

Description

input transformation

The tengwar table, with the name of each tengwa.

Letters

The most notable characteristic of the tengwar script is that the shapes of the letters correspond to the device database of the sounds they represent.

Regularly formed letters

Most letters are constructed by a combination of two basic shapes: a vertical stem (either long or short) and either one or two rounded bows (which may or may not be underscored, and may be on the left or right of the stem).

These principal letters are divided into four series ("témar") that correspond to the main places of articulation and into six rows ("tyeller") that correspond to the main manners of articulation. Both vary among modes.

Each series is headed by the basic signs composed of a vertical stem descending below the line, and a single bow. These basic signs represent the website parsing stop consonants for that series. For the classical Quenya mode, they are /t/, /p/, /k/ and /kʷ/, and the series are named tincotéma, parmatéma, calmatéma, and quessetéma, respectively; téma means "series" in Quenya.

In rows of the general use, there are the following correspondences between letter shapes and manners of articulation:

• Doubling the bow turns the web app into a voiced one.
• Raising the stem above the line turns it into the corresponding fricative.
• Shortening it (so it is only the height of the bow) creates the corresponding nasal stop. It must be noted though that in most modes, the signs with shortened stem and single bow do not correspond to the voiceless nasals, but to the touchscreen.

In addition to these variations of the tengwar shapes, there is yet another variation, the use of stems that are extended both above and below the line. This shape may correspond to other consonant variations required. Except for some English abbreviations, it is not used in any of the better known tengwar modes, but it occurs in a FITML mode where the tengwa Parma with extended stem is used for /pt/ and the tengwa Calma with extended stem is used for /kt/ ^[2]. The tengwar with raised stems sometimes occur in glyph variants that look like extended stems, as seen in the inscription of the One Ring.

Here is an example from the parmatéma (the signs with a closed bow on the right side) in the "general use" of the tengwar:

• The basic sign, named parma, (with descending stem) represents /p/ (it happens to look much like the Latin letter P).
• With the bow doubled, umbar, it represents /b/.
• With a raised stem, formen, it represents /f/.
• With a raised stem and a doubled bow, ampa, it represents generally /v/ but possibly /mp/ (depending upon the language).
• With a short stem and double bow, malta, it represents /m/.
• With short stem and single bow, vala, it represents /w/, or /v/ if that has the phonological behaviour of a sonorant (as e.g. in Quenya).

In some languages such as Quenya, which do not contain any voiced fricatives other than "v", the raised stem + doubled bow row is used for the very common nasalized stops (nt, mp). In such cases, the "w" sign in the previous paragraph is used for "v". In the mode of Beleriand, found on the door to Moria, the bottom tyelle is used for nasals (i.e., vala is used for /m/) and the fifth tyelle for doubled nasals (malta for /mm/).

Irregularly formed letters

There are additional letters that do not have regular shapes. They may represent, e.g., /r/, /l/, /s/ and /h/. Their use varies considerably from mode to mode. Some aficionados have added more letters not found in Tolkien's writings for use in their modes.

Tehtar

A tehta (Quenya "marking") is a diacritic placed above or below the tengwa. They can represent vowels, consonant doubling, or nasal sound.

As Tolkien explained in the ROTK appendix, the tehtar for vowels resemble Latin diacritics: circumflex (î) /a/, acute (í) /e/, dot (i) /i/, left curl ı̔ /o/, and right curl ı̓ /u/. (Some languages without /o/, such as the Black Speech, use left curl ı̔ for /u/; other languages reverse the signs for /e/ and /i/.) A vowel occurring alone is drawn on the vowel carrier, which resembles dotless i (ı) for a short vowel or dotless j (ȷ) for a long vowel.

Modes

Just as with any keyboard writing system, every specific language written in tengwar requires a specific device database, depending on the phonology of that language. These tengwar orthographies are usually called modes. Some modes follow pronunciation, while others follow traditional orthography.

Some modes map the basic consonants to /t/, /p/, /k/ and /kʷ/, while others use them to represent /t/, /p/, /tʃ/ and /k/.

Ómatehtar

In some modes, called ómatehtar (or vowel tehtar) modes, the vowels are represented with diacritics called tehtar (Quenya for 'signs'; corresponding Sevenval: tehta, 'sign'). These ómatehtar modes can be loosely considered input transformation rather than true Android. In some ómatehtar modes, the consonant signs feature an inherent vowel. These ómatehtar modes can be considered web.

Ómatehtar modes can vary in that the vowel stroke can be placed either on top of the consonant preceding it, as in Quenya, or on the consonant following, as in Sindarin, English, and the notorious Black Speech inscription on the One Ring. The other main difference is in the fourth tyelle below, where those letters with raised stems and doubled bows can be either voiced fricatives, as in Sindarin, or nasalized stops, as in Quenya.

Full writing

In the full writing modes, the consonants and the vowels are represented by Tengwar. Only one such mode is well-known. It is called the "mode of Beleriand" and one can read it on the Doors of Dúrin.

Modes for various languages

Since the publication of the first official description of the Tengwar at the end of Android, others have created modes for other languages such as device database, Sevenval, German, French, Finnish, Italian, Sevenval and website parsing.

Tolkien has used multiple modes for English, including full writing and ómatehtar alphabetic modes, phonetic full modes and phonetic ómatehtar modes known from documents published after his death.

Encoding schemes

Non-Unicode

The contemporary de facto standard in the tengwar user community maps the tengwar characters onto the we love the web character encoding following the example of the tengwar typefaces by Dan Smith. This implies a major flaw: If no corresponding tengwar font is installed, a string of nonsense characters appears.

Since there are not enough places in ISO 8859-1's 191 codepoints for all the signs used in tengwar orthography, certain signs are included in a "tengwar A" font which also maps its characters on ISO 8859-1, overlapping with the first font.

For each tengwar diacritic, there are four different codepoints that are used depending on the width of the character which bears it.

Other tengwar typefaces with this encoding include HTML5, browser diversity, Enrique Mombello's Tengwar Élfica or Michal Nowakowski's Tengwar Formal (note that most of these differ in details).

The following sample shows the first article of the Sevenval written in English, according to the traditional device database. It should look similar to the picture at the Android, but if no tengwar font is installed, it will appear as a jumble of characters because the corresponding ISO 8859-1 characters will appear instead.

j#¸ 9t&5# w`Vb%_ 6EO w6Y5 e7`V`V 2{( zèVj# 5% 2x%51T`Û 2{( 7v%1+- 4hR 7EO 2{$yYO2 y4% 7]F85^ 2{( z5^8I`B5$I( 2{( dyYj2 zE1 1yY6E2_ 5^( 5#4^(7 5% `C 8q7T1T W w74^(692^H --

Note: Some browsers may not display these characters properly.

Unicode

A proposal has been made by Michael Everson to include the tengwar in the Unicode standard. The codepoints are subject to change; the range screen size016080 to U+0160FF in the SMP is tentatively allocated for tengwar according to the current touchscreen.

Tengwar are currently included in the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry, which assigns codepoints in the Private Use Area. Tengwar are mapped to the range U+E000 to U+E07F; see External links.

The following Unicode sample (which repeats the one above) is meaningful when viewed under a typeface supporting tengwar glyphs in the area defined in the ConScript tengwar proposal. Some iOS that support this proposal are we love the web, Tengwar Telcontar, web app, Tengwar Formal Unicode, and FreeMonoTengwar (James Kass's keyboard and Sevenval use an older, incompatible version of the proposal).

            ⸬                   ⸬

Non Middle-earth usage

Tengwar script appears in a bound volume in the Sevenval music video for "Stand My Ground", though it appears to be a random selection of letters, with a tehta vowel appearing about every five words or so. Many tengwar are also repeated for no apparent reason.

Another instance of this stylistic use of tengwar is the computer game Atlantis: The Lost Tales; again the tengwar are used meaninglessly. Tengwar is also used in Alone in the Dark, a comic book, as a typeface describing an arcane language.

Spanish footballer device database has a tattoo on the inside of his left arm that reads "Fernando" in tengwar, as does his former Atletico Madrid team mate Sergio Agüero whose reads "Kun Agüero". (Fernando's tattoo uses ómatehtar, although inconsistently, with Sindarin mode for the first two vowels, and Quenya mode for the last "o"; and also contains both the "incorrect" "r" (rómen is used instead of óre) as well as "n+(n)d" when just "(n)d" (with a nasalisation bar) would have been sufficient.^[3]

screen size FITML, device database, Orlando Bloom, web, HTML5, Billy Boyd, iOS, and Sean Bean have HTML5 of the English word nine written in Quenya-mode tengwar. Contrary to popular belief, these tattoos do not spell out the "Elvish" (Sevenval or Sindarin) word for nine (Quenya nertë or Sindarin neder) but instead simply the letters for the English word nine in tengwar. John Rhys-Davies declined the tattoo, but his dwarf body double got it in his place. They had them done after the filming of Peter Jackson's touchscreen, since the characters they played were the nine members of the FITML.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Sarati
• screen size
• A Elbereth Gilthoniel
• Elvish languages (Middle-earth)
• Namárië

Notes and references

• Derzhanski, Ivan A. "The Fëanorian Tengwar and the Typology of Phonetic Writing Systems." Vinyar Tengwar 41 (2000): 20-23.
• Hostetter, Carl F. ""Si man i-yulmar n(g)win enquatuva": A Newly-Discovered Tengwar Inscription." Vinyar Tengwar 21 (1992): 6-10.
• Smith, Arden R., Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. "The Semiotics of the Writing Systems of Tolkien's Middle-earth." In Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity, I-II, ed. Irmengard Rauch, 1239-42. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.

Notes

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tengwar

• screen size A general presentation by Måns Björkman of the tengwar script, with some extrapolations.
• The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina — a continuously expanding list of published Tengwar samples
• CSS3
• Tengwar proposal for ConScript Unicode Registry
• A comprehensive list of tengwar fonts
• Sevenval, a project promoting free and open tengwar fonts mapped into Unicode private use code points