Tengwar

The fictional Tengwar script was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his works, the Tengwar script, supposedly invented by Fëanor, was used to write a number of the languages of Middle-earth, including Quenya and Sindarin. (The word tengwar is Quenya for "letters.")

The shapes of the letters correspond to the characteristics of their sounds. Each letter is 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 underlined, and may be on the left or right of the stem).

The Tengwar are divided into 4 series, and then a regular set of variants are applied to these initial letters to change the sounds.

The four series correspond to the main place of articulation. Each series is headed by the voiceless stop consonants for that series. These vary among modes, depending on what sounds the language that the mode is made for requires. For Quenya, they are: c,t,p,qu, and the series are named: calmatéma, tincotéma, parmatéma, quessetéma (téma means "series" in Quenya)

The four basic signs are composed of a vertical stem descending below the line, and a single bow.

• Doubling the bow turns the voiceless consonant into a voiced one.
• Raising the stem above the line turns into into the corresponding fricative;
• Shortening it (so it is only the height of the bow) creates the corresponding nasal. It must be noted though that in most modes, the signs with shortened stem and single bow don't correspond to the voiceless consonant nasals, but into Approximants.

Here is an example from the parmatéma.

• The main sound is "p" - which looks much like the letter p (the bow is to the right and underlined).
• With the bow doubled, it becomes "b"
• With a raised stem, we have "f"
• With a raised stem and a doubled bow, we have "v"
• With short stem and double bow, we have "m".
• With short stem and single bow, we have "w".

In quenya (at least) combinations also occur:

• With descending stem and double bow, we have "mb"
• With ascending and double bow, we have "mp".

Additional letters represent the phonemes /r/, /l/, /s/, /w/, /j/, and /h/. However, as many of the consonants can be rotated to form other valid consonants (as in Shavian), there exists a high potential for dyslexia among users of Tengwar.

A mapping of letters to the sounds of a specific language is called a "mode" (a Tengwar orthography. Some modes use vowel points called tehtar analogous to those used in writing the Hebrew language; other modes, called "full writing" or "Beleriandic" modes, borrow unused consonant signs as vowels. Some modes map the basic consonants to /t/, /p/, /k/, and /k_w/, whilst others use them to represent /t/, /p/, /tS/, and /k/. Some modes follow pronunciation, whilst others rather follow traditional orthography.

Since the publication of the first official description of Tengwar at the end of The Lord of the Rings, others have created modes for languages such as English, Esperanto, and Lojban.

Other scripts invented by Tolkien include the Cirth.

External links

• http://www.elvish.org/VT/
• http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm
• http://www.geocities.com/tengwar2001/
• http://hem.passagen.se/mansb/at/tengwar.htm
• Proposal to incorporate Tengwar (http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar) in the Unicode character encoding
• The Tolkien language mailing list (http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/misc/local/TolkLang/)
• ESR's Tengwar modes for Esperanto and Lojban languages (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/tengwar/)