Simple guide to writing Elvish | Hacker News Reader

Simple guide to writing Elvish

starchamber.com

65 pointsiamelgringo23 comments

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?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents

Just guessing, but in non-rhotic accents like RP and New Zealand English, the R in car is not pronounced unless the following word begins with a vowel. Any other ideas, maybe from an American English speaker?

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.

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

With my New Zealand accent, no matter how hard I try I can't make the "R" in red and car the same! Car for me is pronounced something like "Kah".

In New Zealand English, you should be comparing the pronunciation of R in “red” and “car audio”, to ensure that the R is actually pronounced at all. Some accents don’t even pronounce it in the latter. (There’s a good one for the spelling reformers.)

And be careful with “ah”. I have a strong suspicion that we pronounce it very differently in New Zealand compared to North America.

With my Australian accent I wouldn't pronounce an "r" sound in "car audio" either -- just switch straight from the "ahhh" sound of "car" to the "orrrr" sound of "audio".

Speaking of which, it wasn't until quite recently that I realised not all accents have so much trouble with the ambiguity of the Ford Ka.

For most American dialects, the sounds are nearly identical, but not quite: at the beginning of a syllable, the "r" is an approximant (a type of consonant that starts with an emphasized vowel sound), rather like "y" or "w", whereas at the end it is a true vowel, again like "ee" or "oo" respectively.

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.

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...

I see busy tattoo shops...

Full of pale white screaming, crying geek flesh.

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.

Raphaël Poss adapted Tenqwar to the artificial language Lojban

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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