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Tengwar: Languages
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![[The Tengwar writing on the Ring]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/t/e/n/tengwar/i/002.jpg)
Some of the tools that are introduced here can in fact be used without knowing much about the Tengwar, but the user should be aware of their limitations. For most languages, automatic transcription from the Latin alphabet to Tengwar cannot be completely accurate. In particular, Tolkien's methods for writing English in Tengwar are not easy to reproduce by a software tool. The orthographies he invented were often influenced by both the traditional spelling of English and the actual pronunciation, which causes problems when these two do not have a straightforward relationship. The Elvish languages are simpler in this respect, but occasional etymological spellings complicate things.
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Tolkien's Elvish elvish writing system (Tengwar) can be used to represent a variety of languages including English. The standard set of Tengwar letters are repurposed to represent the sounds of each particular language. Mostly the sounds of a given letter are consistent between languages but since the phonemes used in each language vary, the character-sounds are of necessity somewhat specific to the language at hand.
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![[The same text displayed in Tengwar Cursive]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/t/e/n/tengwar/i/003.jpg)
In their fictional setting, the Tengwar came to be known in a wide geographic area, and were used for writing many Elvish and non-Elvish languages. As is to be expected, each language had a somewhat different orthography, or even several of them. These orthographies, the different ways of applying the letters and signs for representing sounds, are known as modes.
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The Tengwar script was invented by the philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien as part of the mythological world he created, and was widely popularized through his work, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, etc. Along with a family of artificial languages and a large corpus of etymological data describing their relationships, the Tengwar script has attracted the attention of a large community of linguists and other enthusiasts interested in this expression of Tolkien's expertise in historical and comparative linguistics. The Tengwar shouldbe treated as a Category D (Attested Extinct) alphabet: there is a relatively limited corpus, and a relatively small (but existent) scholarly body studying it. In order to provide a standard Tengwar character coding for such scholars and enthusiasts, it has been suggested that this character set be included into the Unicode standard and ISO 10646.
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Jeff explained that Tolkien's runic Tengwar writing system can be used to write any language from English to Russian and beyond. Not only did "The Professor" create several languages, but he created their writing system as well. The structures of the Tengwar runes have a precise logic related to their phonetics, that is, to the sound that they represent. Each rune ... has a name, which is also the meaning of a word in Elvish.
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Several languages of Tolkien's world use the Tengwar as their written form. The requirements of each differ from one to another, so different writing "modes", like Quenya, Sindarin and Black Speech, have been created for using the Tengwar system. The above Ring inscription, for example, is written using the mode of Black Speech.
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