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Writing with Elvish Fonts
dj_whitebread writes "Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script? Now's your chance to have your Elvish text look just like Tolkien's. This page gives you all the instructions. The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!"
If you want to understand the invented languages of Tolkien, a good place to start is with a meetup group.
:)
Some people take their Elvishness pretty sillyessny...erm meant to say seriously...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.
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I appreciate the mapping by Daniel and all, but if you are really interested in Cirth and Tengwar, push for the Unicode inclusion. http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.htm l and http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1641/n1641. htm
For a font that does PUA and Plane 15 implementation of this standard use code 2001 from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm
Logban (A logical language for human speech), Quenya, Sindarian, English, etc. can all be written in Tengwar. I believe there are people using it for just about every language, including esperanto.
So, while the keymap is nice, use the Unicode stuff and help push it through to final inclusion.
There have been (several) Tengwar variants for TeX for at least 10-20 years....
I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one
This isn't anything new. There have been tengwar and sindarin TTF fonts available for many years, at least 8 or 9 years.
The reason I know is that I did a project in school that was related to precisely tengwar and sindarin, and I managed to get hold of a couple of TTFs which made my life easier (but I won't say easy - querty + elvish = not good). Should still have the TTFs on a floppy somewhere.
Got good marks for the project too. I'm guessing it might've been related to the fact that the teacher couldn't read a substantial part of it as it was in fact written in sindarin... =)
No contest. Tolkien was a language expert. Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember). From a brief look Aurebesh looks like just a substitution code for English (or am I wrong?). There's a lot more to a language than an alphabet. Also, the Elvish scripts are beautiful; and if you like more angular characters, look at his Dwarvish runes.
1. this is too complex and simply not the right thing to do;
c /tengdoc.pdf
2. the results are pathetis;
3. this is for windows only.
the correct solution exists. see http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jcb/fonts/TengTeX/do
With OS X, just drag the .ttf files to /Library/Fonts and restart any running apps, maybe log out for good measure. Works fine, I just installed all of them.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
>Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember).
Actually it wasn't based on Finnish at all, but rather inspired by it. It has it's own structure, just like any other language. Quenya was (in some ways) meant to capture the beauty that Tolkien saw in the Finnish language. In the early versions of Quenya he did use some loanwords from Finnish, but those were of course all replaced. Also there are many fundamental differences besides simple words (since it is, of course, it's own language). The modern (or "completed" if you prefer, although he never actually finished them) version have no connections with any real languages. If you get to really know the internal linguistic history of Tolkien's languages you can see how their world was meant to connect to ours (hint: in the LotR movies the Rohirrim speak a real language).
For some great info on the relationship between the Elvish languages and real world languages (primarily Finnish), check out this great article: http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm
Yes, I'm a big fat nerd. I even have my own page on Tolkien: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
>A substitution code is not a language!
Indeed, if you wrote english in this it would be like trying to write English with, say, Arabic letters. With some substitutions and alterations (Elvish uses different consonants and vowels than English does obviously) it's possible, although it's still English, and wouldn't even be using the alphabet technically properly, since you'd have to change things to get it to work. Tolkien devised his own method for writing English in the Tengwar (as well as with the Cirth - Dwarvish Runes), and that's what people follow (the great majority of the time) whe writing English with the Tengwar, but it still is written differently than real Quenya or Sindarin (the two most well known and developed Elvish languages).
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
Stupid stuff like this is one reason Unicode is such a mess: "Unicode can now support charsets such as Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B!"
Yeah, but at what cost? Am I the only one unhappy with the current Unicode? The problem is that there's just not one Unicode -- there's THREE (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32).
Err no. This is one unicode - Universal Character Set (UCS). UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are just three different ways to encode this character set into an 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit character stream. There are other ways to encode as well.
Encoding has nothing to do with what is included in the character set.
UT has a class dedicated to the study of Tolkien's languages.
-ashot
At http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alternative.htm is a great resource for all types of writting systms. The alternative page has many made up written languages, which include fonts for all type of systems.
I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?
The runes used on the map in "The Hobbit" did use the real runic alphabet (or a close variant thereof). The Cirth described in the appendices of LOTR was comletely different, however. So the official answer is probably "no".
This is a copyright violation until shown otherwise.
Fonts and scripts aren't subject to copyright. (The computer programs that draw fonts are - and are also just known as fonts - but the pictures they draw aren't. This is also true for the US, but not all other countries.)
under the current Disney regime, it's death plus ninety years.
No. It's seventy years from death, or 95 years in the case of stuff printed before 1978.
You could try this for loads of Futhark rune fonts One of them might be close to what you're looking for.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin