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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Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy
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
>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