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!"

Comments

Elvish Meetups

[bluethundr]

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... :)

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Anonymous Coward]

In case anyone is interested, this is a good example of an Elvis font.

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally I can start work on my Elvish to Klingon dictionary!

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Anonymous Coward]

Elvish Meetups (Score:-5, Dorky)

Re:Elvish Meetups

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Err, isn't that a bit weird? An Elf who's religion specifically identifies Man as created in the image of the one true God?

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Joe Tie.]

I was thin and small for my age, with large eyes and ears and a lanky body

Don't fall for their lies! Those aren't elves, they're those little grey big eyed aliens!

Re:Elvish Meetups

[fenix down]

Ross Perot is an alien?

Re:Elvish Meetups

[MuParadigm]

This is, without a doubt, the geekiest item I have ever seen on /.

Re:Elvish Meetups

[blancolioni]

Well, this blows the myth of unearthly elven beauty right out of the water.

Re:Elvish Meetups

[TopShelf]

Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes...

"You know when I was in Memphis I came this close to seeing Elvis, but my shovel broke."

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Jack William Bell]

Ross Perot is an alien?

Oh come on, you really didn't know that? I mean the clues have been there all along. Short body. Big head. Speaks a strange language...

Re:Elvish Meetups

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Well, this blows the myth of unearthly elven beauty right out of the water.

Man, all I can say is that Beren and Luthien, fairest of all the children of Iluvata, have really let themselves go!

Re:Elvish Meetups

[Skord]

Next thing you know you'll be playing stratego with all the other nerds.

Re:Elvish Meetups

[jcast]

Um, no. Tolkien was a Roman Catholic writing from a Roman Catholic perspective.

Re:Elvish Meetups

[jcast]

Weird? Maybe. Tolkienesque? Sure---go look up the Gift of Men at the end of the Music of the Ainur (in the Silmarillion).

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.

--
Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy

Re:Mirror

[PepsiProgrammer]

Damn it people, he's DEAD, now get over it!

Re:Mirror

[CProgrammer98]

Would that be the "The Mirror of Galadriel" then?

Re:Mirror

[larry bagina]

How could routes to the site get slashdotted?

s/slashdotted/it with a bulldozer by a drunk construction worker/

Fault tolerance was the big selling point for the internet as a communications medium.

correction: Fault tolerence was the big selling point for ARPANet. When the internet backbones got handed off to commercial companies, the fault tolerance and redundant lines disappeared. Most of the major pipelines are near full capacity at peak times, so accidents, worms, equipment failure, etc can shutdown routes quite easily.

Resumes

[deanj]

Man, just the thing to make the old resume stand out in the crowd.

Re:Resumes

[Zork the Almighty]

Did they tell you that you were to be replaced "by this new guy who just applied" ?

Re:Resumes

[simong_oz]

It might stand out from the crowd, but would you seriously give a job to someone who translated their resume into elvish? ...

Re:Resumes

[deanj]

/slaps self on forehead.... it's a joke!

Ohhhhh Elvish

[javiercero]

Not Elvis.... got me confused there for a moment.

Re:Ohhhhh Elvish

[bluethundr]

::sound of slashdot crickets::

Re:Ohhhhh Elvish

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

That is so not insightful... Goofy moderators.

I guess you haven't read the FAQ. You have to smoke crack when you moderate. That's what I do when I have points. I always get meta-moderated "fair". That or it's just the vodka. I dunno.

Hell Yeah!

[mschoolbus]

Now I know what to put all over my rice burner to make it faster!!!

Re:Hell Yeah!

[Tokerat]

Oddly enough, that made me laugh really, really hard. :-)

Yes, but

[Matey-O]

Where can I get an Elvish keyboard?

QWERTY,
DVORAK,
TENGWAR?

Re:Yes, but

[EvilTwinSkippy]

You seek the One true keyboard. It has but a single key, in the Elven Tongue "Any"

One Key to Rule them all, One key to find them, One Key to bring them all and in the gui bind them.

Re:Yes, but

[Yet Another Smith]

A keyboard with one key? You mean like a Mac mouse?

Re:Yes, but

[Apiakun]

Oh come off it, if you don't like the one key keyboard, you can easily plug a multi-key keyboard into your computer! :)

Re:Yes, but

[ichimunki]

Now that was a good one. :)

Re:Yes, but

[Zak3056]

One Key to Rule them all, One key to find them, One Key to bring them all and in the gui bind them.

In the land of Redmond, where the shadows lie?

Re:Yes, but

[EvilTwinSkippy]

In the black heart of Redmond is a massive citidel, blocked by a magic Gates. When you arrive that gate will prompt you to "Press Any Key to Continue".

Once past the Gates you will see the Hedge o' Money. You must avoid its corruption. It has bought the soul of many. Past the Hedge is the Well of Souls, where the organizations acquired by the Dark One sit in suspended animation. The luck ones are twisted and warped into new products. The rest are left of languish for an eternity.

Re:Yes, but

[Zarquon]

LOL.

Huh? I don't get it

[Magic Thread]

This stuff looks like it's in a foreign language or something.

Seen this.

[Fizzl]

I think this was the very same site I used as a reference when desinging engravings to my and my ex-girlfriends rings. I think this was at the time of making of LOTR's first book into a movie.
I recall I also used some stand-alone app to get the nifty fonts after I learned exactly what letters I wanted.

Re:Seen this.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I think this was the very same site I used as a reference when desinging engravings to my and my ex-girlfriends rings.

Well, I guess you answered the question of why she is your EX-girlfriend...

Re:Seen this.

[Fizzl]

And of course I should have seen this one coming :)

I think this not a forum to go into details of the relationship and its problems.

I have seen her still wearing the ring thou. They turned out pretty nicely. :)

Re:Seen this.

[ssbljk]

Ring owns her now :)

Re:Seen this.

[bigboard]

On the other hand, I'm sure there are plenty of women who would love to meet a cunning linguist.

Re:Seen this.

[riggz]

LOL. you're right, we would all like to be cunning linguists.

Conscript/Unicode

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Conscript/Unicode

[Principal Skinner]

Did you mean lojban? (804 search results) Or did you mean Loglan?

Mac font

[viol2001]

Kudos to Elwin Loomis for converting the Tengwar Cursive font for Mac. Too bad the other fonts are not available for Mac.

Otherwise, these fonts should provide great fun for those who are really into the Tolkien world...or those that think the Elvish script just looks cool...like me :)

Re:Mac font

[1u3hr]

Too bad the other fonts are not available for Mac.

Which fonts aren't available? There are several tools for cross-platform conversion. For Truetype, use TTconverter. But I'd be amazed if they weren't already in Mac format.

I wanna write in Elvis

[Anonymous Coward]

The only lexicon I need to know is:
hamburgers chips sleeping pills

very cool

[syrinx]

I just finished reading the Silmarillion (again). never quite got into speaking or writing Elvish though. this website rocks though; i feel compelled to use tengwar for something now, though i'm not sure what yet.

Re:very cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I find certain c++ code more intelligible when I apply an Elvish filter. Forth does better in dwarvish. I save the black speech for Cobol.

Re:very cool

[Henry V .009]

And Java, of course, is the common tongue.

(Goddamn, I hate Java and Java evangelism, but I couldn't resist). +5 funny to the parent as well.

Re:very cool

[child_of_mercy]

Thats Westron to you buddy.

Re:very cool

[AndroidCat]

I would have figured APL for black speech, there was definitely dark arts involved. (Now there was a font set!)

woohoo

[thanjee]

Being able to write love poems using the Elvish script will really give me the edge in attracting a female companion!

Thanks slashdot :)

Re:woohoo

[MacGod]

Well, only if your hitting on Elvish women!

Otherwise you might as well just wear an "I'm a big geek" T-shirt. Like, say, this one.

Re:woohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're joking. But I've got love letters written to me using elvish script by my college girlfriend, 14 years ago... it's amazing how fast you can pick up a new alphabet, given sufficient motivation.

And you can write very rude things indeed to each other in a script that nobody will be able to casually read. Which is nice...

Happy days... :-)

Re:woohoo

[Dumbush]

if you are lucky, you may end up with an elvish companion

"it" might not be a female though

Re:woohoo

[fenix down]

You: "Beleg calacirya, wen!"
Elf: "Get the fuck away from me, cracker."

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tolkien needs more racial slurs.

Re:woohoo

[Nimrodel]

Personally, I'd LOVE if a guy wrote me a love poem in elvish. Granted, he might have to translate it for me...but I'd still love it.

Re:woohoo

[Thorgal]

Some years ago I wrote a small aphorism in Elvish for my Tolkien-positive love interest, using TengwarScript (Windows). I'd put in the box with a CD I bought for her, but never got any reaction. Many months (or was it years?) later I've learned that she never saw the card, as she somehow managed to overlook it...

Re:woohoo

[geekoid]

next you'll be insinuating you can't speak Klingon!

Re:woohoo

[thanjee]

An elf maid unable to read elvish? Oh dear!

You could always use babel fish :)

More importantly

[Nihilist_CE]

/. readers now know that michael has a typographer inside him! Get it out, michael!

Me fail english?

[Ghoser777]

That's unpossible!

Gah, I meant Elvis.

Matt Fahrenbacher

Re:Me fail english?

[Nom du Keyboard]

James Tiberius Kirk

And what happened to James R. Kirk?

Hardly a new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hardly a new idea

[1u3hr]

I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one

No, they've been around on Macs and PCs at least as long. (One minute of Google finds some dated 1991.) Must be a slow day at Slashdot.

Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[JessLeah]

The instructions assume a Windows PC.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[JessLeah]

It's not about genitalia. It's about having the fucking right to CHOOSE what you put on YOUR computer, as opposed to having Pop Culture and Mama Gates dictate it for you.

Running Mac OS X doesn't make me feel my b00bs are any larger. It does, however, make me feel a little freer than the WinDrones of the world.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[BrainInAJar]

Your right. it is about choice. I CHOOSE to put windows on my computer. Linux doesn't fulfill my needs. Neither does BSD, or OS/2, nor BeOS. My needs are 1) must run with all my hardware, 2) must work with a minimal amount of hacking. 3) must run on affordable hardware.

1 and 2 pretty much destroy every x86 OS out there except windows, and 3 destroys Osx

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[Bush Pig]

3) also puts Windows out of the running ...

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[usmcpanzer]

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.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[Arker]

How do you figure technical zealotry plays into it at all?

It was simply observed that the instructions were for use with Windows. I found that a bit odd myself, considering that the target audience is a bit small and includes a disproportionate number of people that don't use Windows.

Fortunately most of us are smart enough to get it working on our own boxes without the instructions, but that doesn't mean it isn't odd.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[The Bungi]

considering that the target audience is a bit small and includes a disproportionate number of people that don't use Windows

Unless you provide some proof to the contrary, I'd say the people who put up that website know what their "scene" looks like better than the average /. reader.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[0x0d0a]

If you're intelligent enough to use something other than Windows, one would assume that you're intelligent enough to also be able to install fonts in said environment.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[mrmag00]

Actually, the majority are windows users. Have been for quite some time.

I am personally viewing this in windows, albeit with blackbox as my shell and firebird as my browser. Simply because I have to run certian programs, and it happens to work and be easier.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[Arker]

Actually, the majority are windows users

And you know this how?

Not that I doubt it's true, but a simple majority still leaves a lot of room for some very large minorities.

In my experience, the set of people that care about Elvish (a subset of those that actually know what the heck it is) includes pretty large minorities of Mac and *nix folks. Never said they were the majority, even in this class, but they're sure a much larger portion than in the population at large.

So I would have expected at least a mention of the existence of such, perhaps a couple of quick links to how-tos on using ttf fonts on Mac and *nix... *shrug*

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[mrmag00]

Completly offtopic but I was referring to the number of slashdot readers in general. I don't recall where I saw it posted, or when was the list time, but faintly remember that the majority of visitors were using windows.

Of course, I care not in the end. You are probably right about mac users tho.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[Arker]

Ah, yes, most hits on slashdot are from IE/Windows, of course.

That's because most slashdot readers are wasting time at work, and work for the kind of idiots that 'standardize on Win2k corporation wide' and similar nonsense speak. Which, of course, is why said slashdot readers are more interested in wasting time than actually working. ;)

Lots of Mac heads among the elvish population though. And it's not hard at all to use those .ttfs on a Mac. It wouldn't even take a link. A single sentence would do. Oh well.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[JessLeah]

New Macs start at $799.

Re:Don't bother if you're not a Windows user.

[JessLeah]

Go fuck yourself? I don't live in an all-Microsoft world like you do.

Writing with is...

[Cyno01]

Is all well and good, but Don't Come Crying To Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish.

The battle of the Fonts...

[groove10]

The ultimate geek matchup: Tengwar vs. Aurebesh!

Which font will earn the right to go up against Klingon for the hearts (and webpages) of geeks worldwide?

On a personal note, I'll always be an Aurebesh man myself.

Re:The battle of the Fonts...

[1u3hr]

Tengwar vs. Aurebesh!

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.

Re:The battle of the Fonts...

[JorenDahn]

>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

Re:The battle of the Fonts...

[daniel_yokomiso]

Google Fight is the answer:

Tengwar versus Aurebesh
(20 800 results) (429 results)

Tengwar versus Aurabesh
(20 800 results) (611 results)

Clearly Tengwar is superior.

dear god please let this not be real

[Letter]

dear god please let this not be real,

On June 16, 2001 Elenhil Laiquendo (Boris Shapiro) and Elgaladna Findilauriel (Olga Kukhtenkova) got married in a catholic church in Russia. Boris is an amateur linguist and a beginner lambengolmo. He is fond of Tolkien and his languages and he specializes (to a certain extent) in Quenya and in Middle-earth calendars; he has complex ideas about Tolkien's world and Christianity and the Elder Days of our oikoumene; his beloved, Olga is an artist, a dramatic actress, a theatre costumier, she loves drawing fairies and elves and illustrating Tolkien, she also specializes in the history of arts and culture and loves mythology and collects cosmogonical mythos. They both are elves: his name is Elenhil Laiquendo and her one is Elgaladna Findilauriel.

so elves do get laid,
letter

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anymore! They're married!

*rimshot*

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[khaine]

They don't happen to live next door to the Chernobyl reactor by any chance do they?

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[mdielmann]

So he doesn't have a job (or it isn't listed) and she's in the arts. Surprise, surprise...

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[cryms0n]

God that _was_ funny.

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[rastos1]

That wasn't funny. That was Insightful.

Re:dear god please let this not be real

[petrus4]

>Olga is an artist, a dramatic actress, a theatre >costumier, she loves drawing fairies and elves >and illustrating Tolkien, she also specializes >in the history of arts and culture and loves >mythology and collects cosmogonical mythos. They >both are elves: his name is Elenhil Laiquendo >and her one is Elgaladna Findilauriel.
>
>so elves do get laid,

I sincerely hope they *don't* get laid. Crackpots like these two reproducing is really not what the rest of the planet needs...the world is crazy enough. ;-)

If only Ace Ventura could meet these folks.

[belloc]

Two words:

Lah-hoo. Zah-hers.

Re:If only Ace Ventura could meet these folks.

[core plexus]

Wow, and I thought those fat old balding guys speaking Klingon was bad. What's next?

I'm sure one of them will mod me down for this, because the truth hurts. I got karma to burn baby!

News for nerds, stuff that matters? Uhm, ok.

-cp-

Elvish?

[Bobb Sledd]

Elvish? Elvish Preshley?

What they didn't tell you is that you have to swing your hips when you write in this script.

elvish and Plan 9

[F2F]

Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked. After all, those are the people who brought you UTF-8!

Screenshot here!

Re:elvish and Plan 9

[KrispyKringle]

Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked.

What a great pickup line. I'd say that beats "You must be tired, because you've been running through my mind all night." Mind if I borrow it this weekend?

The complete ring poem

[mike_stay]

The complete ring poem wasn't inscribed on the ring, only two lines from the middle of it. Tolkein only gives the translation of those two lines, but an anonymous linguist with the pen-name "Elerrina" has reconstructed the complete poem with analysis. Here it is sans analysis:

Gakh Nazgi Ilid/Albai/Golug - durub-uuri lata-nuut.
Udu takob-ishiz gund-ob Gazat-shakh-uuri. Krith Shara-uuri matuurz matat duumpuga.
Ash tug Shakhbuurz-uur Uliima-tab-ishi za, Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.
Ash nazg durbatuluuk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluuk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,
Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.

See the TolkLang mailinglist archive for the original source. I've got it formatted using the fonts described in the article here (MS Word docfile, sorry!).

See also this bracelet I engraved with the complete poem with a dremel. The copper under the gold plating gives an impression of fire. On the gift card I wrote "This doesn't work, which is probably a good thing."

Re:The complete ring poem

[Antisthenes]

Somebody sent Tolkien a goblet with the ring inscription engraved upon it.

Tolkien wrote the inscription so it would grate on his ears. He didn't like the black speech.

So, he used the goblet as an ashtray.

Re:The complete ring poem

[Mr. Bad Example]

One ring engraved by dork,
One ring that's plated,
One ring that doesn't work
And ensures the giver's hated...

Re:The complete ring poem

[squidfood]

Ash nazg durbatuluuk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatuluuk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,

No one has ever dared utter those words in Slashdot, you insensitive clod!

Re:The complete ring poem

[The Wing Lover]

Gakh Nazgi Ilid/Albai/Golug - durub-uuri lata-nuut.
Udu takob-ishiz gund-ob Gazat-shakh-uuri. Krith Shara-uuri matuurz matat duumpuga.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee.

Re:The complete ring poem

[sharkey]

Hmmm....

"This Ring, no other, is made by the elves,
Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves.
Ruler of creeper, mortal and scallop,
This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop.
The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring.
The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing.
If broken or busted, it cannot be remade.
If found, send to Sorhed (the postage is prepaid)."

LOTR has already been made

[gokulpod]

If you wanted to spice up your resume for Peter Jackson, he's already done with LOTR. But you could try convincing him to take you as a dwarf in "The Hobbit" :)

Available for many years

[CoolGopher]

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... =)

Re:Available for many years

[meldir]

q uerty + elvish = not good

Indeed, if you spell it like that, you're not using a qwerty keyboard.

Re:Available for many years

[CoolGopher]

Doh. I can think of no way to explain THAT typo away. Okay, I suck :)

Unicode

[LauraW]

There's even a proposal to add Tengwar to Unicode. I don't think it's very high on the priority list, though.

Er, sorry if I just slashdotted you guys.

Re:Unicode

[LauraW]

> aren't there real human languages that aren't in unicode yet?

Yes, although they're adding more and more of them in recent versions. Tagalog is there now. The prominent remaining ones (or at least the only ones I'd heard of) are Balinese and Javanese.

The usual answer to the "What about the real languages?" question is "Well, if a human language needs to be encoded, someone who knows it well should write up a formal proposal for it." It's kind of a catch-22, because most of the unencoded human languages are seldom-used minority scripts that don't have many computer-literate speakers. And most of the Unicode geeks either don't know enough about them or aren't interested enough. Or are busy writing proposals like this. :-)

In my former life as a Unicode geek I always wanted to write up a proposal for the "Character formerly known as Prince", but never quite got around to it....

Re:Unicode

[dvdeug]

I hate to rain on their parade, but aren't there real human languages that aren't in unicode yet?

Being pedantic, I'll point out that Unicode encodes scripts, which don't have a one-to-one mapping to languages - for example, any language can be written in the IPA, and most languages at some point are written in the Latin script. Secondly, Tolkein's Elvish languages are real human languages - they're real languages that can be used for communication just like any other, and they're human, because who else do you see speaking them?

More importantly, the remaining scripts have no one really interesting in a computer encoding. Perhaps we should try to encode a script that's read by 420 people, none of whom have computers, and which not enough information has reached the outside world to encode it. And when people who know those scripts show up wanted them encoded and giving us the information to do so, it's done. But there are thousands of people who use Elvish fonts and would like the ability to store and transmit data in Elvish. Why should they wait on people who don't even care whether their script gets into Unicode?

Re:Unicode

[kalidasa]

The second paragraph here is FUD. There are plenty of languages with thousands of users that aren't encoded in Unicode yet - not because there is no demand, but because the process of reducing them to an encoding is more complex than with alphabetic and syllabic scripts. Indeed, one could not say that Chinese is yet fully encoded.

Re:Unicode

[dvdeug]

The second paragraph here is FUD.

FUD does not mean bad or wrong. It means fear, uncertainty and doubt, and refers specificially to the actions of companies like IBM and Microsoft when they insinuate the inferiority and unreliability of their opponents. I wish people would stop using this word to mean doubleplusungood.

There are plenty of languages with thousands of users that aren't encoded in Unicode yet

Like what?

Indeed, one could not say that Chinese is yet fully encoded.

One could never say that Chinese is fully encoded, since it's not a closed system. One could say that English isn't full encoded, because it's missing the Artist-formerly-known-as-Prince letter.

Re:Unicode

[kalidasa]

Fine, it's disinformation. Languages with thousands of users: Cunieform and Hieroglyphic Egyptian are used by thousands of scholars; Coptic, which is being reencoded, is used by the Coptic church, etc., etc. And yes, I know Chinese isn't a closed system: but the current repertoire of Chinese at any point in time is a closed system, while the future repertoire is unbounded only on one side (the repertoire of Chinese can only increase, never decrease, even though the repertoire of one user community might decrease).

Re:Unicode

[dvdeug]

Fine, it's disinformation.

Do you know the word "wrong"? You seem to want to impune ill motive to me.

Cunieform and Hieroglyphic Egyptian are used by thousands of scholars;

That's far different from thousands of native speakers; Tengwar has thousands of users, and quite possible more then cuniform. Do scholars of twenth century literature and sociology matter less then scholars of Babylon? Egytologists have actively discouraged the addition of Hieroglyphics to Unicode; should we force Unicode on everyone before encoding Tengwar?

Coptic, which is being reencoded

Right; so Coptic is encoded, and has been encoded for a long time. Now we should make sure Unicode is perfect before encode Tengwar.

the current repertoire of Chinese at any point in time is a closed system

The current repertoire of paintings at any point in time is a closed system too. That's a moot point. There can be new Chinese characters invented, and are on a regular basis. Thus Chinese is not a closed system. There are more Chinese characters encoded in Unicode then every other script combined. They've got their fair share. Besides that, there is the IRG which handles Chinese characters completely parellel to any of these fictional scripts.

Re:Unicode

[kalidasa]

We should deal with non-ficitonal languages before fictional ones. Once those non-fictional languages for which our understanding is in a state that can support Unicode are done, and we have some idea of the scope of room that will be necessary for the encoding of the remaining current repertoire

Tengwar has thousands of users, and quite possible more then cuniform. Do scholars of twenth century literature and sociology matter less then scholars of Babylon?

If one were to provide a list of ten names of scholars working in an academic environment on languages written in Tengwar (not just on Tolkien, but on his languages) - I know there are some, indeed I'm thinking of picking up the book "Tolkien's Languages"); and provide a list of three literary works not by J.R.R. Tolkien in a Tengwar language (or point to two literary works by Tolkien in Tengwar languages beyond the Ring poem itself), I'd say no, they probably aren't. But at the moment, the corpus of literary, scientific, historical, and commercial significance is entirely the work of one man, and so it remains effectively an idiolect. Other users of the language are either Tolkien scholars or Tolkien readers using the language in the context of Tolkien's work. So I doubt that sharing of large corpora across disciplines and user communities, and the other things that a non-PUA encoding would be used for, are currently necessary to the user community.

There are more Chinese characters encoded in Unicode then every other script combined. They've got their fair share.

Let's say that a Chinese writer is born who is at least as important as Tolkien. In his works, he uses unencoded (new or not) standard Chinese characters. Are you saying that it is more important to get Tolkien's fictional scripts, which are not the actual medium of his literary work, but are in fact part of the "message" of his literary work, encoded than it would be to get the new characters from the hypothetical Chinese writer, which as postulated WOULD BE part of the actual medium of his work, encoded?

By the way, I believe you're mischaracterizing the arguments against the hieroglyphic encodings: they tend to be "we don't understand the repertoire well enough" or "we don't agree that the proposed repertoire properly represents the script," not "hieroglyphics should never be encoded in Unicode." Here's the relevant paragraph of the objection:

At the present stage of research in Egyptian hieroplyphic script, one always has to expect new characters and changes in what we currently perceive to be an abstract character. This means that the clumsy instrument of standardization cannot meet the demands of the incomplete stage of research in Egyptology. A far more appropriate means would be fonts registered by Egyptologists, which can be very quickly expanded and modified within the science itself, as is the case with the directories of the Standard and the Extended Library that Hans van den Berg, Utrecht, is running within the framework of the program for printing hieroglyphs Glyph (please note the name). Only after the repertoires will have stabilized within Egyptology itself, further steps can be sensible.

Re:Unicode

[kalidasa]

PS: I don't remember if the Ring poem is in Tengwar or Cirth. So don't shoot me if I'm mistaken. And the whole point of my argument is that 16 bits is not enough. I don't know if DVDEUG agrees or disagrees with that point; I wouldn't be too worried about encoding Tengwar or Cirth (of all the ficitonal scripts), but I would be worried about the curtailment of the higher planes of the Unicode standard.

Re:Unicode

[dvdeug]

Once those non-fictional languages for which our understanding is in a state that can support Unicode are done,

Why? Why is it more important that we chase down every script once invented by a missionary who managed to translate half the book of Luke into it for a now extinct tribe before we start encoding a fairly well-known and commonly used script?

[and until] we have some idea of the scope of room that will be necessary for the encoding of the remaining current repertoire

We do. Look at the Unicode Roadmaps. Notice that after they've placed every script they could concieve of encoding, there's still large spots open on SMP, and they don't have the foggest what's going into the planes 4-13. Space is not a problem.

Let's say that a Chinese writer is born who is at least as important as Tolkien. In his works, he uses unencoded (new or not) standard Chinese characters. Are you saying that it is more important to get Tolkien's fictional scripts, which are not the actual medium of his literary work, but are in fact part of the "message" of his literary work, encoded than it would be to get the new characters from the hypothetical Chinese writer, which as postulated WOULD BE part of the actual medium of his work, encoded?

I think your distinction is without point. Any encoding of the Lord of the Rings needs Tengwar and Cirth for the title pages and indexes. And actually, I would think that Tengwar would be more important, as there's people out there writing stuff in Tengwar, whereas depending on the use of this word, it may never appear outside the context of his work.

I realize you don't care what people are using to write unless they have a college degree writing for academic pursuits, or if they happen to live in the wilds of Africa, but actual use is important.

Honestly, if this Chinese Robert Heinlein invented the Chinese word grok, would you be so quick to offer him a new character for a fictional word? Why?

they tend to be "we don't understand the repertoire well enough" or "we don't agree that the proposed repertoire properly represents the script," not "hieroglyphics should never be encoded in Unicode."

So why should Tengwar, a well understood script wait on something that we don't know enough to encode, and frankly, if two hundred years hasn't done it, possibly we won't ever know enough to encode?

Good way to impress chicks

[Michael Crutcher]

For all you ./'rs out there who were thinking that this font would make for a romantic and heartfelt letter to finally admit your love for that girl you've been admiring from afar:

Don't.

Believe me, your ego will thank me later.

Granted, I may be a really big nerd....

[makoffee]

I've read 6 tolkien books now, a from time to time roll a d-20. But this is up there with speaking klingon.

NERDS!!!!!!

"If only there were an Emoto-con for what I'm feeling!" --The Collecter

Dirty Language

[Kenshin]

Yes, but can someone translate and write "Kiss My Ass" in Elvish?

I'd like to see that...

Answer questions.

[euxneks]

Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script?

No.

Re:Answer questions.

[kryzx]

No.

Exactly.
This should be filed under the "geek->ubergeek->alphaGeek->patheticLoser " category.

Love J.R.R.T.s works, but come on.

Re:Answer questions.

[kylecito]

of course not...

We already have perl :-)

This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[Anonymous Coward]

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). Reading a simple character in UTF-8 now is almost like reading a miniature file with an ambiguous format, prone to aliasing and security problems if normalization (just choose one of FOUR valid kinds) and mapping to glyphs is implemented incorrectly. For example, a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think. What's a good buffer size for a UTF-8 encoded filename? That's why buffer overruns are so common these days. Why are we going to all this trouble just to support Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B, which are of interest to so few people who aren't half serious anyways?

This is where the word "DISCIPLINE" comes to mind. The Unicode organization does not have the DISCIPLINE to combat feature creep. UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS. Just stop it already.

And the Unicode standard is now at Version 4.0. When will they freeze it? 10 years from now, is there going to be a Unicode Version 10? I can't imagine the mess the "standard" is going to be.

This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea. I'm not opposed to attempts at Internationalization, and again, UTF-16 was good enough.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[EugeneK]

What's a good buffer size for a UTF-8 encoded filename? That's why buffer overruns are so common these days.

But why would you use a fixed-length buffer?? Use a unicode string class for crying out loud.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dmeranda]

"Feature creep?" You mean like fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages like Elvish? It's Unicode that's trying to bring some uniformity and saneness to this human condition of Babel.

Your problem is that you're confusing the Universal Character Set (UCS), which is the core of Unicode, with a character encoding, such as UTF-xx and so forth. UTF-16 is NOT Unicode! When will that myth ever die? Perhaps you should go visit the Unicode Consortium home page and read through some of their FAQs.

And there's way more than just three encodings, but there's only one Unicode (actually there's ISO If these Elvish characters are more than just a curious fad then what's wrong with assigning them Unicode code points? The only problem would be doing so prematurely before all the characters have been reasonably deteremined and stable. Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text. Granted though, the Unicode Consortium is primarily concerned with real human languages rather than inventions of fiction.

As far as encodings, keep in mind that Unicode is essentially a 20-bit character set allowing slightly more than one million separate characters to be defined (I say 20-bits loosely since the UCS codepoints really don't map to bits at all). So even your beloved UTF-16 (or the older UCS-2) is unnecessarily messy; having to use the low and high surrogate pairs to properly encode the entire UCS repertoire. Not to mention things like byte order issues and so forth.

This is why I actually love UTF-8, it is actually very simple and easy to work with. I think a lot of people get scared-off because it is variable-width, but for anybody who has actually coded using it, it is a very nice and easy to use encoding. Of course people primarily communicating in non-Latin languages may have other opinions. That's fine too.

As far as Project Gutenberg selecting US-ASCII, well, it sure looks identical to UTF-8 to me! In fact ASCII text is identical to UTF-8 text (but not the other way around). Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations and I'd be very surprised if UTF-8 is not the adopted character encoding. In fact they could just make the policy change right now, and they'd have to retype exactly zero documents in their collection.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

Stupid stuff like this is one reason Unicode is such a mess:

Nonsense. Most of the messy stuff in Unicode comes from real life complexity in writing systems and compatibility with preexisting codepages. If you want to, you can ignore Linear-B and still be entirely standards compliant.

a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think.

Blame the Romans; they're the ones who had to make up their own writing system instead of just using Greek. ISO-8859-5 (Russian) and -7 (Greek) both have this problem, as do all modern Greek and Russian codepages.

That's [UTF-8] why buffer overruns are so common these days.

Right; that explains why the original Unix systems, which predate Unicode, were rife with buffer overflows, and modern system code (e.g. coreutils), which handle Unicode, are nearly overflow free.

Why are we going to all this trouble just to support Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B, which are of interest to so few people who aren't half serious anyways?

Who said this had anything to do with Tengwar and Linear B? Tengwar isn't in Unicode, and every premodern script put together isn't more then 1000 characters. Han characters is responsible for having multiple planes, and preexistening standards and preexisting standards are responsible for normalization and most duplicate characters.

UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS.

But it wasn't good enough for Unix. HUMAN BEINGS don't using Unicode much - they prefer writting the characters to using numbers.

When will they freeze it?

Why would they? So far as humans are creating more characters, there will be a need to add new characters to Unicode. They don't freeze other standards - Fortran is now Fortran 2000.

This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea.

This has nothing to do with PG's decision to use ASCII. PG is doing more and more in Unicode, because that's the only way to do things.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations

When? We're still largely English, but we have maybe a couple hundred non-English books, for which we use an appropriate codepages. There's an unfortunate number of stuff in unlabeled DOS codepages in the archives, but modern stuff is labeled, and usually posted in ISO-8859-x (for an apropriate value of x). UTF-8 is usually only used for old Icelandic and stuff with odd accents (a lot of books dealing with India and the Middle East use macrons over vowels, for example.) It's mainly the choice of our producers, since that's what they find easy to work with.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[Duncan3]

No... Normalization is what messes up Unicode. UTF-8 etc are just like binary, base-10, and base-16 - just numbers in different forms.

The 4 (and growing) normalizations are NOT compatable with each other, and in 2/4 cases permanently loose information.

Unfortunately, it's now too late to fix the problems, everyone uses different normalizations, and we're right back where we started where you need multi-megabyte libraries to read anything.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[kahei]

(plug)

To sort out these and other common misconceptoins about what Unicode is and does, why not refer to my Unicode Tutorial?

(end plug)

(repeat plug in .sig)

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dkf]

UTF-8 is also frequently used any time you want to start combining, say, English, Russian, Chinese and Korean (plus math, of course) into the same document. The alternative is that you have some way of switching encodings part way through, and that's a much suckier (i.e. more bug-prone) way of doing things.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dkf]

The only real problem with UTF-8 is that it is expensive (i.e. O(n) instead of O(1), making many algorithms go from linear to quadratic, which is very noticeable on longer input texts!) to index into the string by character position (as opposed to byte pointer). It's a bit of a shame that that's actually a fairly commonly desired thing in text processing applications...

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

To sort out these and other common misconceptoins about what Unicode is and does, why not refer to my Unicode Tutorial?

It's less then perfect:

Unicode will probably never handle cuneiform and the like,

Cuneiform is spread across enough centuries and places with enough changes to make it tricky to encode. Nonetheless, there are people who are working on it and it will probably be encoded in a few years.

if you work with dead languages Unicode is not much use

Depends a lot on the language; Runic, Linear B, Old Italic and Gothic are among the scripts purely encoded for dead languages, where as there are many Latin/Russian/Greek/etc. characters encoded for dead languages. Honestly, most work on dead languages I've seen has been in Latin transliteration, which Unicode excells at.

Remember how I said that the various letter Qs that existed in pre-Unicode character sets were given their own different code points in Unicode? Well, with Chinese-derived ideograms, they did the opposite,

The various letter Q's? There aren't really various letter Q's.

Some areas other than Han ideographs have been unified (e.g. Runes).

The two above things give a wrong impression. Everything has been unified, the question is how much. German o-umlaut and Swedish o-diaresis have been unified into o, for example. The question runs more on how tightly it's been unified (rare, old scripts or very large scripts tend to be unified tighter then stuff like Latin and Cyrillic.)

Unicode contains characters that are never used, like Deseret, are not really characters, like Terminal Control Codes, or are just plain wacky, like Japanese cartographical icons. Yet it omits some groups of characters that are frequently used, such as i-Mode glyphs.

i-mode glyphs are "really characters"? Deseret may have a select audience, but the book of Mormon has been published on the web in Deseret, to give one example.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

UTF-8 is also frequently used any time you want to start combining, say, English, Russian, Chinese and Korean

But there's nothing special about UTF-8 - UTF-16 or UTF-32 encode the same characters and would work just the same. It's like the difference between OGG and MP3 - they can both encode the same sound, the main difference is size and ease of use.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[mdielmann]

Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text.

I don't know what's funnier, that line being part of a post modded insightful, or the fact that I can see some people waiting eagerly for that day...

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[kalidasa]

UTF-16 encodes all the characters in Unicode. You're thinking of the Basic Multilingual Plane. And no, the BMP is not enough. For instance, Mycenaean scholars (and there are thousands of them) need the encoding of Linear B to create electronic editions of their texts. And Chinese speakers (and there are over a billion of them) need the extra space for rarer words, etc.

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[jerde]

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).

No, there is just one Unicode. There are three different ways to represent Unicode data, UTF-8, -16, and -32 as you mentioned.

The Unicode organization seems pretty disciplined to me! To encode all the asian characters in active use, they needed a character space bigger than 2^16. So, they've chosen a 21-bit system that maps very easily to 16-bits for most of the characters. And UTF-8 maps the whole Unicode space down to 8-bits for most US-ASCII characters.

If a filename is encoded in UTF-8, there's still a maximum number of bytes allowed in the name, it's just that in Unicode that could be a variable number of "characters", though strictly less than the number of bytes.

Then there's always UTF-32, which just directly maps the 21-bit Unicode character number onto a longint. Easy to deal with those...

and again, UTF-16 was good enough

You mean a previous version of Unicode that was limited to a 16-bit representation? That'd be way back at Unicode version 1. Unicode version 2.0 brought with it the UTF-x encodings and the 21-bit character space. It's been that way ever since!!!

The point is, 16 bits was not enough for the world's actively used languages.

Once expanded past 16 bits, there was enough room for all the active languages, and also room for some lesser used scripts, like Linear B.

They're not even taking ALL possible scripts and languages, even if the proper channels have been used to propose them. For example, Klingon was rejected, even though it can be argued that it is a scholarly language worthy of study.

No, Unicode is a very well planned and thought out standard, and it is now THE standard for international text.

- Peter

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[HopeOS]

This is not really a problem. Algorithms that use indexes into text should only be used with fixed-width chars. Unless you're implementing a word-processor it is unlikely that you would ever need to do this. Pointer-based algorithms, which include cursors and iterators, can do the same work.

UTF-8 is in some ways a compressed format of the 32 bit Unicode space. Any algorithms that operate on compressed data directly are going to be more complex.

I should mention that applications that are not properly globalized cannot expect to operate on user-readable text at a glyph level. At best you'll be able to deal with ascii delimited sequences of foreign characters. UTF-8 makes this minimal state of affairs possible with little, if any, code revision.

-Hope

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[HopeOS]

The various letter Q's? There aren't really various letter Q's.

The author of the page was stating that there are multiple code points for the letter Q. This is true. The ascii Q exists. There is also a full-width Q in the east asian code pages. An application can use either code, and both will hopefully render a Q. In theory, a lexical comparison should treat these characters as being equivalent. In actual practice, this is unlikely to ever be the case.

-Hope

Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up

[dvdeug]

Does supporting fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages justify the increased complexity of Unicode? According to a retrospective on a decade of Unicode , increasing the fixed char size to 16 bits was good enough for real world practical work (as opposed to "play").

A quote from ten years ago. There are 70,000 Han ideographs in Unicode. 70,000. Your 16-bit system is more then big enough to handle every major fictional alphabet (Shavian, Cirth, Tengwar, Klingon), which add up to a few hundred characters, but it can't handle what the Japanese and Chinese feel they need. There's your bottle neck.

Word Macro Elvish Plugin

[chrispl]

C'mon, is this really worth the risk of enabling macros in Mord? Do you really want to give people a reason to turn them on?

Then again I guess if you are nerd enough to want to type in Tengwar you may know a thing or two about the dangers of word...

Re:Word Macro Elvish Plugin

[chrispl]

BTW "Mord" is murder in german.

this is futile

[Anonymous Coward]

1. this is too complex and simply not the right thing to do;
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/doc /tengdoc.pdf

Elvish writings

[applefan]

If only they had a translation for the Sherlock.app for Mac OS X and the truetype font.

Will this help my Nethack ascension?

[dmeranda]

My blessed magic marker keeps drying out when I try to write those complex spellbooks that I can never seem to read. Not to mention all those monsters that keep ignoring my hastily engraved Elbereth; here I've been using the wrong font all along. Stupid tourist!

Latin--Tengwar

[MacGod]

On the page, the font author discusses how to type characters, since they are mapped differently than latin. In order to produce the characters that most closely represent the sounds from the latin characters, he says:

Using a transcriber such as Mans Bjorkman's TengScribe. You only need to type in the desired text in Latin letters (the ones you are currently reading), choose a mode, and tell the transcriber to produce the corresponding Tengwar text.

Anyone out there with more perl knowledge than I want to whip up a script to handle this conversion? Seems like a great cross-platform way to do it!

The Ultimate Geek Garb

[Nathdot]

Beautiful...

I shall begin the translation now.

Within a week I will be the proud possessor of the finest nerd togs in existence!

Behold: My elvish cloak with intricate Tengwar DeCSS print

Reminds me of a limerick

[Mr. Arbusto]

The day that my XT replaced
my D&D dice holding case
social skills I neglected
elvish lore I dissected
and a celibate life I embraced.

-- www.bbspot.com

They all work fine on my Mac..

[caveat]

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.

My Precious

[jonfelder]

Now I've just got to get a hold of some gold and equipment and I can make my own precious...me likes my precious...mmmm

Re:Mod parent up!

[JorenDahn]

>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).

Taking the time......

[dukerobinson]

This is facinating I have to say, but to think of taking my time to learn a made up language when there are so many real languages that do exist that could be useful to learn!

Re:Taking the time......

[iapetus]

Maybe I'm just odd, but I'd rather learn a language for its beauty than how useful it is. Maybe that's because I've already got a couple of the 'useful' ones under my belt. Which is why, if I ever get round to it, the next language I'm going to learn is Welsh (which despite the jokes has more vowels than English)...

Lots of extra Tolkien language info

[JorenDahn]

A fantastic site for this stuff, and very highly thought of in the Tolkien language community (yes, it exists, stop laughing. :P Language is a profession taken more seriously in Europe you know) is Ardalambion. Here the author has compiled a ton of info on all of Tolkien's many languages (even ones that are not related to the world of Middle-earth), and even a course to learning the Elvish language Quenya! Very cool stuff. :) Also, I have a handy quick-and-dirty reference guide to Tolkien at my site here: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm.

Enjoy, all ye pursuers of Elvish. :)

Re:Lots of extra Tolkien language info

[Dwarth]

I agree with Joren on that one.. the Ardalambion is one of the (if not THE) best reference in terme of the Languages of Tolkien. The Quenya course given there is a 371pages PDF file that include lot of 'meat'. I'm personnaly trying too pass thtough all of it (I'm at page 191!) and I must say that you some willpower in your study to pass trough it.

BTW as said in the course Quenya is NOT a language that contain enough material for us to be able to speak it fluently.. but is a good language for writing poem & song.

Learn Elvish!

[ashot]

UT has a class dedicated to the study of Tolkien's languages.

Miriap!

[Rhinobird]

Miriap you, you p'taQ!

Word Macros?

[vandan]

The page has a link to some Word macros that give you toolbars for working with the fonts.
Anyone converted them to OpenOffice's Java-Basic-UNO 'language'?
Yes I'm being sarcastic.

I used to wonder...

[winkydink]

...what all those laid off dot-com geeks were doing.

At least now I know why they're still looking for jobs.

Elvish Pickup Lines?

[Avsen]

What i'd really like to see is a catalog of pickup lines in elvish.

Re:Elvish Pickup Lines?

[winkydink]

I believe you'll find them in the book titled "1024 Things Geeks Do That Keep Them From Getting Laid".

From the site.

[The Cydonian]

We will not discuss the Cirth, the angular letters seen in the inscription on Balin's tomb. The Cirth are also called runes, while Tengwar is translated as "letters".

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?

If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 (here as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).

(/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)

Re:From the site.

[Christopher Thomas]

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".

Re:From the site.

[dvdeug]

can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?

Runes is a more general term - not all runes are associated with the northern Germanic Runic alphabet. (Hungrarian runic, for example). No, Tolkein's runes are not the same as the Germanic Runes. /.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages

Tengwar is no easier to type then Hindi. Runes are, because the people who created runes made a nice simple alphabet, unlike Indic scripts which are terribly complicated, and very hard to enable on computers. Apparently Cassandra managed to get across the importance of making a script that can be handled on a typewriter easily, unlike her Indian counterparts. (-:

Re:From the site.

[The Cydonian]

Besides, the transcriber has got it all wrong.

Consider this extract I got after a bit of focussed googling. Compare that with the Roman transliteration given at the bottom of a fan page. This, apparently, is an absolutely correct piece of transliteration; notice how the author points with glee that JRR Tolkein himself got it wrong in his transliteration. In particular, Tolkein apparently forgot that the script is phonetic in nature, and that the long 'e' in 'even' and 'seen' needs an additional accent on the next consonant.

Now observe what the transcriber returns for 'even'. (Hint:- No double accent over the Tengwar alternative for the letter E)

Not just that, none of the fonts provided have a mapping for the double accent, nor, apparently, is it possible to actually type the additional accent in.

[Okay, I need to get a life and all that - heck, I am known to be a language buff - but just to point out that the 'rules' here don't seem to be serious at all. :-)]

As for Hindi, it is actually simple to type on a typewriter; there have been typewriters for quite sometime now. It's just that on computers you can process letters more logically than a typewriter, so glyph production tends to be complex. The problem, really, is that the concept of a 'standard' is almost non-existent, despite 15 years of ISCII and Unicode. And then, the adjunct consonants, the so-called aadha-akshar, are a bitch to generate in Unicode.

sigh

[narkotix]

if only it let me speak l33t

Re:sigh

[Antisthenes]

There are tengwar numerals (you can even pick decimal or duodecimal!), and they look similar enough to the regular letters to be employed in a l33t manner.

Sadly, no cirth numerals (.pdf) have yet been published, although their existence is rumored. (See this list of yet unpublished works.)

So, we must await the whim of the Elfconners to discover whether canonical Dwarvish l33t is possible.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

School lectures are boring. To keep myself awake, I tried writing with my left hand, writing upside down, upside down and backwards, or the same with my left hand. I memorized pi to 210 digits over a few days' lectures.

Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar. I liked the way the letters worked so I learned it and I was hooked.

So I bought a calligraphy pen and took it to all my classes. My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.) I found it to be a creative/artistic outlet in all my dry technical courses.

I'm not a Tolkein geek (never read the books), but now the girl is 2000 miles away, and when people find out I write in elvish, some say "you must have a lot of time on your hands" and think I'm some sort of uber dork (maybe they're reading this). C'est la vie I guess.

Re:Writing in elvish

[commodoresloat]

Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar

And you didn't marry her?

Re:Writing in elvish

[mikedaisey]

No offense, but you are indeed an uberdork. revel in your time, but expect to be branded as such.

Re:Writing in elvish

[Mordaximus]

"I write in elvish"
I know what you mean, but to be correct, Twengar is an alphabet, not a language. Had you been writing in Quenya or Sindarin you would have indeed been writing in Elvish.

Re:Writing in elvish

[WWWWolf]

Heh. I have to admit the idea has some merit - yes indeed. =)

Speaking of writing notes in odd languages or characters... since Multics had "Hodie natus est radici frater" as an error message, when will Linux get impossible kernel panics in Klingon? =)

Re:Writing in elvish

[Chelloveck]

My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.)

Back in my college days I caught the Elvish bug and learned to write the Tengwar. My handwriting is atrocious and my printed "t" is nearly indistinguishable from a "+" sign. Since "t" (time) was a variable in so many equations, I started substituting a Tengwar glyph that looks a lot like "t". Worked great for about a year, until I started to encounter equations with the lowercase Greek "tau" -- which looked nearly identical to the Tengwar "t" glyph I was using! I ended up reversing the two, writing Tengwar for "t" and a block "t" for the much less common "tau". I explained the reversal in a symbol key on the front of all my papers. Must have driven the TAs nuts! Didn't seem to affect my grades, though.

Re:Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

Yeah, I know. But if you tell people you write in tengwar, they just go "whaat??" I have told people, and written them something, and then they say "oh, you write in elvish".

Re:Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

Well you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

In my lectures, I see 50-100 other people that look as though they're half-passed-out. It has been said the brain can process 600 words per minute, while lecturers can only speak at 150 or so. So what if I am a little more ambitious with my free brain cycles than others who are wasting away in boredom?

People think I have no life or something, even if I tell them I learned this while multitasking with something else that is mundane. But I am just making more out of my time. If that qualifies me as an uberdork, so be it, but I have to question the standards of uberdorkiness.

Re:Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

Well we were never serious candidates for each other. Makes my geek story sound good though, no?

Re:Writing in elvish

[mikedaisey]

You may also wish to get that sense of humor looked at. ;)

Re:Writing in elvish

[Mawen]

Well I don't know if you are serious, but I know there are still people out there who seem to think any kind of learning for fun or learning things not out of necessity seems incomprehensible. And learning alternate letters is hardly a straining task.

I think there was a story on slashdot recently about how information acquisition releases dopamine. I do think I am an info-junkie.

It was 24 years ago today (or thereabouts)

[aebrain]

...that I first programmed an Elvish character set into my trusty Exidy Sorcerer. From Wikipedia:

Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512 x 240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320 x 200.
...
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to not really to have graphics at all. Instead they allowed the user to re-define the character set (the shapes of the letters on screen) and used these in lieu of pixel-addressable graphics.

The big problem was the vowels - which are implemented as accents/modifiers to the basic consonant glyphs. But it was trivial to write a small program that took latin characters in, and produced elvish output on the screen. Even doublets like zh resulted in a single glyph IIRC.
More difficult was Tsolyani, which is written right-to-left and has a different character set for leading and trailing letters. Still, an 8-pin graphics printer gave good results with both.

A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port

First done at room 642, International House, Sydney University in 1978, as far as I'm aware. But I'm sure others did the same thing at about the same time. Ah, the days when I could double my memory from 16K to 32K for only a few hundred bucks...and debug programs by having a radio nearby and listening to the RFI from various parts of the motherboard. The same year, the University of Wollongong narrowly beat us in porting UNIX. Others in the US were working on that too.
And now I'm an old fart, working with Ada-95 on Satellite Avionics, and X/T UML on agile development... both of which are pretty neat, and cutting edge. (I'll revise that remark about Ada being "cutting edge" when Java catches up and gets Generics and the other stuff invented back in 1983.) It proves that you can still be a Geek at 45.

Re:It was 24 years ago today (or thereabouts)

[digitalhermit]

The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to not really to have graphics at all. Instead they allowed the user to re-define the character set (the shapes of the letters on screen) and used these in lieu of pixel-addressable graphics.

Didn't the Atari 8-bit computers use something similar to do their graphics? Player-Missile graphics I think it was called. It allowed you to redefine characters as pseudo-sprites.

The TI99-4A also had something similar. In one of their reference books was a BASIC program to redefine a couple characters into a jumping man animation.

Maybe they owe the idea to the Sorceror.

LaTeX has had a Tengwar font for many moons

[topologist]

Interesting. I'd also like to note that LaTeX, the Knuth/Lamport typesetting system available on a great many platforms (including Windows), has had an elvish font for several years. I am no elvish scholar of course, so I can't comment on the appeal of the LaTeX approach to the elvish cognoscenti :-)

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\newfont{\elvish}{tengwar}

The One Ring: {\elvish

Three rings for the elven kings under the sky Nine for mortal men doomed to die Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone One for the dark lord on his dark throne In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.}

\end{document}

As fonts, they're only so so

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Speaking as a former full time and now only occasional type designer, these elvish fonts are mediocre.

They are cleary swiped from other fonts, but I will comment on the more "standard" of the lot, TengwarQuenya.

First off, it's taken from Times New Roman, which is not a big deal to me. It's boring, but not bad - I'd have prefered something with a little more tang, like Cloister or even Berling, but Oh Well. We're talking LOTR geeks, not Hermann Zapf. Speaking of Zapf, Gudrun's font, Diotima, would be nice for the Elvish treatment...

Secondly, the curves in the letters that are not derived from Times are very uneven, and ungraceful. Because of this, there are a pleathora of points describing what is essentially a simple clean curve.

A good example of this would be the char in l.c. "i" and the l.c. "k".. they're wavy snaky things with about 5x as many points as they need, and that's even accounting for the quadratic curve description differences in TrueType.

The letter spacing is mediocre. There are a few combos that could use some kerning, but the real problem lies in how letters that have identical forms are given different side bearings. Example: in English the letters (in helvetica / arial) l, h, and b sould have extremely similar if not largely identical left sidebearing values. In Adobe Helvetica, the left sidebearings for k, b, h, and l are: 67, 58, 65, and 67.

For letters q, w, y, and t in Tengwar Times, which all have very similar left side shapes, and similar counter spaces, have values of : 12, 25, 12 and 0. Which is crap.

So, overall, I give these fonts a C+.

They'll do the trick for the unclued, but they're not art.

Also, they are not available in Mac format, and for a graphics oriented font, that's a really sad thing to overlook. But it was devised by Geeks for other Geeks using MS Word, so, we're talking dupes of the conspiracy here.

RS

Re:As fonts, they're only so so

[KamuSan]

So, be creative and create your own!

Re:As fonts, they're only so so

[AaronStJ]

I'm not entirely sure which is geekier, someone who ares that much about Elvish, or someone that cares this much about fonts. ;)

Re:As fonts, they're only so so

[Molz]

Windows ttf's work just fine on OS X, so they can be used on a mac very easily; just drop them in your font folder.

As for how they look, the main problem I noticed is that the letter spacing is sometimes wonky, as you pointed out. Still they are better than nothing.

Re:As fonts, they're only so so

[bill_mcgonigle]

I think it's really hard to do elvish type right with standard TrueType fonts.

Elvish fonts cry out for Apple Advanced Typography fonts. For instance, these characters are way too vertical and constrained horizontally. It ought to look more like this, with all the decenders flowing under previous characters (a right-handed elf, I guess).

Check out the Q here for an example of this or the Zapfino font. The example doesn't even have all the features turned on. I recently did some birth announcements using Zapfino on Mac OS X and the type is phenominally nice. For instance if a sentence ends with the word 'example.', the cursive tail of the trailing e, which is quite long, goes under the period, actually extending past the period. It looks nearly hand-crafted.

I understand making an AAT font is an incredibly laborious process, but fortunately there doesn't seem to be a lack of Tolkien-obsessed geeks (in the nicest possible connotation).

Re:As fonts, they're only so so

[larry bagina]

look at a paper (or book) typeset in TeX. I mean, really look at it, notice how the paragrpahs are justified, how the serif/san serif/monotype fonts all match each other. Notice how well the letters are kerned. Notice how easy it is to read. Then look at something printed from most anything else.

I'm not a font-geek by any means, but I find ragged-right (left-justified) text to be ugly and unprofessional looking.

Helllllllo copyright violation

[Rogerborg]

There's an indirect attribution, but no acknowledgement of rights or suggestion of a fair use defence. This is a copyright violation until shown otherwise. Whether it's morally wrong or not is quite another matter, but remember, under the current Disney regime, it's death plus ninety years. Your grandkids might be able to use Tengwar legally, but you won't.

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dvdeug]

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.

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[Rogerborg]

Sorry, I didn't have my slide rule to hand to work my way through the copy right maze.

Regarding fonts not having copy rights, can you cite references for this? It seems strange that they don't attract copy rights as images or even trade mark protection (yes, I know that's a separate issue). Does Paramount really not have any rights to the symbols making up the Klingon fonts, for example?

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dvdeug]

Regarding fonts not having copy rights, can you cite references for this?

Copyright FAQ, question 3.3

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[Rogerborg]

(Actually question 3.9 for anyone following this). Wow, interesting stuff, thanks for the link. As usual, now that I know the correct google incantation ("typeface copyrightable"), the information flows out of the woodwork. As I understand it, US law seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and as the typefaces (see, I know the words now) were created in England, we're into the vagueries of the Berne Convention as to whether that's applicable in the US.

Fascinating subject, thanks.

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dvdeug]

US law seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and as the typefaces (see, I know the words now) were created in England, we're into the vagueries of the Berne Convention as to whether that's applicable in the US.

There's a court case, Corel v. someone or other, where they photographed old paintings and Corel used their photographs without permission, and they tried suing under British law in the US on the basis of the Berne Convention. The judge ruled that only US copyright law was relevant, and that making copies of public domain works doesn't give you a new copyright, no matter how much work put into them.(He also ruled they would have lost under British law, too, but that's besides the point.)

Re:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dschuetz]

but remember, under the current Disney regime, it's death plus ninety years.

Is this the term of the copyright, or a new proposed penalty for violations?

The SGA

[nathana]

Hahah...your post just reminded me of something.

I remember when I was in junior high, I had a few friends of the "nerd" persuasion, and we would occasionally write things out in the Standard Galactic Alphabet for each others' benefit.

No, it isn't quite on the same level as writing lecture notes in elvish since the SGA is nothing more than substitutions for letters in the English alphabet (whoda thunk that advanced species like the Vorticons, the Shikadi, and the entirety of the population on the planet Fribbulus Xax would be speaking and writing in perfect modern English, just with a different alphabet?), but it was a fun inside joke. :-)

-- Nathan

Re:"...ever wanted to write in the Elvish script..

[Steeltoe]

She's a girl! Even an elven one at that, what more could you possibly want?

Am I the only one

[desitter]

that read 'Writing with Elvis fonts?' This font starts out small, but will grow during use :)

Now my life is complete.

[GomezAdams]

Having more time than brain cells, I can now complete my Klingon Elvish dictionary using the proper fonts.

Printing in one thing

[AndroidCat]

But I'd really be impressed if someone did scanner software to read Elvish!

Re:Paul Haeberli's runes?

[AndroidCat]

You could try this for loads of Futhark rune fonts One of them might be close to what you're looking for.

know it all

[commodoresloat]

Why is it that I hear the parent post spoken out loud in the Comic Book Guy's voice?

Re:know it all

[p3d0]

Worst font ever.

Related Question: Ancient Greek on OS X

[commodoresloat]

I just want to be able to view and copy/paste the ancient Greek texts available at perseus. It worked fine with "Athenian" font on OS 8.5.1 with Netscape 4.something on an old PPC, but on OS X getting the fonts to display usefully is a nightmare. Is anyone else doing this? The Unicode stuff has not helped. I just want to be able to easily cut and paste from Chimera to Word in the same font and have the greek words with accents. This shouldn't be so hard for a computer that displays Arabic and Chinese and Korean webpages flawlessly.

Re:Related Question: Ancient Greek on OS X

[kalidasa]

I'm doing that. Use OS X with the Unicode precomposed settings, Lucida Grande, and TextEdit. You won't be able to do it properly with Word. Post an address where I can email you and I'll send you information (I don't want my email address or website on Slashdot).

Re:Related Question: Ancient Greek on OS X

[commodoresloat]

Thanks; hit me up at the address csloat @ nofuncharlie.com. Will I be able to then paste from textedit to word? Email me; thanks!

Re:Related Question: Ancient Greek on OS X

[kalidasa]

Neither. I'd rather that those who read my website not realize I'm slumming on Slashdot. :-)

Re:Death Penalty

[JamesP]

under the current Disney regime, it's death plus ninety years.

Does this means that you get the death penalty, and your rotting copse gets locked up for 90 years befre they bury you???

I used a page much like this

[Hitch]

when designing my wedding rings.

the link is at this page:

http://5xj.com/goodell46.html

we're about near the bottom of the page - "Chris and Sabrina, Manassas VA."

We've since moved, but anyway.

What they say is "'til starlight's end, we two are bound in love", and the elven translation is "silme mettanna, nalwe oyatana melmesse". If anyone considers that "incorrect", bite me. no offense. I had the help of a mailing list full of linguists who love quenya. in the end, they told me that what I wanted was theoretically exactly that, but that it was debatable.

We'll know Elvish has made it when

[zoward]

... Google supports it.

Bared an elvin culture

[thbigr]

When I was in highschool we where tasked with building a culture and actually burying it in the ground. (We had to dig up the preveous years culture). I have heard this was pretty populare at the time (late 70's).

I talked the class into building a tolkien elvin culture, and I built a Calander, and potery with elvish script. I am so glad I am not the only nerd around.

Re::Swearin in elvish

[horo_prc]

As a native finnish speaker it makes, me wonder if Quenya is as a good tongue to swear with as finnish. After all I think its much more powerfull than germany.
Elven commander could have said something similar to this at the Battle of Helms Deep:
"Mista vitusta noita perkeleen orkkeja tuli yhtakkia noin helvetin paljon!" Go babelfish that!

Reality check.

[mikedaisey]

From the article:

"The Tengwar, also called Feanorian letters after their inventor, were used in Aman and Middle-earth for writing many different languages."

I wish there would be at least a token acknowledgement that all of this is fiction...not because people don't know, but because it is kind of creepy.

Re:Reality check.

[DirkDaring]

Glad I wasn't the only one that was thinking that.

Re:Reality check.

[Antisthenes]

These people do realize that it's fictitious, but they don't need to stick disclaimers ("BTW, this is all made up! Elves don't really exist!") on everything they write.

Referring to the internal linguistic history (the fictional history as told in Tolkien's works, as opposed to the external development of the languages in Tolkien's own life) is important to the seriously interested becuase Tolkien's languages and his stories were parts of the same endeavor; his created languages and created cultures are connected.

The people who do serious work in this area can refer to fictional characters as if they were real, and then refer to Tolkien changing this word, because both contexts are important, and because they can safely assume that their readers are capable of discerning fact from fiction. It's a very natural way of doing things, just as we can talk about characters in a movie as if they were real, and then say something about the director. ("She would never say that!" "Well, what do you expect from that hack?") And as for people that do always talk as if Middle-earth is real, you'll find the same kind of people in many other realms of fandom.

In this case, a "token acknowledgement" would be patronising. The 'Lord of the Rings' topic icon should be enough to clue most Slashdotters.

As for it being 'creepy,' I personally don't feel that it's any more creepy than an intense, serious interest in classical music or sculpture. Tolkien loved languages and literature, so he spent his professional life studying them. He differs from other philologists in that he decided to create his own literature and languages. It was an uncommon hobby, and still is, but why can't language be treated as any other medium?

Maybe it's creepy to you because you aren't that interested in language and don't understand that sort of fascination; maybe you like language, but find 'fake' ones creepy. Of course, all languages are man-made, but 'real' ones evolve naturally in the course of their speaker's lives; Tolkien's languages were mostly private during his life, which might seem creepy to some, but you can find many creepier fans on the internet; Tolkien nuts are pretty benign in comparison.

Re:Reality check.

[Antisthenes]

Well, okay: having been reminded by looking at posts that appeared while I was writing this, I'll concede that some of these people are disturbing.

Please note (I'm talking to you, Boris and Olga, if you do actually exist) that Tolkien loved his native language (and studied it for a living) and that he gave his children good, Catholic names like John and Christopher.

Re:Reality check.

[mikedaisey]

Well, that's the response I expected from somebody but I commend you on working it all through.

Nevertheless, creepy. ;)

The King is Alive! The King is Alive!!

[fygment]

... oh, wait ... it really is Elvish. I thought the guy was slurring. Never mind.

LaTeX support?

[Jerk City Troll]

Do you suppose anyone has (or has the initiative) to create fonts and rulesets for use in a LaTeX environment? I suppose this guy's work could be adapted to the cause.

Re:Is this Mandarin script?

[Arker]

Tolkien ripped off various Arabic writing systems for the Tengwar.

That's not at all accurate.

Tengwar may look a little like Arabic because they both use the same style of calligraphy, but the resemblence ends there.

The only system that really resembles Tengwar analytically is the Korean.

Evil? Pffft...

[Jugalator]

Finally, here is my suggestion for the character string to use for writing the text on the Ring with Tengwar Cursive:

AE5,Ex26Yw1E3/4^z= AE5,ExxwP%1Ej^
AE5,Ex37zE1E3/4^z= X#w6Ykt^AT`Bz7qpT1Ej^

It does look rather evil that way, doesn't it?

H4H4 Y0U D0N7 UND3R574ND H0W 70 7YP3 1N 7RU3 L337! 3V1L MY 455!

People, it's just...

[jbarr]

...a freakin' story!

(or is that Orc moderation)

Real languages/scripts vs made-up ones...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes -- that's fine and all that. But rather than go to extremes to learn elvish or some other made-up language, why not help preserve a little human history and learn one of the many genuine languages that face the very real threat of extinction? For just one example, the last of the native Gaelic-speaking Nova Scotians are dying off. With them will die a tremendous amount of history and tradition, unless they can pass it on to someone...

OMFG

[Xrkun]

I thought I was a nerd. Nope, right now I feel like the coolest person on the planet. I'm f*cking Fonzie! I'm gonna go to the bar tonight and pick up chicks!

Re:Mod Parent Up

[WillAdams]

Not only that, but there are real languages / scripts w/ millions of speakers (John Plaice used the example of Berber and Tifinagh at TUG2003) which aren't in Unicode yet---I really wish they'd call a moratorium on trivial fictional stuff until such time as serious, real-world needs such as getting slots for Tifinagh are addressed.

William

Har-d-har-har

[festers]

After the 5th time seeing this joke, it's just not funny anymore. My wife, who is not anything close to resembling a geek, thinks this kind of stuff is very interesting. You don't have to be a geek to appreciate language.

Sad, really

[NineNine]

Running Mac OS X doesn't make me feel my b00bs are any larger. It does, however, make me feel a little freer than the WinDrones of the world.


Defining yourself by your operating system is just as sad as someone who defines themselves by the car they drive. You're a good little consumer. You keep believing that you're "freer" because you run an Apple. Good consumer.

You do realize...

[NineNine]

... that you posted this in a public forum where potentially a *lot* of people will be able to see this, right?

Re:Mod parent up!

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

Klingon is a full language, and Quenya and Sindarin (Tolkien's main Elvish languages) are too, but Tengwar is just a writing system that can be adapted to many different languages. However, depending on the language it's often more than just a simple substitution cipher (it's written phonetically, so there are many different Tengwar modes for English, all slightly different).

I'd rather write...

[dentar]

...in an ELVIS font!

I HATE URL REGEX FILTERS

[JCCyC]

I can't get one of the font files here at work because the URL contains the word ARNOLD!!! I can't effin believe it!

Re:I HATE URL REGEX FILTERS

[hesiod]

> I can't effin believe it!

Don't you mean you can't elfin believe it?

ba-dum dum. har har.

So?

[R4d10h34D]

-begin IRONY- This gonna make my life better -/begin-

Elvish Fonts?

[UncleBiggims]

I'm confused... are we talking a wingding type font inspired by the King of Rock-n-Roll?

Ho man, look at that font. That thing is HUGE!

You're right tiny Elvish.

respect and more.

[Anonymous Coward]

The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!

And the sane part of me says "what a fucking loser".

Nothing new here..

[emtilt]

This is nothing new. These fonts have been around for a number of years. There are several programs that help you use them that have also been around for a long time.

Could use a keyboard script plug in too

[cryptochrome]

Though it's not essential, it would be handy to have an elvish keyboard layout/text behavior script too. Not to mention it probably already has its own block in the unicode private use area too. (http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/)

But that's probably overkill, since all you really want to do is fiddle around with it, not produce anything useful.

Incorrect, Linux always has alternatives

[Subaiku]

Here you can find the KDE version of the tengwar tool used on the site. All the same functionality and it even uses all the same fonts and language sets.

Elvish....

[tickticker]

... gives people who've mastered Klingon something to do.

ticktickticktick

Who uses this stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the real men can write tengwar by hand...

And if you want to understand...

[Snaller]

...why people want to understand the invented langauges of Tolkien there is no help for you.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[worldcitizen]

> there are real languages / scripts w/ millions of speakers which aren't in Unicode yet

IMNSHO, when considering priorities in Unicode, there is one reason much more relevant than how many people speak a language:
How many people want to use it in their computers?
No matter how many people speak a certain language, if they don't care about writing it in a computer there is no "natural right" to inclusion.

Some thoughts on multiculturalism "rights"

Re:Mod Parent Up

[WillAdams]

Why should people care to use computers which don't accomodate their scripts?

I'm not arguing for cultural relativism here, but the mere consideration of reality vice fiction in the consideration of priorities.

Groups like GUST (the Polish TeX User's Group) have worked _very_ hard to get their languages / scripts / accents supported, and in certain instances (Boguslaw Jackowski's nifty LatinModern) have greatly benefited others as well---there's no need to crowd the bar w/ fictional things when people in the real world want to approach it (to mix a couple of metaphors).

William

Re:Get a life you fucking virgins

[hesiod]

> And you wonder why no one wants to be within ten foot of you?

You think that's bad, I know no one wants to be w/in 10 ft. of me, and I still think this is stupid. Neat writing style, neat idea, and just like everything else, geeks take it WAY too far.

All fine and good..

[weeboo0104]

But will Babelfish be able to translate it without sounding like Yoda?

irc is fun in sindarin...

[caveat]

check it out..
..although i cant see iterm being too useful like that..

Laughed so hard...

[Simkin1]

I agree with some of the folks on this list... Some people have too much time on their hands... This ranks right up there on the 'gibberish-scale' with "Klingon" as a language, or Ebonics, or folks that want to turn Jedi into a religion, or even that those mythical people who persist in thinking that Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Monica Lewinski.

Thank you!

[Simkin1]

Laughed so hard when I read your post, I almost wet myself!

Re:Mod Parent Up

[iabervon]

It's not like there's a shortage of slots (particularly in UCS-32); the problem is getting the character set codified to the point of being suitable for inclusion, and generating fonts which can be used. The people who do this work for fictional scripts are generally more interested in the fictional scripts than in the general issue. If they weren't working on Tengwar, they'd be translating things into Quenya or installing light fixtures or something, not working on Berber.

Getting hobbyists involved in Unicode helps the adoption of UTF-8 and font management and rendering technology. Chances are that more people who add support for non-iso8859 character sets to their programs will be doing so in order to support Tengwar than Berber, even though Berber is probably more important.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[WillAdams]

A font for Tifinagh has already been done, as has a prototypical encoding scheme---see the Omega docs.

The problem is, the Unicode consortium sees that Berber is already set w/ Latin, as well as Arabic, and apparently feels that that's sufficient and hence there's no need for their native script.

William

It's 20 bits, not 21

[dmeranda]

Umm, not to nitpick too much since your point is entirely correct.

But it's really 20-bit, not 21-bit. The maximum codepoint is U+10FFFF. But since 0 is not a valid codepoint, there's really only 20-bits worth of information there, not 21 (actually its more like 19.8 bits since some codepoints are permamently unassigned). Remember, UCS codepoints are abstract numbers, not specific bit patterns; so you have to measure information content, not the number of bits it takes if you just happen to choose a particular binary representation like two's-complement.

But I do have to strongly agree that so many people seem confused and always think Unicode is 16-bits, which is just plain wrong! And most people who use UTF-16 sadly don't even know anything about surrogate pairs...they think they're using a fixed-width encoding, but UTF-16 is in fact a variable-width encoding just like UTF-8!

Re:It's 20 bits, not 21 (correction)

[dmeranda]

Ooops, *blush*, I computed wrong. Okay, the correct number is 20.09 bits.

There are 1112063 possible codepoints (0x10ffff - 2048). Taking the log-base-2 you get approximately 20.09. Still WAY less that 21-bits, which was my main point, but yes it is slightly more than 20-bits too. So I stand corrected. (Of course if you don't count surrogates which are not real characters....)

Re:Mod Parent Up

[worldcitizen]

Your example seems to indicate a group who does care about using computers to write its language. I have no problem with that.

My point is: if there are enough computer users who find it more useful to have available elvish or klingon, it doesn't matter that it is not "real".

It is like using dingbats or other character-graphics, if there are enough people wanting to use them, it is a good thing that they're incorporated into the standard. If more computer users find it useful to have a heavy teardrop-spoked pinwheel asterisk (U2743) than to have sumerian cuneiform letters, then it is irrelevant which is more of a "real language". If you really need cuneiform letters, there are still ways to produce them with a computer regardless of their status in the standard.

I personally prefer to have elvish letters available than 40 different varieties of stars, asterisks and snowflakes. Mmm... Let me check if my SA membership lets me vote on that...

"Eat Glass" is relevant

[HiggsBison]

I suppose it would be nice if someone who is into elven script were to submit a properly crafted .gif to "The I Can Eat Glass Project".

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/created.html

They already have Sindarin (Elvish) posted, but it is just the phonetic translation: "Bathathon heled, im u-cirath".

As for modding my original post down to -1(off topic): Geez! Get a clue!

Re:Elvish Fonts

[frisket]

But Tengwar fonts for LaTeX have been around for over a decade! What planet has this guy been living on?

Your own site?

[Scrab]

Not after this slashdotting you won't....... ;)

I want to

[geekoid]

write elvis songs in elvish.

Re:SCI-FI

[G3ckoG33k]

What?! For now I'm being "-1, Offtopic". Why?!

Why?! There was no sarcasm anywhere. Indeed my pointer was to a very relevant side-affair of the topic: the sci-fi as related to 'true' sci-fi. Therefore, their homepage address was indeed, and still is the best I've seen in years. Yes I'm such a whiner. ;)

Re:Elvish Fonts

[orangesquid]

I don't know, but he didn't even link to Ardalambion (at least not that I saw but I might be blind), a fantastic site for all sorts of info about the langauges of Tolkein.. TONS of information on Elvish Preshley.

(Wow. Shit. I remembered that URL *exactly*, even after not really going there in years...

Craziness.)

Re:Mod Parent Up

[dvdeug]

I really wish they'd call a moratorium on trivial fictional stuff until such time as serious, real-world needs such as getting slots for Tifinagh are addressed.

It does have slots - 08A0-08CF. What it doesn't have is a solid working proposal. You aren't going to summon up a proposal by banning other stuff. And honestly, how seriously needed is it if no one is willing to fund Michael Everson to get it down now?

In any case, the works of one of the great writers of our century, and the choice of communication of many computer users are hardly trivial. Just the Lord of the Rings alone is a large chunk of DVD and novel publishing, probably more then is done in Berber or Tifinagh.

thats typeface, not fonts

[geekoid]

Under some conditions, fonts can be copyrighted.
Like scalable fonts, for example.

Re:Get a life you fucking virgins

[geekoid]

"...geeks take it WAY too far."
dude, that is the definition of geek. whether its a circus geek, train geek, tolkien geek or computer geek.

I think its cool, and I have been geting laid since 1978.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[dvdeug]

The problem is, the Unicode consortium sees that Berber is already set w/ Latin, as well as Arabic, and apparently feels that that's sufficient and hence there's no need for their native script.

The Unicode consortium is not a rich organization - pretty much all the work is done by volunteers and people paid by other organizations. If you want Berber in, then send your check to Script Encoding Initiative and they'll work on it. If no one cares enough to send their checks in, and no other organization cares enough to take up the cause, then there's probably no need for it.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[dvdeug]

Why should people care to use computers which don't accomodate their scripts?

But millions have. Funny, that.

We can't summon computers that work perfectly out of thin air; before any computer is suitable for someone who only knows Berber, it will take man-years of work in adaptation and translation. If no one can be motivated to start the path by getting the script supported, then who's going to be motivated to do all the work to make Berber a fully supported language?

the mere consideration of reality vice fiction in the consideration of priorities.

Thirteen years after Unicode was created, Tengwar still isn't a part of it. Buisness-world reality has taken a priority; when does fiction get its chance?

Groups like GUST (the Polish TeX User's Group) have worked _very_ hard to get their languages / scripts / accents supported

Which is completely irrelevant - the work of GUST and of Tolkien fans is totally independent and doesn't interfer with each other in any way.

there's no need to crowd the bar w/ fictional things when people in the real world want to approach it

OTOH, there's no need to crowd the computer with things no computer users want, when real world computer users want to use Tengwar. The real world is filled with not-serious things; there's no need to go around attacking them.

Just the thing for stalking Liv Tyler with!

[Zhe Mappel]

"Dearest Ms. Tyler/Arwen Evenstar,

Just between Elves, I feel confident that I can tell you, fairest one, the following:

O menel aglar elenath!

So, did you like the font? Cool, huh? Found it on Slashdot, heh heh. What's Slashdot? Oh, you have so much to learn, my queen, so much. But there will be years for that (particularly after I level up my Everquest wizard a bit more, which will leave mornings and evenings open).

When I heard that you wished you had more chances to speak Elvish in LOTR:TFOTR and LOTR:TTT and LOTR:TROTK, I knew that our love should no longer have to wait. For now we can speak and key Elvish to our hearts' content in our own private Lothlorien, or by IM or wirelessly!

In fact, I've made arrangements, and mom says it's OK if we crash in the basement while we get on our feet. I realize that leaving the international limelight to marry an unemployed computer programmer is kind of unusual, but look on the bright side of "

~ snip ~

This is great!

[wideBlueSkies]

So when I'm done learning Klingon, I can tacle LOTR languages. Awesome!

Who needs to spend their time learning Japanese when there are so many fictional languages available?

So when will Java and Unicode start supporting this stuff? Next time I add a couple of languages to my application, I want to get these in there.

wbs.

Oops

[Scroatzilla]

At first I thought "Hey cool, I'd like to write like Elvis." Must... have... more... coffee.