Slashdot Mirror
Writing with Elvish Fonts
dj_whitebread writes "Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script? Now's your chance to have your Elvish text look just like Tolkien's. This page gives you all the instructions. The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!"
If you want to understand the invented languages of Tolkien, a good place to start is with a meetup group.
:)
Some people take their Elvishness pretty sillyessny...erm meant to say seriously...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.
--
Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy
Man, just the thing to make the old resume stand out in the crowd.
Now I know what to put all over my rice burner to make it faster!!!
Where can I get an Elvish keyboard?
QWERTY,
DVORAK,
TENGWAR?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This stuff looks like it's in a foreign language or something.
::sound of slashdot crickets::
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
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.
Bot Assisted Blogging
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.
Being able to write love poems using the Elvish script will really give me the edge in attracting a female companion!
:)
Thanks slashdot
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
/. readers now know that michael has a typographer inside him! Get it out, michael!
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
Is all well and good, but Don't Come Crying To Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
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
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.
Two words:
Lah-hoo. Zah-hers.
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
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.
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!
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."
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... =)
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.
Er, sorry if I just slashdotted you guys.
Don't.
Believe me, your ego will thank me later.
Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script?
No.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
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.
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!
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
With OS X, just drag the .ttf files to /Library/Fonts and restart any running apps, maybe log out for good measure. Works fine, I just installed all of them.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
>A substitution code is not a language!
Indeed, if you wrote english in this it would be like trying to write English with, say, Arabic letters. With some substitutions and alterations (Elvish uses different consonants and vowels than English does obviously) it's possible, although it's still English, and wouldn't even be using the alphabet technically properly, since you'd have to change things to get it to work. Tolkien devised his own method for writing English in the Tengwar (as well as with the Cirth - Dwarvish Runes), and that's what people follow (the great majority of the time) whe writing English with the Tengwar, but it still is written differently than real Quenya or Sindarin (the two most well known and developed Elvish languages).
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
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.
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
UT has a class dedicated to the study of Tolkien's languages.
-ashot
At http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alternative.htm is a great resource for all types of writting systms. The alternative page has many made up written languages, which include fonts for all type of systems.
I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?
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)
More than mere navel gazing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe you'll find them in the book titled "1024 Things Geeks Do That Keep Them From Getting Laid".
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
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.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.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
Regarding fonts not having copy rights, can you cite references for this?
Copyright FAQ, question 3.3
You could try this for loads of Futhark rune fonts One of them might be close to what you're looking for.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... Google supports it.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
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.
It does look rather evil that way, doesn't it?
H4H4 Y0U D0N7 UND3R574ND H0W 70 7YP3 1N 7RU3 L337! 3V1L MY 455!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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...
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!
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
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.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"
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 ~
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.
Huh?
New Macs start at $799.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin