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]

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

Re:Elvish Meetups

[blancolioni]

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

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

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

--
Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy

Resumes

[deanj]

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

Hell Yeah!

[mschoolbus]

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

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:Ohhhhh Elvish

[bluethundr]

::sound of slashdot crickets::

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.

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.

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: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...

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

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: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: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.

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."

Answer questions.

[euxneks]

Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script?

No.

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

[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

[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.

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!

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.

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. :)

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[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.

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:Helllllllo copyright violation

[dvdeug]

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

Copyright FAQ, question 3.3

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