Note: some of the Tengwar used in this article may not display properly unless Tengwar fonts are installed.

First article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in English)

Tengwar is a script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly ( 10 December 1948 at Palais English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States In his works, the Tengwar script, invented by Fëanor, was used to write a number of the languages of Middle-earth, including Quenya and Sindarin. Fëanor is a character from J R R Tolkien 's fictional history The Silmarillion. The Languages of Arda are artificial languages invented by J R Quenya 'kwɛɲa is one of the fictional languages spoken by the Elves (the Quendi, "those who speak with voices" because when Sindarin is an Artificial language developed by J R R Tolkien. However, it can also be used to write other languages, such as English (most of Tolkien's Tengwar samples are actually in English). English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The word tengwar is Quenya for "letters". The corresponding singular is tengwa, "letter". In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one"

Internal history and terminology

According to The War of the Jewels (Appendix D to Quendi and Eldar), Fëanor when he created his script introduced a change in terminology. The War of the Jewels is the 11th volume of Christopher Tolkien's series The History of Middle-earth, analyzing the unpublished manuscripts of He called a letter, i. e. a written representation of a spoken phoneme (tengwë) a tengwa. Previously, any letter or symbol had been called a sarat (from *sar "incise"), especially the alphabet of Rúmil of Valinor on which Fëanor supposedly based his was known as Sarati, but became later also known as "Tengwar of Rúmil". In J R R Tolkien 's legendarium, the Elves are one of the races of Arda. Valinor (meaning Land of the Valar) is a Fictional location from J Sarati is an Artificial script which was created by J R R Tolkien. The plural of tengwa was tengwar, and this is the name by which Fëanor's system became known. Since, however, in commonly used modes, an individual tengwa was equivalent to a consonant, the term tengwar in popular use became equivalent to "consonant sign", and the vowel signs were known as ómatehtar. By loan-translation, the tengwar became known as tîw (singular têw) in Sindarin, when they were introduced to Beleriand. The letters of the earlier alphabet native to Sindarin were called cirth (singular certh, probably from *kirte "cutting", and thus semantically analogous to, and cognate with, Quenya sarat). The Cirth (" Runes " are the letters of an Artificial script which was invented by J Cognates in Linguistics are words that have a common origin They may occur within a language such as shirt and skirt as two English words descended from This term was loaned into exilic Quenya as certa, plural certar.

External history

Precursors

The sarati, described in Parma Eldalamberon 13, a script developed by J. Sarati is an Artificial script which was created by J R R Tolkien. Parma Eldalamberon ( Quenya 'The Book of Elven-tongues' is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship dedicated to the linguistics of J R. R. Tolkien in the late 1910s, anticipates many features of the tengwar, especially the vowel representation by diacritics (which is found in many tengwar varieties), different tengwar shapes and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features (though inconsistent). The 1910s decade ran from January 1 1910 through December 31 1919 A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation

Even closer to the tengwar is the Valmaric script, described in Parma Eldalamberon 14, which J. Parma Eldalamberon ( Quenya 'The Book of Elven-tongues' is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship dedicated to the linguistics of J R. R. Tolkien used from about 1922 to 1925. Year 1922 ( MCMXXII) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Year 1925 ( MCMXXV) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. It features many tengwar shapes, the inherent vowel [a] found in some tengwar varieties, and the tables in the samples V12 and V13 show an arrangement that is very similar to the one of the primary tengwar in the classical Quenya "mode".

Jim Allan (An introduction to Elvish, ISBN 0-905220-10-2) compared the tengwar with the Universal Alphabet of Francis Lodwick of 1686, both on grounds of the correspondence between shape features and sound features, and of the actual letter shapes. Francis Lodwick (or Lodowick) (1619&ndash1694 was a pioneer of ''a priori'' languages (what in the seventeenth century was called a ' Philosophical language

Coincidential resemblances to Brahmic scripts, hangul, the Armenian alphabet, and (for the tehtar) the Hebrew alphabet have been noted. The Brahmic family is a family of syllabaries (writing systems used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central Asia and East Asia, The Armenian alphabet is an Alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language.

Tengwar

The tengwar were probably developed in the late 1920s or in the early 1930s. The 1920s is sometimes referred to as the " Jazz Age " or the " Roaring Twenties " when speaking about the United States and Canada The 1930s were described as an abrupt shift to more radical and conservative lifestyles as countries were struggling to find a solution to the Great Depression. The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, the first published tengwar sample, dates to 1937 (The Hobbit, most editions). The Hobbit or There and Back Again is an award-winning fantasy The full explanation of the tengwar was published in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings in 1955. The Lord of the Rings is an epic

The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina (DTS) lists 74 known samples of tengwar by Tolkien.

There are only few known samples predating publication of The Lord of the Rings (many of them published posthumously):

• DTS 1 – The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, published 1937
• DTS 13 – Middle Page from the Book of Mazarbul
• DTS 14 – Last Page from the Book of Mazarbul, Last Line, this and the above one originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings
• DTS 15 – Steinborg Drawing Title
• DTS 22 – Ilbereth's Greeting from The Father Christmas Letters, dating to 1937
• DTS 24 – The Treebeard Page
• DTS 50/51 – Edwin Lowdham's Manuscript from The Notion Club Papers has Old English language text written in tengwar (with a few Adûnaic and Quenya words), dating to 1945/6. The Father Christmas Letters is a collection of letters written and illustrated by J The Notion Club Papers is the title of an abandoned novel by J In the fiction of J R R Tolkien, Adûnaic ("language of the west" was the language of the Men of Númenor during the Second Age
• DTS 10 – The Brogan Tengwa-greetings, appearing in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, No. The Letters of J R R Tolkien (ISBN 0-618-05699-8 is a selection of J 118, tentatively dated to 1948.
• The following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but they were not explicitly dated: DTS 16, DTS 17, DTS 18 – Elvish Script Sample I, II, III, with parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil, first published in the Silmarillion Calendar 1978, later in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as DTS 23 – So Lúthien, a page of the English Lay of Leithan text facsimiled in The Lays of Beleriand:299. The Lays of Beleriand, published in 1985 is the third volume of Christopher Tolkien 's 12-volume book series The History of Middle-earth, in which he analyzes

A few other samples, e. g. a tengwar mode for Gothic are known to exist, but remain unpublished to date [1]. Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths.

Spelling and pronunciation

Modes

Just as with any alphabetic writing system, every specific language written in tengwar requires a specific orthography, depending on the phonology of that language. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning These tengwar orthographies are usually called modes.

Some modes, called ómatehtar (or vowel tehtar) modes, are abjads representing vowels with diacritics called tehtar ("signs"; corresponding singular: tehta, "sign"), while other modes, called full writing modes, represent vowels by full letters. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" These ómatehtar modes can be loosely considered consonant scripts rather than complete alphabets. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. An alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a Phoneme, a Spoken language, either Some modes map the basic consonants to /t/, /p/, /k/ and /kʷ/, while others use them to represent /t/, /p/, /tʃ/ and /k/. Some modes follow pronunciation, while others follow traditional orthography. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language The "full writing" modes are sometimes called Beleriandic modes because a well-known "full writing" mode is called the "mode of Beleriand". In J R R Tolkien 's fictional legendarium, Beleriand was a region in northwestern Middle-earth during the First Age.

Since the publication of the first official description of the Tengwar at the end of The Lord of the Rings, others have created modes for other languages such as English, Spanish, German, French, Finnish, Italian, Esperanto and Lojban. The Lord of the Rings is an epic English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. is by far the most widely spoken constructed International auxiliary language in the world Lojban (ˈloʒban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on Predicate logic.

Tolkien has used multiple modes for English, including full writing and ómatehtar alphabetic modes, phonetic full modes and phonetic ómatehtar modes known from documents published after his death.

Tengwar letters

The most notable characteristic of the tengwar script is that the shapes of the letters correspond to the distinctive features of the sounds they represent. In Linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory

Most letters are constructed by a combination of two basic shapes: a vertical stem (either long or short) and either one or two rounded bows (which may or may not be underlined, and may be on the left or right of the stem).

These principal letters are divided into four series ("témar") that correspond to the main places of articulation and into six rows ("tyeller") that correspond to the main manners of articulation. In Articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a Consonant is the point of contact where an Obstruction In Linguistics ( Articulatory phonetics) manner of articulation describes how the tongue lips and other speech organs are involved in making a sound make Both vary among modes.

Each series is headed by the basic signs composed of a vertical stem descending below the line, and a single bow. These basic signs represent the voiceless stop consonants for that series. Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of Phonetics. A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a Consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the Vocal tract. For the classical Quenya mode, they are /t/, /p/, /k/ and /kʷ/, and the series are named tincotéma, parmatéma, calmatéma, and quessetéma, respectively; téma means "series" in Quenya.

In rows of the general use, there are the following correspondences between letter shapes and manners of articulation:

• Doubling the bow turns the voiceless consonant into a voiced one. Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of Phonetics.
• Raising the stem above the line turns it into the corresponding fricative. Fricatives are Consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together
• Shortening it (so it is only the height of the bow) creates the corresponding nasal. A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth allowing air to escape freely through the It must be noted though that in most modes, the signs with shortened stem and single bow don't correspond to the voiceless nasals, but to the approximants. Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of Phonetics. A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth allowing air to escape freely through the Approximants are speech sounds ( Phonemes) that could be regarded as intermediate between Vowels and typical Consonants In the articulation of approximants

Here is an example from the parmatéma (the signs with a closed bow on the right side) in the general use:

• The basic sign (with descending stem) represents /p/ (it happens to look much like the Latin letter P).
• With the bow doubled, it represents /b/.
• With a raised stem, it represents /f/.
• With a raised stem and a doubled bow, it represents /v/.
• With a short stem and double bow, it represents /m/.
• With short stem and single bow, it represents /w/.

There are additional letters that don't have regular shapes. They may represent e. g. /r/, /l/, /s/ and /h/. Their use varies considerably from mode to mode. Some aficionados have added more letters not found in Tolkien's writings for use in their modes.

Encoding schemes

Non-Unicode

The contemporary de facto standard in the tengwar user community maps the tengwar characters onto the ISO 8859-1 character encoding following the example of the tengwar typefaces by Dan Smith. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet. This implies a major flaw: If no corresponding tengwar font is installed, an awful string of nonsense characters appears. Mojibake is the happenstance of incorrect unreadable characters (garbage characters shown when Computer software fails to render a text correctly according to its associated

Since there are not enough places in ISO 8859-1's 191 codepoints for all the signs used in tengwar orthography, certain signs are included in a "tengwar A" font which also maps its characters on ISO 8859-1, overlapping with the first font.

For each tengwar diacritic, there are four different codepoints that are used depending on the width of the character which bears it.

Other tengwar typefaces with this encoding include Johan Winge's Tengwar Annatar, Måns Björkman's Tengwar Parmaite, Enrique Mombello's Tengwar Élfica or Michal Nowakowski's Tengwar Formal (note that most of these differ in details).

The following sample shows the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in English, according to the traditional English orthography. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly ( 10 December 1948 at Palais English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. It should look similar to the picture at the top of the page, but if no tengwar font is installed, it will look a random jumble of characters because the corresponding ISO 8859-1 characters will appear instead.

j#¸ 9t&5# w`Vb%_ 6EO w6Y5 e7`V`V 2{( zèVj# 5% 2x%51T`Û 2{( 7v%1+- 4hR 7EO 2{$yYO2 y4% 7]F85^ 2{( z5^8I`B5$I( 2{( dyYj2 zE1 1yY6E2_ 5^( 5#4^(6 5% `C 8q7T1T W w74^(692^H --

Note: Internet Explorer may not display these characters properly. Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE) commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical

Unicode

A proposal has been made to include the Tengwar in the Unicode standard. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's The codepoints are subject to change; the range U+016000 to U+01607F in the SMP is tentatively allocated for Tengwar according to the current Unicode roadmap. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's See also Mapping of Unicode characters The Unicode characters can be categorized in many different ways Unicode code points can be logically divided into 17

Tengwar are also proposed for inclusion in the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry, which assigns codepoints in the Private Use Area. The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Area for the encoding of Artificial Unicode ’s Tengwar are mapped to the range U+E000 to U+E07F; see External links.

The following Unicode sample (which repeats the one above) is meaningful when viewed under a typeface supporting Tengwar glyphs in the area defined in the ConScript Tengwar proposal. Some typefaces that support this proposal are James Kass's Code2000 and Code2001. In Typography, a typeface is a set of one or more Fonts designed with stylistic unity each comprising a coordinated set of Glyphs A typeface usually comprises Code2000 is a pan- Unicode digital font, which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of Writing systems It is designed and implemented Code2000 is a pan- Unicode digital font, which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of Writing systems It is designed and implemented (The Tengwar Telcontar Unicode font uses an incompatible version of the proposal. )

                              

Non Middle-earth usage

• Tengwar script appears in a bound volume in the Within Temptation music video for "Stand My Ground", though it appears to be a random selection of letters, with a tehta vowel appearing about every five words or so. Within Temptation is a Dutch rock band The band was founded Many tengwar are also repeated for no apparent reason.
• Another instance of this stylistic use of tengwar is the computer game Atlantis: The Lost Tales; again the tengwar are used meaninglessly. Atlantis The Lost Tales is a fantasy adventure Computer game developed by Cryo Interactive and published by Dreamcatcher Interactive, and
• Spanish footballer Fernando Torres has a tattoo on the inside of his left arm that reads "Fernando" in Tengwar. Spain () or the Kingdom of Spain (Reino de España is a country located mostly in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. A footballer is a person who plays in various games known as " Football " &ndash especially Association football, although the term is also used to refer Fernando José Torres Sanz (born 20 March 1984 in Madrid, Spain nicknamed El Niño ("The Kid" is a Spanish footballer, who plays for Liverpool
• Actors Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean have tattoos of the English word nine written in Quenya-mode Tengwar. An actor, actress, player or thespian (see terminology) is a person who Acts in a Dramatic production and who works Elijah Jordan Wood (born January 28 1981) is an American Actor. Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE (born 25 May 1939 is an English stage and screen actor the Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom (born 13 January 1977) is an English Actor. Sean Astin (born February 25, 1971) is an American Film Actor, director, and Oscar -nominated producer best Dominic Bernard Patrick Luke Monaghan (born 8 December 1976) is an English Actor. For the Northern Ireland Labour Party activist see Billy Boyd (politician. Viggo Peter Mortensen Jr (born October 20 1958 is a Golden Globe - and Academy Award -nominated Danish American Theater and movie Shaun Mark Bean (born 17 April 1959 is an English Film and stage Actor. A tattoo is a permanent marking made by inserting ink into the layers of Skin to change the pigment for decorative or other reasons Contrary to popular belief, these tattoos do not spell out the "Elvish" (Quenya or Sindarin) word for nine (Quenya nertë or Sindarin neder) but instead simply the letters for the English word nine in Tengwar. Quenya 'kwɛɲa is one of the fictional languages spoken by the Elves (the Quendi, "those who speak with voices" because when Sindarin is an Artificial language developed by J R R Tolkien. John Rhys-Davies declined the tattoo, but his dwarf body double got it in his place. John Rhys-Davies (born May 5, 1944) is a British Actor and vocal actor born in England They had them done after the filming of the film trilogy "The Lord of the Rings", since the characters they played were the members of the Fellowship of the Ring (which had nine members). The Fellowship of the Ring, or Company of the Ring, as described in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, which bears the same name is

See also

• Sarati
• Cirth

References

• Derzhanski, Ivan A. Sarati is an Artificial script which was created by J R R Tolkien. The Cirth (" Runes " are the letters of an Artificial script which was invented by J "The Fëanorian Tengwar and the Typology of Phonetic Writing Systems. " Vinyar Tengwar 41 (2000): 20-23.
• Hostetter, Carl F. ""Si man i-yulmar n(g)win enquatuva": A Newly-Discovered Tengwar Inscription. " Vinyar Tengwar 21 (1992): 6-10.
• Smith, Arden R. , Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. "The Semiotics of the Writing Systems of Tolkien's Middle-Earth. " In Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity, I-II, ed. Irmengard Rauch, 1239-42. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.

External links

• History of Elven writing systems Wikibook on the secondary-world history of the Elven writing systems
• Amanye Tenceli – The Tengwar A comprehensive study of the tengwar script
• The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina — a continuously expanding list of all published tengwar samples
• Omniglot reference
• Tengwar by Dan Smith
• Tolkien Script Publishing
• Real-life Tengwar samples

Modes

• Tengwar mode for Arabic
• Tengwar mode for Bulgarian
• Tengwar mode for Czech
• Tengwar mode for Dutch
• Tengwar mode for English
• A simpler Tengwar mode for English
• Tengwar modes for Esperanto and Lojban languages
• Tengwar mode for Finnish
• Tengwar mode for French
• Tengwar mode(s) for German
• Tengwar mode for Hebrew (PostScript format)
• Tengwar mode for Masoretic Hebrew
• Tengwar mode for Klingon
• Tengwar mode for Lithuanian
• Tengwar modes for Polish
• Tengwar guides for Quenya and Sindarin
• Tengwar mode for Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian
• Tengwar modes for Spanish
• Tengwar mode for Swedish
• Tengwar mode for Welsh

Technical

• WikiTeX supports editing Tengwar directly in Wiki articles. PostScript ( PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative Programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982
• Official proposal to encode Tengwar in Unicode
• Tengwar proposal for ConScript Unicode Registry
• Proposed corrections to the proposal to encode Tengwar in Unicode
• Downloadable fonts Some Tengwar and other Tolkien-based fonts available for download
• A comprehensive list of tengwar fonts (in Polish, but still useful even if you can't read the language)

Notes