FAQ (sort of)

Perhaps you have noticed that I seem to think it's cute to insert questions hypothetically asked by my hypothetical readers. Perhaps you disagree with me on a minor, nitpicky point, or you are curious about why I did such-and-such. Most likely, the answers will be here, in more detail than you ever wanted to know. You have been warned. (Some of these are also just questions that I think might be asked, or that I feel obligated to explain.)

• Why can't I just use a tengwar font like a normal font?
• Aren't tengwar supposed to be used phonetically?
• Why use a tilde instead of a bar in the word "add"?
• Why the short carrier? Isn't that a long y sound?
• Why bother to use the "correct" tengwar (since hardly anyone can tell the difference/since there are so many different interpretations)?
• What does the tengwar on the buttons say?

Why can't I just use a tengwar font like a normal font?

The short answer: because it isn't a "normal" font. It's mapped differently (note that there are some fonts that try to duplicate more normal character mapping and this will not apply for those, though you should still be careful with them because it's impossible for the correlation to be exact). The "k" key on your keyboard, for example, won't give you the "k" tengwa.

The long(er) answer: Take a look at the following example (I've made it an image since it's unfair to expect your browser to be able to display tengwar fonts correctly).

The first column is what I entered using a fairly normal font (I happened to use Courier). The second is what I got when I changed the font in my word processor to a tengwar font (in this case, Dan Smith's Tengwar Quenya). In the first row, I simply typed my name, "Sarah", as I would normally type it. To the right I have given the translation of the resulting tengwar. It doesn't make any sense at all. Those tengwar do not correspond to the letters "S-a-r-a-h". In fact, the first one doesn't make much sense in English and there aren't any vowels (that "y" happens to be a consonant). The second two rows show possible "correct" tengwar interpretations. Note that none of the letters I entered to get the correct tengwar produced the corresponding letters in Courier.

So, the final answer is: If you use a tengwar font like a "normal" font, the results will read like gibberish. (But why do I care, since hardly anyone will be able to tell?)

(Actually, there are programs that will attempt to do the work for you, if you are so inclined. I much prefer tengwar produced by a real human being—its idiosyncracies are part of its essential beauty—but if you really don't care what I think...though you have to admit that sometimes, when a choice is purely aesthetic, no program can beat the power of the human behind the keyboard!

(back to tutorial)

Aren't tengwar supposed to be used phonetically?

Why, yes, they generally are. If I were writing Sindarin or Quenya with tengwar, I would definitely spell phonetically using the proper mode. It would be incorrect to do otherwise. Actually, it's hard to imagine a non-phonetic Sindarin or Quenya mode because those modes are designed to match the sounds of the spoken languages.

English, however, is not spelled phonetically. (If you're not sure you believe me, take a look at the word "phonetically". Why on Earth do we pronounce "ph" like "f"? Or look at the word "believe". When I say it, both of the vowels sound the same, but they sure don't look it! And we completely leave off the sound of the final "e"!) And, to make matters worse, not everyone pronounces English the same way. Vowels are particularly problematic. Now matter how you pronounce yours, you can be certain that someone, somewhere, pronounces them differently.

Tolkien states in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings that there is no correct tengwar mode for the English language. I'm not surprised, given the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph. Tolkien did, however, use tengwar to write the English title page inscription for the very same book. So clearly it can be done. (There is another style that he used, as well, which involves using actual letters to represent vowels instead of accents. I'm not going to get into that here because most folks on the internet use the tehtar style, similar to the title page inscriptions, probably because that's what most of us learned first. If you use the other styles, chances are some people are going to just assume you're doing something wrong. Maybe you don't care, in which case, all I can say is "good for you!")

Tolkien's actual usage is basically phonetic, but sometimes where a word is particularly difficult, he just spells out the letters exactly. My impression has been that the general convention is to try to write phonetically. I respectfully suggest that this is confusing, misleading, and entirely more trouble than it's worth.

Let's go back to this example (maybe you missed my earlier rant, in which case this is new to you). Here I show various ways of writing my name, Sarah. The first is just plain wrong. The second two are both possible interpretations. The middle one is my closest approximation of a phonetic spelling.

Even if you are familiar with tengwar writing, you may not recognize the combination I am using for the dipthong in the first syllable of my name. It's the best way I have found of accurately representing the sound. "Sar" should rhyme with "air", but it's not quite the same as Tolkien's usual "er". What I have come up with is (I think) accepted (it reads something like "Seir"), but also a bit obscure. Beginning tengwar readers may not be able to read it. That's Problem Number One.

Then I get to the last syllable. That crucial final "ah". The "h" is easy. I don't pronounce it, so I ignore it. The vowel is more difficult. I don't pronounce it like "a". I pronounce it more like "uh". It's a "schwa" sound, usually represented in dictionaries by that funny upside-down "e". That sound just plain doesn't exist in Elvish. How do I represent that sound in tengwar? Let me know if you ever find a way. I compromise by using "a", but that's really quite wrong, because I just don't say my name like that! That would be Problem Number Two.

Add to that the problems I mentioned earlier, and we get a list of four Big Problems with writing English phonetically with tengwar:

1. English is not a phonetic language, and most English-speakers are not linguists like Tolkien who can make sense of it, so it's difficult to even figure out the correct sounds.
2. Once you've figured out the sounds you want, you are likely to have to use devices that some tengwar readers will not recognize in order to represent them.
3. There will still be some (common) sounds that just won't work.
4. Even if you manage a perfect inscription, someone from the other side of the world who pronounces English differently may not be able to read it.

My solution? Don't use tengwar phonetically for English. Write it the way it's spelled. That way, anyone who can read tengwar will be able to tell what you are saying.

(back to tutorial)

Why use a tilde instead of a bar in the word "add"?

Either an under tilde or an under bar can be used to double a consonant. The choice is mostly aesthetic—writers can choose whatever they think looks best. Under a letter such as ando, the convention is generally to use a bar instead of a tilde. The look is "cleaner". In message board buttons, though, the font size tends to be smaller than would normally be used with tengwar. Though the difference is clear here, if the font size is a bit smaller, the under bar with ando makes the combined effect similar to the tengwa for b. An under tilde is easier to read. Try it for yourself if you like—depending on the style of tengwar and the font size that you use, you may be able to use the bar without a problem. (The under bar is simply the " (double quote) key. If your word processor tries to turn it into a "smart quote", hit "Undo" right away.)

(back to tutorial)

Why the short carrier? Isn't that a long y sound?

Normally, when writing with tengwar, one uses the short carrier for short vowels and the long carrier to indicate long vowels (there are other ways to indicate long vowels, but they cannot be used here).

In the "original" Elvish modes, a "long" vowel is the same as a short vowel, except that the sound is literally longer. The tengwar reflect that fact. The more common way of writing a long vowel is to use two of the same tehtar.

English doesn't work like that at all. Our "long" vowels are quite different from our "short" vowels. For example, the long i (or long y) sound is actually a dipthong (two different vowels put together)! If I wanted to reflect this properly in tengwar, I would have to try to write English phonetically; I don't want to do that (and if I did, I wouldn't be using a separate tehta for y). Many tengwar-writers simply decide to use the English version of "long" and "short" instead. They would use the short carrier for the y in system and the long carrier for the y in reply.

This treatment of English vowels is quite common (and perfectly acceptable), but I find it confusing. You can be fairly certain that however you pronounce your vowels, another English-speaker from some other part of the world will pronounce their vowels differently. It's much less confusing to simply choose one standard and stick to it—my standard is to duplicate English spellings, not English sounds.

(back to tutorial)

Why bother to use the "correct" tengwar (since hardly anyone can tell the difference/since there are so many different interpretations)?

I'm about to get a bit preachy. You have been warned.

Imagine a native French-speaker who doesn't understand a word of English. (Note that most French-speakers know more than enough English to not do what I'm about to describe.) She happens to be a big fan of Tolkien, so she makes a Tolkien board. In order to honor the language in which Tolkien wrote, she decides to make her welcome banner in English, but she doesn't know any English, so she randomly picks out words from her one book in English (which happens to be Tolkien's The Two Towers). Here's what she gets:

River escape began cries incurable the desperately!

That certainly looks like English, but anyone who actually speaks the language can tell that not only does it not say anything close to "Welcome to my Tolkien board!", but it also doesn't make any sense. It's pure gibberish.

Now, imagine that you have a Tolkien board, and you want to use that cool writing like Tolkien uses, so you download a tengwar font, and you type "Welcome!" into your word processor, and then you change the font to tengwar, and you make your image using that. It comes out like this:

Granted, it looks pretty nice. And it looks like Elvish. But it's not. It's not even close to Elvish. It makes a great deal less sense than "River escape began cries incurable the desperately!" did. What it actually says, using the same English mode as the title page to The Lord of the Rings, is "of-f-y-kh-hw-lh-f-?". (I'm not sure about that last one. It isn't commonly used in this mode.) I dare you to try saying that out loud. The only vowel in the whole thing is the "y" which makes little sense in this context and in any case only got there by accident.

Now, at this point, you're probably asking yourself, "why should I care, if 99.9% of the people who visit my page won't be able to tell the difference, anyway?" And the truth is, you're probably right. Most people will never notice. But if you're interested enough to read this far, then I would bet that somewhere in the back corner of your mind, you will always have that annoying little voice reminding you that you will know the difference, even if no one else will. (Also, I should point out that those annoying people like myself who can read and write "proper" tengwar are very likely to be so interested in your inscriptions that we will drop everything and try to decipher them.)

A final warning: Remember that vowels, in the most common modes, are represented by tehtar, which look like accents above and (occasionally) below the letters. Anyone who knows this simple fact can spot pseudo-tengwar at a glance, because most of the tehtar are in the places for capital letters on your keyboard (so they don't end up where vowels should normally go in a word). Suddenly the number of people who can tell the difference increases sharply.

Of course, what this means is that if you just don't care what obsessed people like me think (and I can't say that I would blame you), or if it just isn't worth all the trouble for your purposes, you can easily fake out the vast majority of the people who visit your site by sprinkling in some random tehtar by hitting shift a lot (and using some numbers and punctuation).

(back to tutorial)

What does the tengwar on the buttons say?

The banner on the index page, of course, just says "Tengwar for Tolkien Boards".

The tengwar on the navigation buttons is a bit more random:

• index - "index"
• basic buttons - "buttons"
• buttons tutorial - "tutorial"
• tutorial details - "details"
• fonts/references - "links"
• downloads - "stuff"
• custom - "custom"

The background of the 88x61 link button and the little link button says "tengwar", of course, in the Quenya mode.