He says that there are two forms of "R", one as in "red" and the other as in "car". I've been sitting here reciting these to myself over and over, and I can't hear a difference. Neither can my wife, who has a degree in linguistics and speaks English and French fluently.<p>Can someone explain the difference?
In the Appendix of the Lord of the Rings it's written that for languages like English where a lot of words end with a consonant, the Sindarin version should be used (the one with vowels on the following consonant).<p>I also made an adaptation of Elvish for italian, because we have different sounds and the one proposed in the book for english does not work.
This is one version of English using Tengwar, but there are several different "modes" that may be used, and sometimes even Tolkein didn't keep his own rules. The Tengwar system is rather fascinating. There is far more to it than meets the eye.<p><a href="http://at.mansbjorkman.net/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://at.mansbjorkman.net/index.html</a><p><a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Elven_Writing_Systems/Foreword" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Elven_Writing_System...</a>
This is largely correct, but "largely" isn't the same as "entirely" and there are some major blunders. (For heaven's sake don't use it for that tattoo!)<p>The first big one is that there is no letter for 'c' in any Elvish alphabet. Elvish writing systems are phonetic, so English 'c' has to be written with the character for 'k' or 's' as appropriate. (The character this site lists for 'c' is what Tolkien usually used for the English 'ch' sound. The character later listed for 'ch' corresponds to the sound in the word "loch" or perhaps German "ich".)<p>There are a number of similar errors later on, most of which boil down to the same issue: Elvish alphabets aren't just a substitution cipher! They're a distinct encoding of linguistic data.
Raphaël Poss adapted Tenqwar to the artificial language Lojban<p><a href="http://vodka-pomme.net/projects/tengwar-for-lojban/" rel="nofollow">http://vodka-pomme.net/projects/tengwar-for-lojban/</a>
My name is Yann Esposito. Here is the result I prefer (there are at least 8 different manner to write "Yann"): <a href="http://i.imgur.com/sJBLz.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/sJBLz.jpg</a>
It's not really 'Elvish,' as you're just writing English in Tengwar.<p>Also, 'Elvish' doesn't really exist, it's either Quenya (high elveish) or Sindarin (grey elvish)...<p>But this is still a great intro to the whole topic.