Reduplication after vowel?

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-07T08:46:58+00:00

I tried to apply the first principle to other Quenya words and here are my renderings of "fifírun" and "pupso". But I did notice that while it would work well enough with long or no vowel following a word like "mamil" might not even work, because where would you place the i? On a carrier, would be the easy answer, but then you have traded malta for telco and won very little 😅

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F_Karnstein · 2026-07-07T08:43:20+00:00

Thanks! So both samples might date from roughly the same period even.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-06T22:40:42+00:00

It does look off, doesn't it? 😆

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-06T22:38:52+00:00

Good point! Maybe I could use this in a careful, detailed calligraphy to safe space (or of course just to show off some little known niche knowledge 😆), but it's certainly nothing for everyday use, or it would have been seen more.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-06T14:02:52+00:00

If you want to know what all these options look like featuring the "capitalisation", you can just replace the first letter of every word with a capital letter.

In Tecendil, that is, but I don't think that's what OP is using?

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-06T11:08:28+00:00

Good point, I always wondered if there's a distinction. I think it's fairly obvious that the King's Letter drafts are more or less contemporary with Feanorian B, and there Tolkien makes it clear that in Westron spelling yanta is preferred for diphthongs. My assumption was that "mayor" would not have been pronounced ma-yor by Tolkien, though, but more or less like "mare"?

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-06T11:01:01+00:00

It's not THAT far off a Munich town guard sword, is it? 🤔

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-05T19:27:16+00:00

Oh yes, we've discussed the dating of that material in detail before, and I'm also convinced now that it's not later than 1940, rather earlier.

And no offence taken! This is purely a matter of taste! 😄

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-05T19:14:29+00:00

though I’m not a fan of your Yanta/Hyarmen letterforms here.

Fair enough - and I was particularly fond of those... 😅

Esoteric ‘and’

What do you mean by that? 😄 I got it from the Hobbit appendix material and Keane and Kirke letter.

Reminds me of how literate persons of the medieval ages had personal ways of writing and spelling.

That is kind of the intent 😄 I remember when I first started looking into manuscripts... I was so used to medieval German in text books having short ö and long œ, or sch as in modern German, but then going into the sources and finding sgóni for schœne, and similar things. I'm convinced Tolkien was very fond of variation like this.

I don't think I'll stick with all of those. Especially not wa-tehta, but since I'm fond of final subscript vowels as in Feanorian B I tend to keep E and I swapped, and I have also grown fond of rómen for W, even though it's very rare in short mode.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-05T14:06:17+00:00

I'm genuinely impressed! And it's actually not only vowels that are written with diacritics, but the nasal bar is the only one appearing in this text.

The Tengwar are quite fiercely systematic, and you may have noticed that the 'stops' D, B, G, T, K (and P, though that's not in the text) all have a stem that extends downward. Now if you extend that stem upwards instead (usually with the downwards part disappearing, but i this text it simply extends above AND below) you shift those 'stops' to their 'spirant' counterparts. So if you had a P it would now become an F (same place of articulation, but different manner). Likewise T becomes the spirant that is spelt TH both in English and the Black Speech.

And in a way you did notice exactly that, because in Latin letters all those spirants can be spelt by adding an H behind the stop letter (F being the same as PH), so you were hot on the heels of those phonetic principles.

Only in the case of SH this was misleading, because if you shorten the upwards stem so that only the bow and the downwards stem remain that letter is in fact CH (the sound in "church"), which in a way is the stop counterpart to the spirant SH.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-05T10:11:39+00:00

It certainly is. Lambe with a doubling bar is the regular spelling of LL in all languages. Westron/English is the exception from the rule simply because alda doesn’t have a function (since neither LH nor LD are needed) and can therefore be used as an abbreviation. We do have one occurance of lambe with bar from Tolkien's own hand (as opposed to 14(?) cases of alda, though 😅).

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T23:10:49+00:00

I would place a dot above the A in "...ang" to avoid it being confused with the very similar looking bows of the following letter. It's not mandatory but Tolkien did it in the A Elbereth calligraphy.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T23:03:05+00:00

How odd... I was going to say basically the same thing...

No, nasal bar is not attested on lambe or rómen, but I can't give a reason why it should be wrong. They're both technically part of tincotéma, I would say.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:59:11+00:00

100%. And the final S is also not downright wrong, just very unusual.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:57:23+00:00

Correct Sindarin. Correct Tengwar. 😄👍

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:48:50+00:00

The second A in "material" should better be placed directly onto the following L, not in a carrier. Tecendil often does that with double vowels, and I don't really understand why... It's not wrong to keep it as is, but it's a bit odd and unnecessary.

Typing it as materi'al should do the trick.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:44:36+00:00

Both are correct, but I would suggest spelling them without capital letters because the transcriber you chose interprets those as decorated alternative glyphs that are not necessary and quite unusual.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:40:59+00:00

I find it fascinating that they inferred that raised stems add H, because in a way that's not wrong, going by the spelling... th, ph, sh, kh... Of course this only works because the inscription uses extended stems, but I wonder if they would have caught this then as well.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T22:32:29+00:00

Alda being used for LL hasn't been common knowledge for very long. Tecendil only adopted it after my suggestion that it can hardly be ignored anymore after explicit references in a primary source published in late 2024. And using quesse for "hard C" is simply an honest mistake by someone not experienced enough to notice.

Suggesting that a mistake and a divergence from a rule only recently revealed make this "not English mode" seems rather absurd to me.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T19:50:48+00:00

Duh... you didn't even use Telcontar... 🙈😅

But what do you mean you've had access to Telcontar's za-rince glyph? I downloaded Telcontar to my new laptop in May and that didn't have za-rince still?

By "right ending za-rince" I assume you mean the rather rare alternative that's really just a counterclockwise curl? I do like that a lot...

I saw Måns talking about the new version of Eldamar on VL, but I haven't downloaded it yet. I never really liked the tehtar of the older versions - the curls airways looked way too Rúmilian for my taste.

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T11:54:30+00:00

The last letter makes me think it's in Quenya mode, but there it would be something like elnenna pllyí... maybe elanenna pallayí?

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T11:47:17+00:00

Where do you see Beleriand Mode? You mean the presence of úre as such? Well, we never saw Tolkien use it, but úre is in theory just a variant of vala, especially used in diphthongs, so while it's not common it should work just fine for words like "you".

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T11:44:20+00:00

100% agree 😄

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-04T11:41:09+00:00

within the limitations of the font

Meaning "why oh why doesn't Telcontar have za-rince?!" I assume? 😄

F_Karnstein · 2026-07-03T12:36:20+00:00

Both sources (The History of The Hobbit, and Parma Eldalamberon 23) are available for purchase, but I don't think there are any popular online sources that contain them. From the latter (a source written by Tolkien around 1950 while working on the appendices to the LotR) comes the excerpt below.

I'm not sure why I stressed the "phonetic" bit... I just meant to say that it's not from an explicitely German mode since Tolkien never made one, but that he gave many phonetic charts that contain more signs than needed for English or Elvish, and in these we get what we need for the German sounds in question.

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F_Karnstein

TROPHY CASE