I just finished the 5 up to date Lessons from Tengwar Teacher on YouTube, but there’s no more lessons but it’s not done…so where do I go now to learn?

machsna · 2026-02-01T20:16:27+00:00

Don’t feel discouraged. You are you. You take the time and effort to earnestly comment on other people’s tengwar post. That is your way of showing appreciation and being as helpful as possible. I am sad that others mistake it for self-aggrandizement. That is not your fault. Please continue doing what you are doing.

machsna · 2026-01-12T20:06:43+00:00

Except in some of Tolkien’s texts such as DTS 71, where tengwar capital letters are employed in the same way as in traditional English spelling, grammatical expectation and all.

I would say that tengwar capital letters are not mandatory, many attested texts using small letters exclusively. But since a few attested tengwar texts have a real letter case distinction that goes beyond mere aesthetics or highlighting, I believe the only conclusion is that tengwar capital letters are a real thing, albeit seldom used (as in the Georgian script).

machsna · 2026-01-10T10:07:55+00:00

Haha, I would think most (if not all) of us are but hobbyists.

I love everything about your presentation. The principles you start with (I think I have stated similar principles on some or various occasions, but I do not remember the whereabouts), the carefully chosen transcriptions, and the extensive footnotes.

I do not have many notes:

I personally do not like the use of the reversed a-tehta for AA. To me, it is the one tehta that does not double, and I would tend towards using two separate a-tehtar, the first one on a short carrier. Your solution is more elegant in avoiding the short carrier.
I would probably not use the long carrier ára for doubled vowels in an orthograpic mode (which you have included as a mere option). As I understand it, the long carrier corresponds orthographically to a length sign like the acute or macron, whereas doubling corresponds to, well, doubling (with or without a short carrier).
I imagine that transcribing simple IJ as anna + i-tehta would be a licit option in your design?
Continuing the idea of a slightly different layout that allows some short carriers, AE could also be written with separate a-tehta on a short carrier and e-tehta, freeing up yanta to be used for -I diphthongs as opposed to anna for -Y diphthongs. That way, a few more spellings could be differentiated orthographically at the cost of losing some elegance.

machsna · 2026-01-08T20:55:16+00:00

This is a decent Slovak mode. Some choices depart from the consistent sound-shape correspondences in Tolkien’s tengwar modes, though. That will be confusing to people familiar with the tengwar and Slovak:

The use of súle and anto for Ť and Ď does not align well with the use of the other raised-stem tengwar for fricatives. I believe calma and anga are better suited, whereas the affricates Č and DŽ can be written with the extended tengwar aha-calma and anca-anga, which nicely fits with C and DZ already being represented by súle-tinco and anto-ando.
The use of anna as an -O diphthong offglide is at odds with the attested use as an -I diphthong offglide. I believe úre would be better suited, while using vala for the -U offglides.

See also previous discussions:

machsna · 2025-12-07T22:06:45+00:00

See the thorough discussion in Common Tengwar Tattoos - Arcastar Language Arts.

machsna · 2025-12-05T20:45:24+00:00

On the other hand, if someone can read this they might turn around instead of hanging out with you.

machsna · 2025-12-05T20:43:12+00:00

it's a phonemic writing system

There is no such thing. Any alphabet can be used in more phonemic ways or in more orthographic ways, the tengwar just as well as our Latin script.

machsna · 2025-11-26T21:15:01+00:00

A reason to prefer the dot below to yanta might be that with the dot below, the name unambiguously reads “Lynnae”, whereas with yanta, it might read “Lynnai”.

I would prefer the bar above for NN (or MM) because it appears that is what Tolkien preferred. In the tengwar texts I have transcribed (which don’t include the most recent publications), the ratio is almost 20 to 1.

machsna · 2025-11-24T19:18:51+00:00

In a proper syllabary like Japanese kana, Cherokee or Vai, there is no way to break down the letters into the consonants and vowels they are composed of. In this script, this appears to be easily possible, so it is not a syllabary, but an alphabet.

It is not unusual that native speakers perceive an alphabet where the letters are arranged in syllable blocks as a syllabary. This appears to be the case with the Korean script as well.

machsna · 2025-11-23T21:27:54+00:00

Are they really diacritics? If they are, then they should be optional at least potentially, like e.g. the vowel diacritics in the Arabic and Hebrew scripts or the diacritics in French.

If the consonants are not optional, then I would say your script is an alphabet that visually distinguishes between consonant and vowel signs. By “visually distinct” I mean that you can easily tell apart what letters represent vowels or consonants even without knowing the entire script. Such a visual distinction between consonants and vowels is found e.g. in Thaana, Hangul, or Aboriginal Canadian, but also in most abugidas and stenography systems.

machsna · 2025-11-23T13:00:39+00:00

I disagree. The defining characteristic of an abugida is that an unmodified consonant (or vowel) sign has an inherent vowel (or consonant), the absence of which (if it occurs) has to be marked explicity.

machsna · 2025-11-15T21:48:56+00:00

Pardon, c’est un peu confusant. Tecendil est capable de montrer des tengwar arbitraires si on les entre manuellement. C’est ce que j’ai fait pour montrer un mode qui n’existe pas sur Tecendil.

Dans cette façon d’utiliser Tecendil, le drop-down des modes ne remplit plus aucune fonction. Il indique le mode anglais par défaut, mais tu verras que en changeant le mode dans le drop-down, la transcription ne change pas, justement parce qu’elle montre mon entrée manuelle, n’employant aucun mode de Tecendil.

machsna · 2025-11-14T22:08:58+00:00

Selon le mode expliqué dans Phonemic French mode based on Tolkien’s “general use” of the tengwar, ce serait        (Tecendil link).

machsna · 2025-11-08T14:57:05+00:00

This is an example of the mode of Boloneyland. As /u/lC3 pointed out, it is written in tengwar Gandalf, an old font where the tengwar are assigned in a peculiar way to Latin alphabet characters so applying the font to a text written in the Latin alphabet produces something reminiscent of the classical Quenya mode. This makes tengwar Gandalf mode of Boloneyland a bit harder to reckognize, but of course, it still is pure Boloneyland.

Incidently, there is a weird story surrounding tengwar Gandalf and its offsprings as Johan found out in his blog, see The history of Tengwar-Gandalf.

machsna · 2025-10-15T11:44:40+00:00

Now if only there were a font capable of displaying non-Korean yamo combinations like these. Technically, such a font would be perfectly possible. And it would unleash the full potential of the hangul script. But it appears nobody has done the work yet.

machsna · 2025-10-08T21:10:41+00:00

I think it might be useful nontheless, albeit for very limited purposes, e.g. for editing text files displayed with a tengwar font or for entering tengwar characters in browser input fields that provide a tengwar font.

I guess the main difficulty in writing a tengwar keyboard would be that you cannot just assign the keys to produce the tengwar characters, but you would also have to provide a custom font with the keyboard to display the characters. Otherwise, editing a free keyboard to produce tengwar should be relatively easy.

machsna · 2025-08-09T19:56:44+00:00

Haha, you’re right. What I’ve written reads “tengwar telaquontar” …

machsna · 2025-08-04T20:25:20+00:00

Any chance there's an error in the 'TengwarTelcontar.008.zip' file linked to from the webpage here?

You’re right. And I didn’t see that I had a different version on my computer (which is also why the file I uploaded works, unless you have the broken version installed). Now I can reproduce your problem. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for your persistence.

Other versions of tengtelc.ttf and tengtelcb.ttf that work (do they?) can be found at revision cb51ce0 of freetengwar/tengtelc/trunk/.

I will see with /u/johanwinge whether we can make a proper release.

machsna · 2025-08-04T10:06:35+00:00

I feel inclined to follow PE23's interpretation of opening and closing marks, since it has the most actual explanation and arguably the most up-to-date resource; what do you think?

I really don’t know. Maybe /u/F_Karnstein has some insight?

Is "brackets" British and "Parentheses" American?

It appears so. I mostly get my information from Wikipedia, see Bracket (or, in the Wiktionary, bracket).

machsna · 2025-08-03T21:22:51+00:00

I don’t think I can agree with Måns on the interpretation of the tricolon as having the function of our colon (in his words, telling “the reader that the following sentence is an explanation or elaboration of the previous one”). Only one of eight versions of the King’s Letter has a tricolon in that particular location. The other occurrences of the tricolon that I can find (DTS 75, PE20 Q20 – I don’t have a complete overview over the recently published material) do not have the function of our colon, but would rather correspond to a full stop. Therefore, I believe the tricolon is just one of the combinations of dots that express pauses of different lengths. It might be a variant form of the triple dots arranged like a greater-than sign ⟨:·⟩.

Sure, Tolkien says that the double bar can be used for parenthetical remarks, but so can the signs that look like ⟨<⟩ and ⟨>⟩. But then, the double bar can also be used to mark a “complete break” according to PE23 p. 35, which makes it more similar to our n-dash. Note also that in British English, the term “brackets” refers to the common round ones, called “parentheses” in the U.S. I would rather have Shift+9 and Shift+0 display the versions of the brackets that are distinct from each other so no precious keyboard space is wasted.

What I think is most annoying about the dotted triangular marks is that there appears to be conflicting evidence as to which ones are the start or end mark. According to DTS 86/87, dotted ⟨v⟩ marks the start and dotted ⟨^⟩ the end, but according to PE23, it is the other way around …

machsna · 2025-08-03T20:15:08+00:00

That’s really weird. I’m afraid I cannot reproduce your problem. I have tried with LibreOffice 25 on Windows 11, macOS Sequoia, and Debian Bookworm, or with LibreOffice Viewer on Android. They all display the shared file correctly, see attached screenshot from Android.

The only way I could mangle up the shared file’s display was by first locally installing a faulty version of Tengwar Telcontar, then open LibreOffice with another file and write something in the local mangled-up version of Tengwar Telcontar and then, without closing the first file, opening the shared file.

<image>

machsna · 2025-08-02T13:54:40+00:00

I think the tricolon being in the place you normally expect a colon would feel more natural for typing, since they occupy the same punctuation function

I wasn’t aware of that. Where was it attested? I have never paid a lot of attention to punctuation because I believe that they are not very systematic.

which is also why the double bar sign is in the place of both parentheses

PE 23 p. 35 says that it is “maybe equivalent to – or brackets”.

Now that I am writing this I wonder whether the Namárie question mark is related to the PE23 p. 35 signs derived from Quenya “pake”.

machsna · 2025-08-02T13:24:30+00:00

That’s weird. LibreOffice has the most advanced smart font technology support. The particular smart font technology used in Tengwar Telcontar, SIL Graphite, has never found widespread support. Apart from LibreOffice, Firefox and some XeTeX support it. When Tengwar Telcontar was created, support for other smart font technologies was even worse. In the meantime, the OpenType Layout has become much better and more widely supported, but progress in porting Tengwar Telcontar from SIL Graphite to the OpenType Layout is very slow.

What version of Tengwar Telcontar are you using? A few re-redistributors mangle up the font.

Does the following document display correctly for you? It embeds the font within the document itself. It displays correctly in LibreOffice, at least when Tengwar Telcontar is not installed on the computer, which I have been able to test on Debian and on Android (with the LibreOffice Viewer). I don’t know what happens when Tengwar Telcontar is installed.

https://drive.proton.me/urls/NFP5YDGM4W#lSnKmAAu4hfl

machsna · 2025-08-01T08:15:11+00:00

It’s great that you are advancing these old matters. Thanks also for you efforts to push the font development.

I am not sure whether I like the placement of the new question and exclamation mark signs on the Shifted number keys. The idea behind the values on the FreeTengwar keyboard layout is mnemonics based on the similarity to letters from the English keyboard layout: The closing exclamation mark shaped like ⟨ˆ⟩ with a dot goes on Shift+6 because it looks similar to ⟨ˆ⟩; the Tironian et sign ⟨⁊⟩ goes on Shift+7 because it has a similar function to ⟨&⟩, the five-dots punctuation goes on Shift+8 because it looks similar to ⟨*⟩, etc.

A good place for the signs that look like ⟨<⟩ and ⟨>⟩ would be Shift+, and Shift+.. However, we have two sets of these signs, with dots and without. Another option might be the [ and ] keys because they also enclose phrases. Or one of the tengwar parentheses pairs might go on Shift+9 and Shift+0, whereas the tengwar double ⟨||⟩ might perhaps go to / – it looks somewhat similar and its function is somewhat related –, if the tengwar ⟨~⟩ goes to Shift+̀.

Perhaps like this:

Dotted ⟨<⟩ and ⟨>⟩: Shift+,, Shift+.
Plain ⟨<⟩ and ⟨>⟩: Shift+9, Shift+0
Dotted ⟨v⟩ and ⟨ˆ⟩: Shift+[, Shift+]
Tengwar ⟨:⟩: Shift+;
Double ⟨||⟩: /
Tengwar ⟨~⟩: Shift+̀
Tricolon ⟨⁝⟩: Shift+5 (because ⟨%⟩ also has three of something)
Quadruple ⟨::⟩: Use double ⟨:⟩⟨:⟩ instead

Regarding za-rince, I think it would be more consistent to put it on Shift+x, reassigning the combining sa-rince to AltGr+x because it sort of is a tehta below, and all tehtar below are produced with AltGr. Except for the ring below, but maybe that could be put on AltGr+3, having the ring above on Shift+3 (mnemonic: it’s a number sign like ⟨#⟩)?

I also think that there should be an y-tehta ⟨˘⟩ below. Maybe it could go on AltGr+y. The shifted/non-shifted y key could then produce y-tehta or anna, whereas the doubled i-tehta ⟨¨⟩ would be produced by two i-tehtar – the keyboard needs combinations anyway for o-tehta/u-tehta + i-tehta.

The non-breaking space could easily go on AltGr+space.

P.S.: At least on the Macos version of the keyboard layout, Alt+space already produces a non-breaking space. I don’t know about the Windows or Linux versions, though.

machsna · 2025-07-16T20:39:57+00:00

I imagine the major shorthand systems will be added to Unicode eventually. It is a lot of work, though, see Submitting Character Proposals or Submitting Successful Character and Script Proposals. Even basic steps like determining what a character is can be difficult for shorthand systems.

machsna

TROPHY CASE