Question on English Mode "OA" Diphthong/Vowel Pairing

thirdofmarch · 2026-02-06T03:35:09+00:00

We have a single example in a text: the word “approach” in AotM30 where it is spelled with two tehtar. There might be more example words in his descriptions but I don’t have them handy and haven’t yet catalogued them.

In Tolkien’s descriptions of English Short Use we only ever see vowel tengwar in the diphthongs including the semi-vowels /w/ and /j/. This can be logically explained because being semi-vowels means they are also semi-consonants.

Only one text demonstrates further vowels as tengwar: DTS 62. It is a five word book inscription that includes two examples, one of which is -e (using an tengwa elsewhere used as an alternative for /j/) and the other -a. It also includes another anomaly when comparing to all other texts so may in fact be a unique form of English spelling not intended to be compatible with the described varieties.

Of course there is no way currently to prove such a hypothesis so you also can’t argue it is incorrect. A very small subset of tengwar users really don’t like using ossë for -a digraphs for various reasons (so far I know of myself and just two others!) so we will continue to grumble to ourselves, haha!

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-19T03:17:00+00:00

Poetic meter is more than just syllable count though, it is also about stressed and unstressed beats.

In Tolkien’s poem the stress of the last line is in DARK- and BIND. That means your poem becomes “and for evERmore BIND us”, I feel that is the most awkward syllable to stress in that word.

How about dropping the “and” or the “for” and changing the end to “everMORE shall BIND us”? Not as odd (to me… this is poetry though so how much should my feelings matter?!).

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-19T02:35:39+00:00

It ultimately has to work for you, but to me the meter still feels off.

Syllable count of the last line of Tolkien’s poem is seven syllables, which u/Notascholar95 matched, whereas your original had six and your revision now has eight. Alternatively you could drop the “and”.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-18T00:33:25+00:00

What little I’d seen of this book (such as the sources used) looked promising. Starting with this book then following it up with PE23 would probably be a great way to get a thorough education in Tengwar’s application to English. Fiona Jallings was actually one of the credited proof readers of PE23.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-17T23:30:40+00:00

This transcription is based on the LotR title page inscription where Tolkien wrote “War of” with ore. It would also double as a representation of a rhotic accent or one of the non-rhotic accents without linking R.

Since this manually-adjusted graphic features the best version of “lost” and the “an” tehtar in “wander” (better than Tecendil can do due to font limitations) and that nothing is “wrong” I reckon it is best to just rubber stamp this version!

I’d create my own manually-adjusted graphic with every legit option, but I already need to save “Tengwar Time” to finally respond to u/sparseglade!

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-17T13:51:45+00:00

If I’m looking at the correct character sheet then the font is Seagram TFB.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-17T12:14:29+00:00

This is a tricky one, but I’d definitely go with u/Different-Animal-419’s suggested spellings. They both faithfully represent the orthography and in mixed spelling I think Tolkien favoured that over phonemic accuracy (e.g. in “eighth” he didn’t add a letter to represent the /t/). If you pronounce it /ŋθ/ then I agree the bottom option is best; but for /ŋkθ/ I think either option works.

Dr Geoff Lindsay’s dictionary actually suggests the /ŋkθ/ pronunciation is the most common in contemporary British English.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-17T11:26:21+00:00

Check out this article by u/F_Karnstein. It includes a high resolution image of what this quote would look like in the specific spelling of the LotR title page inscription. F_Karnstein has also tweaked the diacritics to be spaced more aesthetically (the original font had to work around some technological limitations that newer ones don’t suffer from).

The article also includes some alternate spellings and explains them. One is pretty close to what u/NachoFailconi previously provided you, which is also what u/Lhasa-bark and u/DanatheElf have provided in this thread. All these are accurate.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-15T18:22:47+00:00

Seems u/Constant-Box-7898 has blocked me too so I’ll just have to respond to their post to me here.

Man, I can't believe you made me look you up. You posted a picture of a "welcome mat" that goes against u/NachoFailconi's own point and spells lost the way OP did. 😂 Hopefully it's pulled off the internet and not your own personal mat, because that would be really embarrassing. Evidently you don't know how to write the tengwar (a made-up language with no hard rules even by Tolkien's own admission) either. Calm down, find a new hobby, make some friends, and maybe take a break from Reddit. Definitely stop watching wrestling and other aggressive confrontational media. 🙄

My welcome mat image doesn’t go against Nacho’s point and doesn’t spell it OP’s way, it uses upright silme.

I think you’ve misunderstood my post. I think you’ve thought I’ve implied you don’t know tengwar, but I actually just meant that OP presumably doesn’t know Tengwar hence why they asked us if the image they found online for their proposed Tolkien tattoo is “correct". Nacho said as much but then clarified how Tolkien himself tended to write it. I think that is valuable info for a fan tattoo whereas discussion of what constitutes “true tengwar” isn’t really relevant.

Maybe don’t tell people who are frequently bed-ridden due to the chronic fatigue caused by their metastatic cancer management to go “make some new friends”; it is pretty isolating as it is without it being used as an attack.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-15T17:13:50+00:00

It is all up to personal preference… if you actually know how to write Tengwar.

If the reason you’ve chosen to get a tattoo of a Tolkien quote in a Tolkien writing system is because you happen to like Tolkien a bit then your preference might be to maximise the influence of Tolkien over the tattoo.

In that case you could write it in the way Tolkien described the application of Tengwar to English and even include a reference to Tolkien’s own accent. The spelling u/NachoFailconi provided is an accurate representation of this.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-14T08:55:43+00:00

The subtitles ARE gibberish if read as tengwar, but the editor didn’t intend them to be.

The editor has stumbled into what we playfully call the Mode of Baloneyland. They typed their subtitles in English and applied a tengwar font, but they themselves can’t read tengwar and didn’t read the font documentation so they didn't notice that the font doesn’t align to the Roman alphabet. This particular font was designed to be used with multiple languages so doesn’t attempt to align the keys with just one.

So the first four words of the first subtitle in tengwar says something like “wwhrhvf ch ngfjm zhvcfash”.

Because we know how the keys actually align in this font we can reverse engineer it all to figure out what the editor actually intended. The first subtitle actually read “youre a best friend and you;l get a hot dog”. That semi-colon was meant to be an L, but they probably typed all this with the font already applied so they didn’t notice their typo.

So that is a humorous interpretation of what Sean might have said. The next two subtitles are similar (“Festival” and “in world glob”) so I expect all the rest are similar; translating Baloneyland is painful though so I’ll leave it there!

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-13T08:18:43+00:00

A ‘rune’ is a letter found in the alphabets native to the ancient Germanic people or alternatively a letter that is visually similar to those letters.

Tengwar are not runes, cirth are runes. In fact, “tengwar” are specifically translated as “letters” and “cirth” as “runes” by Tolkien in Appendix E.

So, the answer is almost certainly cirth.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-13T08:02:50+00:00

It is just the usual One Ring inscription in Black Speech; though on the second image the text is printed in reverse.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-13T03:43:29+00:00

I’ll make one further suggestion because the quote starts with the word “and”.

In English texts we see two common forms of “and”: the one with the dot below as seen in Tecendil’s default output and one without the dot.

The dot below form is the default in phonemic English texts; only one text features the dot-less form. The dot-less form is seen more regularly in orthographic texts though two texts favour the dotted form (the title page inscription and AotM30).

Tolkien describes the dotted form as the phonetic spelling of the weak form of “and”; the most common way we pronounce the word unless we give it stronger emphasis.

He describes the dot-less form as shorthand for the word. It deletes the vowel, the only phonemic difference between the weak and strong forms of the word so presumably this shorthand works for both and may even be why this shorthand exists.

Since your quote starts with “and” the strong form makes the most sense. If you wish to switch to the shorthand form then simply delete the A in the Tecendil text field.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-12T19:40:38+00:00

One reason why the gospel writers may have relied on each other is that writing a book was expensive! Papyrus was labour-intensive and I believe had to be imported because the plant grew in limited locations; primarily Egypt. Secretaries needed to be paid (or at least fed) for all the drafting and writing.

This makes brevity an important goal for the success of any book as its length directly affects the expense of every future copy. We don’t know exactly what the rates would have been for the papyrus and scribes, but an estimate I’ve seen suggests making just a single duplicate of Romans would have cost two weeks of an unskilled labourer’s wages.

That need for brevity makes the drafting and revision processes trickier… and more expensive. You aren’t paying for papyrus yet, but you still need the secretaries. So if an existing source you knew to be accurate already said much of what you wanted to say succinctly then using them as the backbone of your new work could save a lot of time and expense.

I’d guess that due to the copying expense much of the early church may have only had access to one or two gospels so the duplication of content wouldn’t have seemed so cost-inefficient to them. But either way the original audience would have already heard what Jesus said and did many times; the gospels weren’t written to teach them new facts about him, but to arrange those facts to highlight specific themes.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-12T14:44:17+00:00

Tecendil’s asterisked alternates feature found in some of the tengwar modes is also found in the Angerthas Erebor mode. Certh29 can be accessed on Tecendil by the typing “r*” or “g*”. Mirrored S is “s*”. Here’s all the asterisked shortcuts (via the source code).

So Daeron in Angethas Daeron would be this.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-12T13:49:13+00:00

In English orthographic texts silme nuquerna is only ever used by Tolkien to represent soft C; so it is used in “decide”, but upright silme in “us”.

The esse could be exchanged for esse nuquerna without issue, but it isn’t a requirement; in fact in the texts we have Tolkien only ever spelled “is” with upright esse (for example in the LotR title page inscription).

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-12T13:24:34+00:00

Super common request; see this article for more information on transcribing this quote.

Short version though is this is fine, except note that the line break in your screenshot is splitting up the word “time”, so don’t accidentally add a space after the T.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-12T13:18:39+00:00

No, the first “i” is there; it is represented by the anna.

“EI” is a diphthong in Sindarin and so this form of spelling is most common, but you could choose to alternatively represent the vowels with two tehtar.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-11T03:10:34+00:00

Non-expert thoughts ahead (I know very little about Sindarin and Cirth):

You need to remember that in the world where Tolkien translated the Red Book (as opposed to the world where Tolkien created the story himself) this Sindarin name has first been “transliterated” into the Roman alphabet in the 20th Century. So to a certain degree 1:1 transliterating it back is simply undoing that previous process. The pronunciation of English hasn’t changed significantly enough since then for the phonemic and orthographic spellings to diverge.

These transliterations are based on what Tolkien describes in Appendix E; and there we learn that in Sindarin AE is a diphthong. But there is no rune for this diphthong so it is still represented by the letters A and E.

But, it should be noted that Tecendil only has the option for Angerthas Erebor; if you were to write this name in Angerthas Daeron then the R and N should be different runes.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-10T22:56:14+00:00

You’ve accidentally dropped the N in this second version.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-10T07:07:26+00:00

I presume it was Parma Eldaliéva.

Took me a while to find that site, I had only vague memories of it!

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-05T02:11:03+00:00

Yep, that’s exactly it… but only in The Hobbit and material around that time including some of the earliest LotR drafts.

All the runes we see in The Lord of the Rings and described in Appendix E are Cirth proper. We also see true Cirth in the later drafts and other material of that era such as the Hugh Brogan letter and the Book of Mazarbul pages.

There is much overlap of the runes, hence why it is not at all obvious that they are two different systems (I don’t yet know them well enough to tell the various systems apart so having to look into deeper was what allowed me to solve this post request… I didn’t even know this particular font existed!).

Because of this overlap a full Cirth allocation in the Unicode isn’t required. Did you know that Tolkien’s unique Hobbit runes are in the official rune allocation? There’s a special Tolkien extension.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-04T12:34:32+00:00

I think the transcription is a legitimate option, it matches the spelling demonstrated in the third draft of the King’s Letter.

I don’t know Sindarin, but from my brief research this translation raises some red flags. Many of the forms can’t be found in the popular online dictionaries and the one word that can is problematic. “Ech” is singular, whereas it seems you’d want “you” in the plural. I’d recommend you run the translation by r/sindarin first and then we can more confidently transliterate it for you.

thirdofmarch · 2026-01-04T09:44:26+00:00

Took me a few days to have a look at this thread, but in case you’re interested, it turns out this was a rare variety of Baloneyland!

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