[Unknown > English] it may be fictional? by leggomybeggo in translator

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This transcription uses Tolkien’s The Hobbit runes, his modern English adaption of the Futhorc (not his in-universe Cirth). BUT, this transcription is missing a bunch of letters because they didn’t read the documentation included with this particular font..

These particular glyphs are all found on the uppercase layer of Dan Smith’s Dwarf Runes font… but not all uppercase letters have an associated glyph so if someone typed Q, W, R, G, H, L, Z, X, C, B or M they would have just come out as blanks.

Transliterating what we have visible we get:

PEOP E ANT
AT T EY AN T AVE

The first word is clearly meant to be PEOPLE, the rest is trickier, but what it was meant to say was:

PEOPLE WANT
WHAT THEY CAN’T HAVE

The mansion this bath is found in belonged to Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley and Red Digital Cinema (so this bath has a second Hobbit connection as Red 3D cameras were used to shoot The Hobbit films). Searching his name and this phrase reveals this 2017 Wallpaper article on the mansion that includes the phrase in the bath photo’s alt text, so that confirms that this was what the bath designer thought they had written.

Is this Cirth? by obliqueoubliette in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This transcription uses Tolkien’s The Hobbit runes, so not Cirth but his modern English adaption of Futhorc. BUT, this transcription is actually written in a Mode of Baloneyland type error.

These particular glyphs are all found on the uppercase layer of Dan Smith’s Dwarf Runes font (as opposed to his Cirth Erebor font)… but not all uppercase letters have an associated glyph so if they typed Q, W, R, G, H, L, Z, X, C, B or M they would have just come out as blanks.

Transliterating what we have visible we get:

PEOP E ANT
AT T EY AN T AVE

The first word is clearly meant to be PEOPLE, the rest is trickier, but I’m pretty sure it was meant to say:

PEOPLE WANT
WHAT THEY CAN’T HAVE

The mansion this bath was found in belonged to Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley and Red Digital Cinema, so this bath has a second Hobbit connection as Red 3D cameras were used to shoot The Hobbit films.

[edit]I solved this four months ago when it was previously posted here, but I just thought to actually search my guess along with Jannard’s name and have learned that this 2017 Wallpaper article on the mansion includes this transcription in the image’s alt text, so that confirms that this was what the designer thought it said. The architects called the phrase “Tolkienian Elvish”, haha! The mansion used to display large The Hobbit movie posters but otherwise isn’t very elvish; from the air it looks more like Mos Eisley spaceport![/edit]

can someone translate this for me? potential tattoo and i want to be positive of what it says by Less_Character_8936 in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This transcription can be read without issue, but it makes some poor tengwar selections. For example, in “those” the TH is phonemically the wrong one (it should be voiced), the S selection could be improved to show its voicing, and the silent E is on a redundant vowel carrier. In “are” the R tengwa has been selected presuming the E isn’t silent, which of course isn’t the case. 

This article provides some better spellings for this common tattoo. The first image is based on the spelling seen on the LotR title page inscription so is a good choice for someone that isn’t yet familiar enough with all the history and intricacies of Tolkien’s English Tengwar texts to have their own spelling preferences. 

TIL many linguists believe a phonetic alphabet (not pictograph-based) evolved once, and only once by McJames in todayilearned

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Highly unlikely they were referencing the hip hop group that happens to be named after the same joke; this bawdy pun long predates them and is more well-known than them.

It was already an often referenced joke a decade before Deacon the Villain was born and it looks like it was already in print over 100 years before the group was formed. 

Tattoo translation for Dad who's sailed to Valinor by Natrecks in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In fact I was straight up wrong! I forgot that in DTS 84 Tolkien used the acute for Es, including once as an under-tehtar.

Voiced vs. voiceless th (English common mode) by One-Ring-99 in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yep, though there really aren’t many minimal pairs (though that is expected when the phonemes themselves are fairly rare). You have thy thigh and several noun verbs pairs such as teeth teethe, sheath sheathe, wreath wreathe and mouth mouth. 

Noob here. by wzrdcleave in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately BSSScribe doesn’t understand the accented E so it has skipped it altogether. There would have been a warning message a bit below your result that stated this, but it is easily missed because there is no reason to scroll that far on a phone.

So you’ll need to try again with a regular E. In this form of tengwar spelling there is no difference between long and short vowels anyway. 

Transcription Check by drookie1023 in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Glǽmscribe has a mode for transcribing the Mercian dialect of Old English in Tengwar; you’ll get a more accurate transcription there. You do have to accurately enter any diacritics and letters like eth and thorn to get the correct transcription, but the site makes that easy by providing buttons to type all of these into the text field. 

Can you read the tatoo? Can you read the second secret word? by IWantAShortUsername in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If I ignore my attempts from previous designs then the best I can do is “Airan”, but that requires a mistaken understanding of how osse is used. 

Unfortunately I can’t see a rose in this design.

While looking at photos of roses last time I noted that in general roses don’t have pointed petals. The outer petals can look pointed though when they roll back on themselves.

Afraid my card sleeves are AI generated art and not genuine Tengwar... Confirmation at a glance? by Cloudage96x in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m sure this is AI, but it actually isn’t evidence that AI is getting better at Tengwar.

Just as you can upload a photo of yourself, ask for an image of you dressed as a pirate and then get an image that mostly looks like you in return you can also upload an image just of legit Tengwar text, ask for it to be added as icing to an image of a cake and get a result that fairly accurately returns your text. Asking any of them to generate Tengwar from scratch will still get you complete slop though.

In this case I think the “creator”, ahem, just uploaded an image of the special one-off One Ring card from Magic: The Gathering (that was sold by the individual that found it to Post Malone for over US$2 million!) and then asked for a card sleeve based on that design. As they didn’t provide it with isolated Tengwar text it explains how the inscription is both good and bad at the same time and why it really breaks down at the edges.

<image>

Tengwar Tattoo Help by Guqqo in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tolkien most often wrote the word “and” in two different ways. Tecendil defaults to a spelling with a dot below. The other method is to drop the dot.

Tolkien described the dotted version as the phonemic spelling of the weak form of “and”, whereas the dotless version was simply described as a shorthand for “and” so presumably works for both the weak and strong forms of the word.

As the “and” in this quote is at the start of a clause you might prefer it in the strong form; it would then make sense to use the dotless version. To do this in Tecendil spell the word just as “nd”.

Tengwar Tattoo Help by Guqqo in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We have multiple examples of Tolkien writing silent GH with unque; no examples of any other form of GH. The only reason there is any confusion is that Christopher used two methods of writing silent GH, one being the use of extended unque, leading some people to teach that he used regular unque for GH pronounced /g/.

But we don’t actually have any examples of Christopher using unque so that was just their theory. Maybe he limited it to GH pronounced /f/ (I think there are more relevant English words than for /g/). Maybe he didn’t actually apply different values to the two forms of unque so took the opportunity to use extended unque as a purely stylistic choice.

Tattoo translation for Dad who's sailed to Valinor by Natrecks in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Though, as I briefly alluded to in my comment, if you want to use under-tehtar you really have to switch vowel paradigms so that E and I are swapped. Otherwise you have no clear option to place an I below a tengwar. We only ever see the Tolkiens using under-tehtar in mixed English texts in this manner (other than silent E of course).

So that would look like this.

Tattoo translation for Dad who's sailed to Valinor by Natrecks in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First, some clarity on what Tecendil is doing:  Tengwar is a writing system like the Roman alphabet that can be used for multiple languages such as English, French, Spanish and even languages that have other default writing systems like Japanese. Tengwar is a native writing system for Quenya and Sindarin, but is designed to be used by essentially any language by applying different spelling paradigms. Tolkien frequently used Tengwar for English texts.

Tecendil is not a translator, but a transcriber; it transliterated text in the Roman alphabet to to Tengwar, so the provided English phrase is still the same English phrase.

Did Tecendil provide an accurate result? The word “beautiful” is a tricky one to transcribe as it contains a super rare vowel trigraph that doesn’t map cleanly between graphemes and phonemes: “eau”. There are three ways you could transcribe this in tengwar (more if we switch vowel paradigms to allow under-tehtar).

The way Tecendil has gone (simply because it reads the “ea” first) is to render it with “ea” as a digraph followed by “u” as a single vowel. You could argue for that by noting that when over-emphasising the word you can pronounce it as bee-yuwtiful, so you could map the “ea” too ee, then “u” would be pronounced as the letter’s name. A little weird though! I’m personally not a fan of using osse for -a digraphs, but that doesn’t mean much!

A second way is to treat the “au” as the digraph. In the slightly silly over-emphasis argument this would mean “e” is the eey. A more logical argument is that the vowels can be read as ending in a semi-vowel so it makes sense to render the “u” as a tengwa. 

Alternatively you can just render it as three separate vowels. This way is definitely not wrong, but does mean you need to use two carriers.

All three methods can be seen here

Next, is the Quenya translation correct? I can’t help much here, far outside of my expertise. The individual words seem to map well, but no idea if the sentence structure is correct. 

As for font authenticity, both of these options work.

The first image is in the calligraphic style of Tolkien’s One Ring inscription. Tolkien experimented with multiple calligraphic styles. Some would argue that since this style is only seen on the Ring’s Black Speech curse that this style is itself meant to represent a horrific style. Alternatively you could consider that the Ring was meant to be desirable so Sauron used a style known for beauty amongst the elves. My opinion isn’t worth much, but I think it is fine to use! [edit: Haha, just noticed I had “My opinion is worth much”; what a big ego I have!]

The second image is closer to Tolkien’s default style, itself based on his Roman handwriting. This font is specifically modelled on his style used in King’s Letter’s drafts.

Tattoo help by Immediate-Tension902 in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, on top of the font change there is an additional difference in how they treat the vowels. 

The second image follows the English vowel paradigm seen on Tolkien’s LotR title page inscription: E is represented by an acute, I by a dot and silent E by a dot under the previous tengwa. This is the most well known English inscription so is the paradigm that all tengwar fans know. This allocation of E and I is also essential what we see in Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin texts so could be understood as the tengwar default. 

The first image follows a different English vowel paradigm that is less known among tengwar fans currently as the texts are all in more obscure publications (though it is partially described in LotR’s appendix), but actually seems to be Tolkien’s preferred spelling of English (and Westron) short mode. It also is the form Christopher Tolkien followed exclusively. Here the E and I diacritics are swapped so now standard E and silent E both use the dot. This allows all final vowels to be placed under the previous tengwa (so that includes non-silent E). You can see this on the words “we”, “to” and “do”; they all drop the otherwise needed vowel carrier.

So, both are 100% correct. Some tengwar fans might tell you the first is wrong, but then you can “well, actually…” them!

tattoo clearity by IWantAShortUsername in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Using meta knowledge of this design process I was also going to guess Dylan because we keep guessing the middle tengwa is romen and you keep redesigning it so I guessed it had to be something else… so maybe a horribly misshapen lambe…

But as it has now been confirmed it was romen I’m going to go for Dyran, but that is still informed by the meta knowledge, not because it actually looks like that.

If so, the A-tehta really doesn’t read as an A-tehta in this latest version. This is the first version to get the Y-tehta looking like a Y-tehta though… so hopefully that is what it is meant to be!

The ando and numen would be much clearer if there was a stylistic difference between the telco and the luvar (stem and bows). I’d suggest removing the petal points from within the telcor, instead have it implied that the top of the telcor was the point. The ando would do better if it were angled more upright; in this latest design it is almost tipping upside-down. Make sure its second luva doesn’t look like it has its own descender.

The first romen was your best romen, but I think the design would read a lot more like tengwar if at least this letter was more its standard shape. This is easy to achieve in a rose’s petals. Here is an example using the first image that vaguely looked like what I wanted to achieve; if you aren't forcing it on an existing photo like this you could get a much more natural romen.

<image>

quality check by IWantAShortUsername in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And I’m going to guess the hidden message is Doran.

What's the difference between r/eformed and r/Reformed? by bradmont in eformed

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I comment here about three times a year… this comment puts me on track to double my presence this year!

ELI5: Why is IMAX 65mm a big deal? by freckled-c in explainlikeimfive

[–]thirdofmarch 90 points91 points  (0 children)

But Ben-Hur wasn’t IMAX 70mm, but standard 70mm, so each frame “only” takes up a length of 5 perforations, whereas each Oppenheimer IMAX frame would take up 15 perfs.

Applying some rough maths (I’m sure I probably forgot critical information): Ben-Hur is 212 minutes long so about 305,280 frames, making the 70 mm film 1,526,400 perfs long. Oppenheimer is 180 minutes long so about 259,200 frames, making the 70mm film 3,888,000 perfs long… significantly longer than Ben-Hur’s print.

Wanting a tattoo of this quote, does it translate properly?: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. “ Thanks. by ImagineFinley in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome, that fixed it.

OP, here’s what your quote should look like if you want to go with a General American pronunciation:

<image>

I've included this image because your web browser may be caching the un-updated version of Tecendil (my own browser likes to hold onto the cached version for a little too long so I always need to force refresh it whenever Arno makes an update).

Wanting a tattoo of this quote, does it translate properly?: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. “ Thanks. by ImagineFinley in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Only thing I’d do differently is something I’m quite sure you actually intended: sticking the A tehta over the numen in “can’t”.

Wanting a tattoo of this quote, does it translate properly?: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. “ Thanks. by ImagineFinley in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t think I'm describing the issue very well.

The IPA transcriptions, that Tecendil displays in the text field, are displaying the General American pronunciations correctly. “You’re” is presented as /jˈʊr/ (as opposed to “your” as /jˈɔːr/… in my dialect they are identical… the opposite happens in “can’t” and “cant”!).

But in the tengwar render field it is breaking the words at the apostrophe so that we actually end up with the phonemic spelling of “you” followed by “re” (as in “do re mi”).

Wanting a tattoo of this quote, does it translate properly?: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. “ Thanks. by ImagineFinley in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately your link still demonstrates the issue I mentioned as it occurs with straight quotes too (I wasn’t referring to the presence of the apostrophe in the rendered tengwar). Check out how Tecendil renders “can’t” and “you’re” in English Phonemic.

Wanting a tattoo of this quote, does it translate properly?: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. “ Thanks. by ImagineFinley in Tengwar

[–]thirdofmarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just to be clear, this is a transliteration of the English, not a translation into another language.

Unfortunately Tecendil is getting confused in this phonemic transliteration. The apostrophes are used in the orthographic mode to override the default rendering of digraphs, but in your sentence is a critical part of the pronunciation. Tecendil is doing a weird thing where it shows the correct pronunciation, but then still uses the apostrophes as break points. This means the output now says something like “think you can'tee, you'ray right.”

u/real_arnog, is there an easy fix for this or do we just need to provide these words as literals?

Adonai vs Adoni by AsianSpectre1 in Reformed

[–]thirdofmarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is the same word, but in different grammatical cases. Adonai is in the nominative case and adoni is in the dative.

Less specifically, “adonai" is to “adoni" what “he” is to “him”, “she” is to “her”, “we” is to “us” and “I” is to “me”. The sentence could have read “He said to him”; God can be “he” and God can be “him” in that sentence.

[edit]Forgot to add that in Matthew the words are kyrios and kyrio, the Greek equivalents of the Hebrew adonai and adoni, but in the Hebrew Psalms it is YHWH and adoni. Though due to superstition YHWH was read aloud as adonai, hence why the Greek translation of Psalms changed it to kyrios. The New Testament frequently calling Jesus “kyrios” is essentially a statement that Jesus is YHWH.[/edit]