Can You Read Tengwar?
- August 05, 2003
- 29 comments
“What the hell is Tengwar?” some of you might ask. Tengwar is the Elvish writing system created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his amazing books. I found a place where I could translate a phrase into Tengwar. Below is the translated phrase:
Can you figure out what it is I had translated? Major Tolkien fans will probably know it immediately. For others, it should be pretty challenging.
HINT - I didn’t translate an English phrase.
Oh, too bad, I thought I’d nailed it. Well, the home page of that site I used mentions that there are actually several systems, depending on which Elvish language is being used, and that a given letter could have several sounds, depending on how the speakers of, say, Quenya, decided to map the letters to the sounds of their language. Kind of like the Latin alphabet used by us, the French, the Portuguese, the Icelandic, the Navajo, the Indonesians, the Vietnamese, the Igbo and, God help us, the Irish, to name a few. All these languages use pretty much the same set of 26 characters in different ways to represent all the sounds found in all these languages, sceau iou havre thoux neaux ouâte leingoueudge iou are louquing ette thoux bi ébeule thoux pronaounce itte corrèctlie.
I decided my best shot was with the “unofficial” English-Tengwar mapping, but maybe I chose wrong. Seems your claim of translating a non-English phrase needs some further qualification, i.e., what mode of Tengwar was it translated to?
Chris
August 7, 2003
Chris
August 7, 2003
Chris
August 9, 2003
Either no one can figure out what I translated (besides Bob) or no one cares. It’s probably the latter.
So here’s what I translated:
ash nazg durbatulk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
It’s an example of another Tolkien language called Black Speech. You can tell what it means in English by the word pattern and repitition. In English, it’s the famous lines from the One Ring poem:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Chris
August 10, 2003
mélissa
October 26, 2003
thanks a lot
melissa
October 26, 2003
greg
April 4, 2004
Aeglos Abed
August 26, 2005
hi, the next month my girlfriend and i we’re going to celebrate 3 years together, so i’m going to buy her the necklace of Arwen. Wonderful gift for a girl. I’m going to give her a letter, you know all the ritual in that beautiful moment, so i want to write tha phrase that Arwen told to Aragorn: I would rather spend one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone. Can anybody help me with the translation, my time is running out. It would be lovely of your part pals. Aeglos.
Bei
Ross
The best online transcriber I’ve seen is here
Below the transcribe button are several options for output. The mode can either be “english” or “english 2002”. Output should be PNG, and try changing the Tengwar a couple times to see which one looks nicest to you.
Kristin
March 2, 2007
Thanks for your suggestion. This doesn’t seem right as it has numbers in it. This is what it translated: t`Û 2`Cv&16R t`Û jeT`V
I wanted to translate “my daughter my life” I’ve done it three times and each time it comes out similar. I’ve spent hours searching for a translation site and have gotten nowhere.
Christian
April 18, 2007
That’s cool! you wrote the “ash nazg” verse, but not in sauron’s writting, but in regular elvish writting…
If you want to get a good tengwar typeface, go here.
Bruno, a few comments above this one, I mentioned a Tengwar transcriber to Kristin. Go to that site and type in ‘mellorn’ in the input box. In the options below it, use the following:
mode: sindarin OR sindarin classic
output: PNG
Fiddle with the Tengwar drop-down menu and font size in the ‘output format’ section until you get a style you like. The result will also look different depending on the mode you choose.
I hope that helps and isn’t too confusing.
Thanks so much, mate!
I remember “mellorn” means “friend” and, at the same time, is a name of a important tree, isn’t rght?
I want to tatoo this word (and a tree) in my shoulderblade.
I was reading your profile, and I’m a graphic designer too. You appears to be a nice person to talk and drink a beer. Hug to you!
It was pretty easy, actually, and I’ve never studied Tengwar before. Here it is:
ch(sh)anzagdrobtalokoo. chanzaggbatalo.
chanzagthrrkatalokug(gh)abrozmuch(sh)iikthpitalo.
I used http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4948/tengwar/english.htm to help me with the transliteration. I’m surprised a bunch of people haven’t figured it out already. Sorry for giving away the secret so soon!