Tengwar Challenge 1
- August 14, 2003
- 6 comments
This will be the first of hopefully many Tengwar transcriptions I’ll be doing. How I’d like this to work is that I’ll transcribe a phrase or paragraph or something longer, and let others try to read it. I’ll highlight words in red that I’m not completely sure are correct. Then any expert who reads it can let me know if I got those words correct or not. I think this will be great for me to practice and hopefully become a fun challenge for others who are wanting to learn how to read Tengwar.
So without further ado, here’s the first challenge:
Mode: English Common
I’m not a fan of the ‘phonetic style’ of writing. I would at least write out the silent vowels. Perhaps a dot underneath the ‘h’ in ‘heart’ and an ‘a-tehta’ over the ‘d’ in ‘lead’, but that’s just me. ‘Acknowledge’ is spelled wrong. You should use ‘Quesse’ here, I would even place a bar underneath of the ‘Quesse’ .
C. McKay
August 14, 2003
Some more thoughts:
In ‘acknowledge’, if you really want to write ‘phonetically you should not use ‘vala’ at all, rather just place the tehta over ‘lambe’.
For ‘your’, you shouldn’t need the diphthong since you’re writing phonetically. Just place the ‘o-tehta’ over the ‘r’.
If you’d like to write phonetically, I’d suggest you use a different mode. The best would be the first style of the English Mode of Beleriand, used in the Bombadil passages. It’s meant to be written phonetically, the tehta modes aren’t really.
You could place the ‘n’ in ‘understanding’ as a bar over the tengwa ‘Umbar’. Otherwise ‘understanding’ is correct.
Chris
August 14, 2003
Wow! Excellent feedback from both of you. I appreciate it very much.
Now that you pointed out using the the bar over ‘Umbar’ in ‘understanding’, it seems obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t use it at the beginning and did at the end of the word?
Out of the three words in red, ‘acknowledge’ was the one I was most unsure about. You both gave me good pointers on this.
So, Chris, if I were to continue using the English Common mode, it would be best for me to actually spell out the whole word, and not write it phonetically?
Wow, it’s scary that I was actually able to read this without consulting any charts. It helps, of course, that it was English, so I could use my knowledge of English to fill in some gaps where I was unsure what the letters stood for. But it looks like I spent more time learning Tengwar than I originally intended to. Guess I just can’t pass up these types of challenges.
I’m not clear why people are saying you are spelling this phonetically. Yes, you left out the ‘e’ in “heart” and one or two other things, but for the most part, it seemed to match pretty well with the modern English spellings of all these words.
Interestingly, there were almost no clear examples of long vowels (“long” in the English sense), which would be the best indicator of whether you were following phonetics or spelling, so it’s a little hard to prove which way you were trying to go.
To confirm what the other Chris was saying, the idea behind English Common mode seems to be to follow the spelling… and I’m not a fan of that 
But I’m not well-steeped in Tolkien culture, so take that FWIW.
Wow. I don’t know the English Common mode at all and I could piece that together. (I mostly write in a poorly thought out homemade English mode)
I prefer phonetic modes for English, myself, b/c the tengwar are a phonetic system. English may be diphthongized like crazy, but that should be respected.
I find that the i-tehta in “direct” goes against that, even though you’ve elsewhere leaned in a phonetic sort of direction (e.g., “liin” for “lean”, “hii” for “He”).
I’d agree that quesse qould be better in “acknowledge”, I first read it as “aghnowleje”, which didn’t click for a moment.
Hi Chris,
This is a great way for you to practice, and for me to practice too. :-D
I’m not too familiar with the various style names…English Common I’m assuming is phonetic?
I have never seen the word ‘your’ written that way. And I would use naldo instead of nwalme in ‘understanding’. In ‘acknowledge’ I would use quesse instead of hwesta, and leave out vala altogether. (this going by the pronunciation guide for the word in my dictionary, lol) But this is a problem with the phonetic tengwar…everyone speaks slightly differently.
Great job!
Eru