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Pedich edhellen?
Do you speak Elvish?
Elvish letters (AKA Tengwar), like our "Roman" letters, CAN be used to write most languages. And,
in the real world, some people sometimes use Elvish letters
to write real-world languages, like English.
But there's no standard way to do that. Tolkien himself wrote several English sentences in Elvish letters, and each time he did it differently.
As I see it, there are basically two ways to write English with Elvish letters.
The first way is using Elvish letters to represent English SOUNDS. That would mean that an English sound like "eye" would always be written with the same Elvish symbol, regardless of the original English spelling ("eye", "I", "rye", "die", "guy", "kite"...) This is a nice idea in principle, but does not work very well in practice, because not all English speakers pronounce all words the same way.
The second idea is not trying to represent the English sounds, but the English letters. This may not be what the Elves did, but it's convenient, because you may learn to do that in ten minutes and you will always be able to read back what you wrote. Just follow the "lessons" below and change each English letter into an Elvish letter. You'll get something that looks nice and can be read back.
A little warning, though. In this website, I explain, for free, how you can learn to write Elvish letters yourself. Please feel free to read the lessons here, and to write whatever you want in Elvish letters. In my website on Elvish tattoos, however, I offer to write your name in Elvish letters artistically, for a fee, of course. As it happens, I get lots of email from people who mix the two websites up, and think that I have offered to turn into a tattoo design for free whatever I'm asked. I haven't. Please don't send email asking me to write in Elvish for free. Thanks.
In this website I use a simple Elvish handwriting. The Elvish samples in my tattoo website look nicer but are harder to write by hand, so learners are encouraged to use the simpler shapes here at first, and learn the "artistic" thing later.
Lessons:
 | This is Quenya Elvish. It says ai laurië lantar las-si suurinen, "goldenly fall the leaves because of the wind". |
Copyright (c) 2006-2008
Jordi Mas Trullenque.
email: jordimastrullenque at gmail dot com
http://purl.oclc.org/net/elfico/index.en.html
Last revised: 2008-10-29