Tengwar Tutorial Here!

1)
     
2)  /d/  /dh/  /t/  /th/  /d/  /t/  /dh/  /th/

3)  Voiced sounds are sounds with vocal chord vibration while voiceless sounds are sounds without vocal chord vibration.  For example, /z/ is voiced while /s/ is voiceless.

Lotryn and Vire, your exercises look great

And now for:

Lesson 3: Lips and Patterns

A) P, B, F, and V
B) Voicing and the Tengwar
C) Sound Type and the Tengwar
D) Place and the Tengwar
E) Rows and Columns

A) I'm going to continue first off by introducing a few more letters, and then I'll start explaining what the Tengwar is really all about.

P: this is the common sound /p/, found in such wonderful words as popular, poop, and pecuniary. It corresponds to the -Q- key to make a symbol like:

q

This symbol is a lot like the one of /t/, except that it has a short line closing the bottom of the bow. Tolkien calls this a closed bow (last lesson we were dealing with open bows). This symbol is called parma (which means 'book', as in the Elvish journal 'Parma Eldalamberon', if that helps to remember it).

B: this is the voiced equivalent of /p/, the sound /b/ in boulder, badger, and Bombadil. You get it with the -W- key, which on English keyboards is conveniently located right next to -Q-. You'll get:
w

This is just like /p/, but with an extra bow- the bar at the bottom gets extended out to close all the bows. You can also look at this as a /d/ with the closing bar. This thing's name is umbar.

F: the sound /f/ as in feather, Faramir, and foolhardy. Type it with an -E-, which again on an English keyboard is just one key right of -W-. Looks like:

e

You should understand pretty well how the bow, stem, and closing bar are working to make this symbol (but to be clear: a raised stem with a single bow closed with a bar). Try drawing formen out a few times.

V: add voicing to /f/ and you get the sound /v/ (virtue, volume, very). Type -R- to make:

r

Which has a raised stem and a doubled bow closed by a bar. The name is ampa (if you're wondering why some of the names don't actually contained the sound they represent, just have patience- we'll get to this next lesson).


B) At this point, it's clear that the Tengwar takes just a few basic elements and uses them to make a fair number of sounds. It should also be clear that this isn't a random collection of symbols, but that there is a method to the madness. What I'm going to do now is talk about what this system is.

We'll start with the bows, since that's an easy one. Simply put, the rule is that if a sound has a single bow, it is voiceless, and if it has a doubled bow it is voiced. So the voiceless sounds we've looked at so far are:

/t/
/th/
/p/
/f/

Adding a second second bow to any of these symbols gives you the voiced version:

/d/
/dh/
/b/
/v/

This rule will hold true for all the 'regular' Tengwar, ones that have a raised or lowered stem with bows. There are some other symbols that we'll get to later which don't work like this, but don't worry about that for now.


C) For this next bit, I'm going to have to talk about another distinction in sounds: type of sound (more formally called 'manner of articulation' in linguistics). Notice that in the sounds /t/, /d/, /p/, and /b/ the flow of our through your mouth is pretty much completely stopped for a moment- because of this, they are called stop sounds, or just stops.

With the other kind of sound we've looked at, the air keeps on going through, but gets channeled through your mouth to create friction and so make a distinctive sound.  Modern linguistics usually calls these fricatives, but Tolkien used the less standard term spirant instead. These sorts of terms, such as voiced, voiceless, stop, and fricative, are basic terms in linguistics to describe sounds, and they can be handy to know in a lot of contexts outside of the tengwar as well. /th/, /dh/, /f/, and /v/ are all fricatives.

This distinction between different types of sounds are also built into the tengwar: stops have a lowered stem, and fricatives have a raised stem. Look at these pairs to see what I mean:

q    e

2   4

1    3


Again, this rule is pretty general throughout the 'regular' tengwar.


D) There's one last really important feature of any given sound or tengwa, and that is the place in the mouth that is making the sound. For instance, all the sounds we looked at in lesson two were made (as the name indicated) with the tip of the tongue. Tolkien refers to these as dental sounds, or more simply as t-sounds. All the sounds in this lesson were made with the lips, and are called labial sounds ('labia' is Latin for 'lips') or p-sounds. In future lessons we'll start looking at other places sounds can be made at.

The tengwar distinguishes between different places in two ways. One is whether the bow is closed or open, and the other is whether the bow goes to the left or the right (we haven't looked at any that go to the left yet, but we'll get to that). I'm going to give you four symbols in a moment. Each one has a lowered stem, so it is a stop, and single bow to show that it is voiceless. The only difference is place:

1 q a z


As you can see, when the bow goes to the left it also opens upwards. Also, these are the only four basic styles you can get with the tengwar, so only for different places for making sounds can be represented. This isn't so bad in English, but some languges (such as Quenya) have more, sometimes a lot more, than four places that are really important. As we'll see later, there are a couple of ways to use extra marks to effectively make more places, but the ones I've just given here are the basic ones.


E) Putting this lesson together, this is how the tengwar works: you have four different 'styles' which represent different areas in the mouth for making sounds. Within each place, the sounds can either be voiced or voiceless (indicated by the number of bows), and they can stops or fricatives (indicated by a raised or lowered stem). Traditionally, we call each style a 'series', and name it after the place it represents: so all the sounds in lesson two were in the t-series, and all the sounds in lesson three are in the p-series. This is usually put into a chart that looks like this:


*These are sounds we'll fill in during the rest of this tutorial

In addition to calling the columns 'series', Tolkien referes to each row as a 'grade'. This chart is in the traditional order: the first grade is voiceless stops, the second voiced, and so on. There are actually six grades in total, although I've only showed you four so far. We'll cover the last two shortly.

It's this pattern to the tengwar that makes it really easy to learn. Once you know how it all fits together, you can figure out what tengwa represents a sound even if you don't have it perfectly memorized. This pattern also explains what's going on with your keyboard. On an English keyboard, the chart has essentially been turned on its side so that:

-1-, -2-... represent the t-series
-Q-, -W-... represent the p-series
-A-, -S-... represent the third series
-Z-, -X-... represent the fourth series

If you're using a non-English keyboard this pattern unfortunately gets messed up- but now at least you know why it's messed up!

So that's the essentials of the tengwar right there, folks. Now it's your turn.


Exercises

1) Practice drawing out all eight tengwar we've learned so far by hand. (Don't post this or anything, this is just practice)

2) Give me the tengwar to represent: /f/ /th/ /d/ /b/ /p/ /t/

3) Give me the sounds for: r 2 4 w 1 e

4) How would you write these sounds in my sound notation (with the //'s):

-a voiced labial fricative
-a voiceless dental stop
-a voiced labial stop

5) Use a tengwar font and type out the following:

-A-   -S-   -D-   -F-
-Z-   -X-   -C-   -V-

6) Have fun!

I've revised the exercise for this lesson slightly to fix a couple of errors. Specifcally, I've removed the tengwar we haven't learned yet from the transcription (I'm not entirely sure how they got there, or why I didn't realise I'd put them in ). I've also made it clear that in #5 I want you to type out certain keys, not sounds (I really shouldn't say I'm going to use a certain style for distinguishing and then not...).

Andrey, you've transcribed the exercise as I gave it fine. The only thing I'd ask is for you to try and redo #5 with my fixed version (don't worry about #3 unless you really want to). Otherwise

Andrey, perfect! Sorry about not posting the exercise right the first time around

Excercises:

2,

3, /v/ /d/ /dh/ /b/ /t/ /f/

4, /v/ /t/ /b/

5,

1) Done

2)  e 3 2 w q 1

LOTR, I can't see this lessons tengwar.. Just a buncha roman characters. I can still see them on the first page though  any ideas why that might be?

Oh yes it is a wonderful word

Thali, that looks great. I'm glad the screenshots worked fine- and it really wasn't any trouble for me.

Lesson 4: Languages and Columns

A) English and the CH-series
B) Spelling and Sounds
C) English and K-series
D) Other Languages
E) Exercise

A) So we've gotten the first two columns down, at least in part, and it's time to flesh out our table. We've got the t-series and p-series already- these are nice because they are very standard from language to language (there is an important qualification to this, but I'll talk about that later). However, exactly what the third and fourth series represent vary from language to language. For now, we'll stick to English- but if you ever try to read something in tengwar, and you aren't sure what language it's in, you will want to remember that these two series might not correspond to what you're about to learn. But at least for English this is pretty standard.

In English, series three is the ch-series:

CH: This is the sound /č/ found church, chicken, and witch (Note: the reason I'm using 'č' instead of 'ch' is because the second one is really ambiguous in linguistic transcriptions, and it's better just to avoid it completely. If that seems weird, just go with it). You should remember that each sequence represents sounds made in a different part of the mouth (labials, dentals)- unfortunately the name for this place is really annoying: postalveolar. Don't worry too much about the name- the main point is that these are sounds made with the tip of the tongue, but a bit higher up towards the roof of the mouth than the dentals.

Now this sound is different from /t/ and /p/ in a linguistically important way: it's not actually a stop like they are. It's instead what linguists called an 'affricate', or a compound sound. It kind of starts as a stop, a kind of t-like sound, which is followed or combined with a fricative. Since affricates are related to stops, Tolkien treats /č/ (and its voiced version) as stops in the tengwar. You probably don't need to worry too much about this unless you're interested, but I think it's a good idea to understand what's going on in the tengwar.

The symbol for this, generated by -A-, is:
a

The name of this symbol is calma. As you can see, it has the same form as /t/ and /p/, with the single bow and the lowered stem. But, as is also pretty apparent, the bow is off to the left instead of the right, and opens upwards instead of downwards. It's a good idea to try drawing out /t/ and /č/  side by side.


J: Despite being written with one letter instead of two in English, this sound is very closely related to /č/- and if fact it is simply its voiced version. As such it is also and affricate. I will write this sound as /j/. This is the sound found twice in English judge, as well as in jolly and ridge. For people familiar with other languages, this is different from the various sounds represented by 'j' in French, German, or Spanish. The key is -S-. You should already be able to predict how to write this symbol:
s

This has the name anga. Just like calma, but with the extra bow.


SH: This sound /sh/ is found in ship, sure, and posh. Now we're back to the normal pattern of the tengwar, since this sound is the expected voiceless fricative that our chart says should be here. It's made in exactly the same place as the two previous sounds. We type it with -D-, and write it so:

d

Tolkien calls this one harma, but also gives an alternate name of aha. You might notice that none of these names have much to do with the sound- that's because of the language issue I mentioned. The names have to do with how the tengwar works for Quenya, which is very different from English. More on that later.


ZH: The sound /zh/ is, in keeping with the pattern, the voiced version of /sh/. It's not a sound we have a regular symbol for in English, but nonetheless we have it in words such as azure, fusion, and regime. Press -F- for:

f

The name's anca.


B) Congratulations! You've just filled in another part of the chart. However, we've just run into one of the issues which makes using the tengwar rather less straightforward than those 'Elvish in 10 Minutes' sites imply. I just mentioned that /zh/ doesn't have a regular English symbol (not even a two letter symbol like 'ch' or 'th'), but is a sound written any number of ways in English. In fact, I gave you three different words which used three completely different letters: 'z', 'si', 'and 'g'! This brings up an important question: do you try to recreate the weirdnesses of English spelling, and use the tengwar for /z/ in the word 'azure'? Or do you use the tengwar for /zh/, even though sometimes it's replacing an English 'g', and other times a 'z'?

I'm not asking you to give a definitive answer to this- and Tolkien himself in fact does both things at various times. Doing the first thing, and transcribing 'letter-for-letter' is called an orthographic style of writing ('orthographic' is pretty much just a fancy word for spelling). The other version is the phonetic style, writing out the sounds of English and disregarding our admittadely very strange spelling system.

I should mention that even in the orthographic style, Tolkien doesn't quite just replicate English spelling. One obvious case is the difference between /th/ and /dh/, which he pretty much always makes, even though it is never marked in English writing. But don't worry too much about this- we'll talk about the two systems later, and I'll give some examples which should illustrate what's going on. But you do need to have some idea of what these two styles are about in order to understand the fourth and final sequence.


C) Yay! The last column! This is the k-series, which represents sounds made in the back of the mouth. These sounds are called velar sounds, many of which are really common in the world's languages.

K: This sound /k/ is a really common sound, found in kick, calculator, and racquet. Unlike the last series, this is a normal voiceless stop, just like /t/ and /p/. Type it with -Z- to get:
z

Again, this is a leftwards, upwards bow, but this time with a bar. Notice that since the bow opens up, the bar is over the top (compare with /p/). The name is quesse.


G: The voiced counterpart of /k/ is the sound /g/, which is another very common sound: goal, google, pig. Now I said that the orthographic/phonetic thing would be important, and here we are. In English, it is widely recognized that we use our letter 'G' for both a 'hard' and a 'soft' version. The 'hard' version is what we can now call a 'voiced velar stop', and is the only sound represented by this tengwa when writing phonetically.

The 'soft' sound is the 'voiced postalveolar affricate' of 'george'- we just learned the tengwa anga above (s) which is used for this sound when writing phonetically. However, when writing out orthographically Tolkien just follows the English irregularity and uses this tengwa anywhere that English uses a 'G'.

This means that we have two different things going with these tengwar: On the one hand we have a very elegant and patterned system with the bows and the stems telling you a lot about how to pronounce each tengwa. But then we have the messier thing where these things are more or less ignored in favour of wacky English spelling. For now, concentrate on the phonetic side of things- really, once you understand that part well it isn't all that hard to decode the orthographic style. But you need to be aware of both in order to use the tengwar properly.

Anyway, to return to our sound /g/, you can type it with the key -X-, and it looks like:
z

It has the name ungwe, which is a really cool word meaning "spider's web".


CH: You might be wondering why we are going back over 'ch', when we just covered it above. The answer is that this is a 'different' ch (hence why I used that c-with-hachek symbol for the sound above). This sound /x/ is actually not found normally in modern English (and has nothing at all to do with the /ks/ sound normally represented by 'x' in English- I'm using that because it's what linguists do, and I want to avoid the confusing 'ch').

You have to look to other languages for examples: The last name of the German composer J. S. Bach is a common one. If you've studied phonetics a bit, this is what is called the 'ach-laut'. If you aren't otherwise familiar with the sound, this is just the fricative version of /k/. This sound is found in Old English and the Elvish languages, so it's a good sound to know of- but if you are writing modern English phonetically, this sound won't come up.

Since this sound doesn't really feature in modern English, Tolkien often uses it in the orthographic mode for 'ch' when it is representing the sound /k/, like in the names 'Christopher' and 'Michael'. After all, why waste a symbol if it's not being used otherwise?

This symbol is keyed to -C- and looks like:

c

It's name is hwesta. I think the stem and bow pattern should need no explanation at this point.


GH: The symbol I'll use for this sound is /gh/, although phonetically it's more accurately written /ɣ/. It's a voiced velar fricative, and like the above version is not really found in English. This sound doesn't come up much, so this symbol is mainly used in the orthographic mode to represent the silent 'gh' in words like 'eight' or 'night'. It's typed with -V-:

v

The name of this tengwa is unque, and with that we round out the pattern we've looked at so far.


D) Again, yay! We've got 16 tengwar under our belt, and a nice neat system all worked out, as we can see in this table:

*Sounds that English doesn't really have, but that are part of the table's pattern anyway

However, again I have to say that the system as you've just learned it won't apply exactly to Sindarin or Quenya, or to German or French. One really common thing to be aware of is that many other languages use series three for the k-series. Series four is then used for whatever that language needs. If people are interested, I'll give lessons on the Sindarin and Quenya versions of the tengwar once we're done with English- but I thought I should mention this really basic difference now just in case someone tries to read a Sindarin inscription and gets really confused.

And of course filling out this table like this isn't the end of the story. We actually have two more rows in the table proper, which we'll cover in the next lesson. Then we have a few extra symbols which don't fit into the table anywhere, and then we'll finish up with the vowels. But if you've stuck with it this far, you're really in a good position to pick up the rest quite easily.


Exercises

1) As usual, try drawing out the symbols. Try to draw out this entire table as we've got it so far.

2) Give me the tengwar for:

/x/
/j/
/k/
/sh/

3) Give me the sounds represented by:

x

s

f

c

z

r

4) Give me the sound notation (//) for:

-a voiced postalveolar (above dental) affricate
-a voiced velar stop
-a voiceless velar fricative

5) As always, enjoy!

Andrey, overall your exercises are correct- but on #4 you give both the voiced and voiceless versions for each sound where I've specified which one I'm looking for. If you're not sure about some sound, try looking at the number of bows its tengwa has: one bow is voiceless, two is voiced. If you've got any questions on this, ask and I'll try to explain

1) DONE!

2)

3)/g/ /j/ /zh/ /x/ /k/ /v/

4) /j/ /g/ /x/

5) DONE!

Nashtar, you're exercise is right, and I've edited your picture down to size

Vire, that looks good

As some of you probably know, I'm a college student- this means that I'm right at my big end-of-the-semester push, which will last for another two weeks. I've been working on the next lesson piecemeal, and I'm hoping to have it up soon, but obviously I can't promise that I'll be as regular on this as I'd like.

I'm going to suggest that everyone periodically practice writing out some tengwar, or at least reviewing the tables. I'll also do a quick review once we've gotten a bit further, just to tie everything together.

Lesson 5: The Nose

(I was going to make this a longer lesson, but it actually seems better to treat the nasals on their own. So here's a nice short one, and I'll hopefully finish up the next one soon).

A) The Nasals: /n/, /m/, and /ŋ/
B) Exercises

OK, so far we've looked at the first four rows of the table, each of which represents a different 'manner of articulation': voiceless stops, voiced stops, voiceless fricatives, and voiced fricatives. Now it's time to add a fifth row (there are six in total). These are the nasal sounds: /n/,/m/, and /ŋ/. They're called nasals for the simple reason that when you make them sound is channeled through your nose (lovely image, no?).

As we'll see when we look at the specific sounds, nasals are formed with two bows and a short stem.

N: this is the easy sound /n/ which we should all know from know, ninny, gnome, Nienor, and Niniel. Since this sound is dental, it is in the same series as /t/, /d/, /th/, and /dh/. As such, it is typed using the next key in that row: -5-. It looks like:

5

Since it's in the t-series, like I said, it has a rightward bow opening down with no bar (compare it to /t/ and /d/). Being a nasal, it has a short stem which is only the height of the bow. In English (and most other languages), all nasals are voiced- hence the doubled bow. This tengwa is named númen in Quenya, an element which is probably recognizable pretty quickly from 'Númenor'.


M: This is another very common, very familiar sound, /m/, which we see in memory, Mumakil*, and me. Notice how it's made, with both lips together: it's in the p-series. Following the pattern on an English keyboard, you'd find that it is typed with -T- (the fifth key in the famous 'QWERTY' sequence). It looks like:
t

As expected, it resembles númen very closely but with the addition of a bar. It's name is malta, meaning 'gold'.

*(My spell check is fine with Mumakil! It usually hates Tolkien-words, but clealry it is slowly learning some culture).


NG: This is the sound /ŋ/ (that symbol is like an 'n' but with a little hook at the bottom) which is a slighly trickier sound to talk about than the first two. Obviously, English doesn't have a single letter to refer to this sound. We use 'ng', which is a little confusing since it be pronounced two similar ways: firstly as in sing, bringing, or long; and secondly as in finger, Mongolia, or anger. (Obviously there are also other ways to pronounce this in English, such as fringe, but those don't concern us here.) The difference between those two ways is that in the first, you just say the nasal sound, while in the second you say the nasal but follow it with the stop /g/. Since the tengwa is only concerned with the nasal by itself, I'm using /ŋ/ to avoid any temptation to say that /g/.

So what is this sound? It's a velar nasal. It's made in the same place as /k/, and is part of the fourth series, the k-series. We skipped over the ch-series because English doesn't actually have corresponding nasal- that's just a blank spot on the chart.

You make /ŋ/ by typing -B-:
b

Remember that because it is in series 4, it has leftward, upward bows, as well as a bar. We call this tengwa nwalme.


Adding in these sounds, here is our updated chart:



Exercises

1) Pick one of the four series and give me the tengwar and sound values side-by-side.

2) Give me the tengwar for: /x/, /ŋ/, /d/, /n/, /b/, /m/

3) Give me the sound values for: 4 5 x b g

4) And the usual last one!

Andrey, in you're example you're saying a palatalized nasal (which I believe is written 'ņ' in Latvian, and /ɲ/ in phonetic script). What your looking for is a velar nasal, made further back in the mouth (same place as 'k', but not as 'ķ'). It should be a variant pronunciation of 'n' in Latvian (what does the combination 'nk' sound like in Latvian? The English word 'ink', for instance' has the /ŋ/ sound).

As for your second question, I don't know of a sound that would correspond exactly. Part of the problem is that this series is a little weird in English, representing the ch-series. This place is, you might remember, 'post-alveolar', and I've never heard of any language that has a post-alveolar nasal, nor seen the sound in any phonetics discussion. I certainly don't know the symbol for it. I think the reason is that it is so close to a normal /n/ that the sounds would be very hard to distinguish- that doesn't mean that there isn't _some_ langauge somewhere with that sound, but it's not very common (Latvian doesn't have this sound).

I don't know Latvian, but I'm perfectly capable of researching its phonology. As I said, after a bit of researching I've been able to find literally no language so far that has that sound as a distinct sound (and I'm sure that Latvian would be in there, since it's of pretty great interest to Indo-European linguists)- it's essentially a very, very slight variation on an alveolar /n/.

I wasn't so sure if Latvian had that particular letter combination or not. According to the description of Latvian phonology I found, it does have the velar nasal as a variant pronunciation of the letter 'n'- unfortunately, it didn't say when 'n' is normal and when it's velar. So I mentioned the 'nk' combination- since that's really common a lot of languages I thought maybe Latvian would have it too. As it is, all I can really say is look at my English examples. The following words all have this sound:

singing
inking
long
rings

And a couple from German, in case they're helpful:

Engel
Schlange
danke

The other way to do it is just by using the position of the sound. Say a /k/ or a /g/ (or any other sound in the velar column) and then try making a nasal sound in the same place. Just like /m/ is in the same place as /b/.

Does any of that help?

WOW... thanks for information that you provided and well.... if there are no such sound then it is nothing we can do about that. I just was very excited about that tengwa that has no sound. Why? Because if Tolkien invented such tengwa then there have to be the appropriate sound. Everything is invented with a certain reason. But anyway, LOTR, thanks for educating me!!! That helped me a bit.   

lotr,

just wanna ask if its ok to translate an english word/phrase to tengwar directly or need to translate it first to other language  e.g elvish? Is it letter by letter when translating such or by words?
Thanks, im just confuse..

So..... when will be the next lesson, LOTR? Can't wait to see it. 

Great!!!  It was a long time since you had to left this thread for some time due to real life things (don't blame you, I also had the same situation with exams). By the way, how are you?

Sorry about that last post I thought i was posting that to a past part of the forum (Lesson 1 part 2, i think!), I realize things have progressed much further since then! Must catch up!! ha 

Sorry about the double post and CLUTTER!

K-Protector, your answer for Exercises 1 and 2 look great!

Your answer on voiced/voiceless is about right, although the specific action in question is the vibration of your voicebox. You can actually feel this if you hold your fingers to your throat and try saying /t/ and then /d/, or /th/ and then /dh/.

And I fully expected that some people would come through the tutorial later--just keep on posting your exercises like you have been and it'll be fine.

I hope you're having fun

Andrey, exercises 2, 3, and 4 are spot on--exercise 1 has the two 'r' symbols flipped exactly. I see how you got confused with the way the lesson was set up, and you clearly understand when to use each 'r'. It just goes the other way. I'll see if I can't edit the lesson to make it clearer. Well done