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ChikaraWolf
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Post Concerning the usage of certain Tengwar
on: March 28, 2014 08:49
I have two questions. As for the first, I noticed in the guide that several of the characters don't appear to correspond to any letter of the Roman alphabet: Súle, Aha, Noldo, and Hw. Sindarinwa. What's the deal with them? Are they used at all in Quenya? If not, why are they in the guide in the first place? Are they used in Sindarin, but not used in Quenya? Are they used for a purpose that is unknown? I don't understand, and I would appreciate some clarification.

As for my other question, the guide states that for the letter "r" we should use Rómen if it's followed by a vowel, and Óre when it's not. What about cases such as "rya," "rye," etc.? The letter "y" is a consonant in Quenya, but when it follows "r," "l," or "n" it is only denoted by two dots underneath the character that it follows. In this case, in which the letter "y" does not get its own character, should we treat the "r" as followed by the consonant "y" or as followed by the vowel that comes after "y?" I've been treating it as the latter, but I wanted to confirm whether or not I'm doing this right.

Sorry for the long post, thanks for your help!~
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dirk_math
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on: March 29, 2014 01:45
Súlë is an 's' that originated in a 'th' in early Elvish. In Sindarin it is still pronounced as a 'th', but in Quenya it evolved to sound as 's'. In the Ardalambion word list you can recognize words with súlë as they have a thorn þ. It is an ancient English letter denoting the 'th'-sound. E.g. sambë (þ) noun "room, chamber".

Aha is used to denote an 'h' that appears before a 't' as in the word tehta 'vowel'. It is pronounced as the 'ch' in the German word Bach, in English this sound appears in the Scottish word loch (in Russian names etc. Wikipedia denotes it by 'kh').

Noldo was originally the 'ñ' sound as still exists in Spanish. But in Modern Quenya it is prounced as an ordinary 'n'. In the word list you can recognize words with noldo as follows: nauro ("ñ" ) noun "werewolf".

Hwesta Sindarinwa of course only appears in Sindarin as its name clearly indicates.

When 'r' is followed by a 'y' we always use rómen with two dots inside its tail.

There is a separate tengwa for 'y' called anna, but in Quenya it also gets the two dots underneath when it is used to denote a 'y'. Anna is needed when there is no preceding consonant available to write the dots under, e.g. at the beginning of a word or when the preceding sound is a vowel, e.g. yulmaya "his cup" has two anna tengwar.


[Edited on 03/29/2014 by dirk_math]
Yassë engë lómë, anarties calali.
Elthir
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on: March 30, 2014 09:36
Just to add: the þ in early Quenya was not quite like the sound of English th as in 'think' [pronounced with the tip of the tongue between the teeth]. The Elvish þ is rather formed with the tongue-tip behind the back of the upper front teeth, being closer to s before it merged with s later in the Noldorin dialect.

As far as I understand things, anyway.
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