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Talagan a Corchalad
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Post Glǽmscrafu – Tolkien’s linguistic cellar
on: May 17, 2015 07:09
We are pleased to present here the new version of our website Glǽmscrafu – Tolkien’s linguistic cellar, that proposes to discover by eye and ear the languages invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. Each one is illustrated by sample texts transcribed, translated, presented and declaimed. The cellar also features some languages that inspired him and short extracts of his own audio records. The website is fully bilingual in French and English and it hosted as a wing of the French-language Tolkien website JRRVF. It can be reached at http://www. jrrvf.com/glaemscrafu.

The first version had been issued in 2006 already and needed quite a brushing up. After more than half a year of work, we can now release the 2.0 version.

What’s new ? First and not least, the architecture of the website has been entirely revised and its look subtly improved (while keeping the same style). The first version had been done quickly in moment of enthusiasm to let Tolkien’s languages be heard, and was difficult to develop further: everything had to be reconstructed every time. Now we have a much more readable and handy XML version, that should make things much easier in the future.

The textual comments have all been read again and updated when needed according to the publications of the last decade. References are now automatically done to quoted resources. We added around fifteen new texts (identified with a yellow label).

Every text has also been transcribed into one of Tolkien’s scripts, or into a relevant historical writing style for the languages of our world. This required extensive work to adapt extent typefaces and set up a new transcriber. Now we also let the reader decide to display the transcription, the romanized text, the translation or several at the same time.

The bibliography and links have been updated, extended and moved into a new « mathom room », that also contains a short introduction to Tolkien's languages and a note on the transcription and typefaces.

Enjoy the visit! Do not hesite to contact us for feedback: this may be helpful for a further issue. Only Eru knows now when this will happen, but we are confident it will eventually.

Benjamin Babut & Bertrand Bellet

[Edited on 05/18/2015 by Talagan a Corchalad]
Talagan a Corchalad
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on: March 25, 2016 05:37

Hark, hark, you fellow Tolkien friends!

As you must know, March 25th is the day of the fall of Sauron, the start of the Fourth Age of Middle-earth and the New Year in the New Reckoning of Gondor. At the Tolkien Society's initiative, every year since 2003 it has also been the <a href="http://www.tolkiensociety.org/events/tolkien-reading-day-2016/">Tolkien Reading Day</a>. This year, <i>Glǽmscrafu</i> is marking the occasion and making it a Tolkien Reading AND Writing Day. We chose this very special day to deliver you a thing that has been quite a while in the making: <b><i>Glǽmscribe</i></b>, a transcription engine for Tolkien's languages and scripts. Benjamin Babut has been developing it for two years for the website's purposes; we are publishing it today in a ready-enough form after much reorganization and wrapping up.

It is the first transcription engine for Tolkien languages attempting to enable the processing of all their scripts: tengwar, sarati, cirth (and potentially lesser-known scripts), as well as allowing for a wider use for other scripts of our primary world. <i>Glǽmscribe</i> is released as an friendly <a href="http://www.jrrvf.com/~glaemscrafu/english/glaemscribe.html">online transcriber</a> devised for Tolkien fans and scholars as well as newbies, that allows you to dabble in more than a dozen of modes for many languages and scripts. But it is also released as an open source engine under a GPL license, together with a full environment of modes for the bolder ones that would like to experiment themselves, thanks to a specially created computer language that has been made as easy and direct as possible while allowing for a lot of possibilities.

Glǽmscribe would never have come to be without the ceaseless and continuously renewed work of the great family of Internet Tolkienists, both on technologies (with several generations of transcribers and typefaces) and on knowledge shared and gathered on websites and forums. Neither would it exist without the devoted labour of all those that make the publication of Tolkien's linguistic works possible. A very big thank you to them - and to you!

And as usual, there would not have been an update of Glǽmscrafu without a few new texts. This time, two new languages are added the website's already plentiful list. Firstly, <b>Westron</b>, the Common Speech of Middle Earth with a Hobbitish flavour, to dive a bit deeper into the Shire and enjoy its welcoming mood. Secondly, <b>Middle English</b>, to bridge Old English with the language in which The Lord of the Rings was originally written (sorry... translated, of course !); with two prayers and good chunks from two important works for Tolkien, <i>Sir Orfeo</i> and <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>. Finally, let us not forget two other texts in already illustrated languages that we silently released some months ago : <i>Apostil to Thucydides</i> scribbled in Gothic by a young Tolkien in a history book of his, and <i>Clychau Cantre'r Gwaelod</i>, a Welsh poem composed by J. J. Williams (1869-1954), that we felt highly reminiscent of some Tolkienian moods.

We wish you a good reading and a lot of fun on this 25th of March!

Benjamin Babut & Bertrand Bellet
dirk_math
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on: March 25, 2016 03:47
This is a really useful tool! Thank you both for developing it.
Yassë engë lómë, anarties calali.
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