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Writing with Elvish Fonts
Posted by
michael
on Mon Aug 04, 2003 11:08 PM
from the spanish-is-easier-and-more-useful dept.
from the spanish-is-easier-and-more-useful dept.
dj_whitebread writes "Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script? Now's your chance to have your Elvish text look just like Tolkien's. This page gives you all the instructions. The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!"
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Elvish Meetups (Score:5, Informative)
Some people take their Elvishness pretty sillyessny [geocities.com]...erm meant to say seriously...
Re:Elvish Meetups (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Elvish Meetups (Score:4, Funny)
"You know when I was in Memphis I came this close to seeing Elvis, but my shovel broke."
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Re:Elvish Meetups (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Elvish Meetups (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Elvish Meetups (Score:3, Funny)
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
--
Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy [martin-studio.com]
Re:Mirror (Score:5, Funny)
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Resumes (Score:5, Funny)
Hell Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)
QWERTY,
DVORAK,
TENGWAR?
Re:Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)
One Key to Rule them all, One key to find them, One Key to bring them all and in the gui bind them.
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Re:Yes, but (Score:3, Funny)
Conscript/Unicode (Score:5, Informative)
For a font that does PUA and Plane 15 implementation of this standard use code 2001 from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm
Logban (A logical language for human speech), Quenya, Sindarian, English, etc. can all be written in Tengwar. I believe there are people using it for just about every language, including esperanto.
So, while the keymap is nice, use the Unicode stuff and help push it through to final inclusion.
Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Insightful)
William
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woohoo (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks slashdot
Re:woohoo (Score:5, Funny)
Otherwise you might as well just wear an "I'm a big geek" T-shirt. Like, say, this one. [thinkgeek.com]
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More importantly (Score:3, Funny)
Hardly a new idea (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one
Writing with is... (Score:5, Funny)
The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Funny)
Which font will earn the right to go up against Klingon for the hearts (and webpages) of geeks worldwide?
On a personal note, I'll always be an Aurebesh man myself.
Re:The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Informative)
No contest. Tolkien was a language expert. Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember). From a brief look Aurebesh looks like just a substitution code for English (or am I wrong?). There's a lot more to a language than an alphabet. Also, the Elvish scripts are beautiful; and if you like more angular characters, look at his Dwarvish runes.
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Re:The battle of the Fonts... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it wasn't based on Finnish at all, but rather inspired by it. It has it's own structure, just like any other language. Quenya was (in some ways) meant to capture the beauty that Tolkien saw in the Finnish language. In the early versions of Quenya he did use some loanwords from Finnish, but those were of course all replaced. Also there are many fundamental differences besides simple words (since it is, of course, it's own language). The modern (or "completed" if you prefer, although he never actually finished them) version have no connections with any real languages. If you get to really know the internal linguistic history of Tolkien's languages you can see how their world was meant to connect to ours (hint: in the LotR movies the Rohirrim speak a real language).
For some great info on the relationship between the Elvish languages and real world languages (primarily Finnish), check out this great article: http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm [www.sci.fi]
Yes, I'm a big fat nerd. I even have my own page on Tolkien: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm [deciv.com]
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dear god please let this not be real (Score:5, Funny)
On June 16, 2001 Elenhil Laiquendo (Boris Shapiro) and Elgaladna Findilauriel (Olga Kukhtenkova) got married [elvish.org] in a catholic church in Russia. Boris is an amateur linguist and a beginner lambengolmo. He is fond of Tolkien and his languages and he specializes (to a certain extent) in Quenya and in Middle-earth calendars; he has complex ideas about Tolkien's world and Christianity and the Elder Days of our oikoumene; his beloved, Olga is an artist, a dramatic actress, a theatre costumier, she loves drawing fairies and elves and illustrating Tolkien, she also specializes in the history of arts and culture and loves mythology and collects cosmogonical mythos. They both are elves: his name is Elenhil Laiquendo and her one is Elgaladna Findilauriel.
so elves do get laid,
letter
If only Ace Ventura could meet these folks. (Score:3, Funny)
Lah-hoo. Zah-hers.
Re:If only Ace Ventura could meet these folks. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure one of them will mod me down for this, because the truth hurts. I got karma to burn baby!
News for nerds, stuff that matters? Uhm, ok.
-cp-
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elvish and Plan 9 (Score:4, Interesting)
Screenshot here [ucalgary.ca]!
The complete ring poem (Score:5, Interesting)
Gakh Nazgi Ilid/Albai/Golug - durub-uuri lata-nuut.
Udu takob-ishiz gund-ob Gazat-shakh-uuri. Krith Shara-uuri matuurz matat duumpuga.
Ash tug Shakhbuurz-uur Uliima-tab-ishi za, Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.
Ash nazg durbatuluuk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluuk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,
Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.
See the TolkLang mailinglist archive [ed.ac.uk] for the original source. I've got it formatted using the fonts described in the article here [xaim.com] (MS Word docfile, sorry!).
See also this bracelet [xaim.com] I engraved with the complete poem with a dremel. The copper under the gold plating gives an impression of fire. On the gift card I wrote "This doesn't work, which is probably a good thing."
Re:The complete ring poem (Score:4, Funny)
One ring that's plated,
One ring that doesn't work
And ensures the giver's hated...
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Answer questions. (Score:5, Funny)
No.
This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but at what cost? Am I the only one unhappy with the current Unicode? The problem is that there's just not one Unicode -- there's THREE (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32). Reading a simple character in UTF-8 now is almost like reading a miniature file with an ambiguous format, prone to aliasing and security problems if normalization (just choose one of FOUR valid kinds) and mapping to glyphs is implemented incorrectly. For example, a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think. What's a good buffer size for a UTF-8 encoded filename? That's why buffer overruns are so common these days. Why are we going to all this trouble just to support Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B, which are of interest to so few people who aren't half serious anyways?
This is where the word "DISCIPLINE" comes to mind. The Unicode organization does not have the DISCIPLINE to combat feature creep. UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS. Just stop it already.
And the Unicode standard is now at Version 4.0. When will they freeze it? 10 years from now, is there going to be a Unicode Version 10? I can't imagine the mess the "standard" is going to be.
This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea. I'm not opposed to attempts at Internationalization, and again, UTF-16 was good enough.
Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)
"Feature creep?" You mean like fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages like Elvish? It's Unicode that's trying to bring some uniformity and saneness to this human condition of Babel.
Your problem is that you're confusing the Universal Character Set (UCS), which is the core of Unicode, with a character encoding, such as UTF-xx and so forth. UTF-16 is NOT Unicode! When will that myth ever die? Perhaps you should go visit the Unicode Consortium [unicode.org] home page and read through some of their FAQs.
And there's way more than just three encodings, but there's only one Unicode (actually there's ISO If these Elvish characters are more than just a curious fad then what's wrong with assigning them Unicode code points? The only problem would be doing so prematurely before all the characters have been reasonably deteremined and stable. Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text. Granted though, the Unicode Consortium is primarily concerned with real human languages rather than inventions of fiction.
As far as encodings, keep in mind that Unicode is essentially a 20-bit character set allowing slightly more than one million separate characters to be defined (I say 20-bits loosely since the UCS codepoints really don't map to bits at all). So even your beloved UTF-16 (or the older UCS-2) is unnecessarily messy; having to use the low and high surrogate pairs to properly encode the entire UCS repertoire. Not to mention things like byte order issues and so forth.
This is why I actually love UTF-8, it is actually very simple and easy to work with. I think a lot of people get scared-off because it is variable-width, but for anybody who has actually coded using it, it is a very nice and easy to use encoding. Of course people primarily communicating in non-Latin languages may have other opinions. That's fine too.
As far as Project Gutenberg selecting US-ASCII, well, it sure looks identical to UTF-8 to me! In fact ASCII text is identical to UTF-8 text (but not the other way around). Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations and I'd be very surprised if UTF-8 is not the adopted character encoding. In fact they could just make the policy change right now, and they'd have to retype exactly zero documents in their collection.
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Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:4, Interesting)
When? We're still largely English, but we have maybe a couple hundred non-English books, for which we use an appropriate codepages. There's an unfortunate number of stuff in unlabeled DOS codepages in the archives, but modern stuff is labeled, and usually posted in ISO-8859-x (for an apropriate value of x). UTF-8 is usually only used for old Icelandic and stuff with odd accents (a lot of books dealing with India and the Middle East use macrons over vowels, for example.) It's mainly the choice of our producers, since that's what they find easy to work with.
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Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Most of the messy stuff in Unicode comes from real life complexity in writing systems and compatibility with preexisting codepages. If you want to, you can ignore Linear-B and still be entirely standards compliant.
a URL could actually be pointing to a completely different URL from the one you think.
Blame the Romans; they're the ones who had to make up their own writing system instead of just using Greek. ISO-8859-5 (Russian) and -7 (Greek) both have this problem, as do all modern Greek and Russian codepages.
That's [UTF-8] why buffer overruns are so common these days.
Right; that explains why the original Unix systems, which predate Unicode, were rife with buffer overflows, and modern system code (e.g. coreutils), which handle Unicode, are nearly overflow free.
Why are we going to all this trouble just to support Tolkien's Tengwar and Linear B, which are of interest to so few people who aren't half serious anyways?
Who said this had anything to do with Tengwar and Linear B? Tengwar isn't in Unicode, and every premodern script put together isn't more then 1000 characters. Han characters is responsible for having multiple planes, and preexistening standards and preexisting standards are responsible for normalization and most duplicate characters.
UTF-16 was good enough for HUMAN BEINGS.
But it wasn't good enough for Unix. HUMAN BEINGS don't using Unicode much - they prefer writting the characters to using numbers.
When will they freeze it?
Why would they? So far as humans are creating more characters, there will be a need to add new characters to Unicode. They don't freeze other standards - Fortran is now Fortran 2000.
This is why Project Gutenburg's decision to stick with ASCII is a good idea.
This has nothing to do with PG's decision to use ASCII. PG is doing more and more in Unicode, because that's the only way to do things.
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Will this help my Nethack ascension? (Score:5, Funny)
Lots of extra Tolkien language info (Score:5, Interesting)
Enjoy, all ye pursuers of Elvish.
From the site. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes [omniglot.com], that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?
If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 [wikipedia.org] (here [unicode.org] as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).
(/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)
Re:From the site. (Score:3, Informative)
The runes used on the map in "The Hobbit" did use the real runic alphabet (or a close variant thereof). The Cirth described in the appendices of LOTR was comletely different, however. So the official answer is probably "no".
Writing in elvish (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I met a girl (that's right, someone of the female persuasion) who writes all her notes in Tengwar. I liked the way the letters worked so I learned it and I was hooked.
So I bought a calligraphy pen and took it to all my classes. My notes for my entire 4th year of university classes are written in Tengwar. (With the exception of numbers and math/programming symbols...doing them would probably have caused me to fail from not being able to read my notes very quickly.) I found it to be a creative/artistic outlet in all my dry technical courses.
I'm not a Tolkein geek (never read the books), but now the girl is 2000 miles away, and when people find out I write in elvish, some say "you must have a lot of time on your hands" and think I'm some sort of uber dork (maybe they're reading this). C'est la vie I guess.
It was 24 years ago today (or thereabouts) (Score:4, Interesting)
More difficult was Tsolyani [geocities.com], which is written right-to-left and has a different character set for leading and trailing letters. Still, an 8-pin graphics printer gave good results with both.First done at room 642, International House [usyd.edu.au], Sydney University in 1978, as far as I'm aware. But I'm sure others did the same thing at about the same time. Ah, the days when I could double my memory from 16K to 32K for only a few hundred bucks...and debug programs by having a radio nearby and listening to the RFI from various parts of the motherboard. The same year, the University of Wollongong narrowly beat us in porting UNIX [terrigal.net.au]. Others in the US were working on that too [mids.org].
And now I'm an old fart, working with Ada-95 on Satellite Avionics, and X/T UML on agile development... both of which are pretty neat, and cutting edge. (I'll revise that remark about Ada being "cutting edge" when Java catches up and gets Generics and the other stuff invented back in 1983.) It proves that you can still be a Geek at 45.
LaTeX has had a Tengwar font for many moons (Score:5, Informative)
As fonts, they're only so so (Score:5, Interesting)
They are cleary swiped from other fonts, but I will comment on the more "standard" of the lot, TengwarQuenya.
First off, it's taken from Times New Roman, which is not a big deal to me. It's boring, but not bad - I'd have prefered something with a little more tang, like Cloister or even Berling, but Oh Well. We're talking LOTR geeks, not Hermann Zapf. Speaking of Zapf, Gudrun's font, Diotima, would be nice for the Elvish treatment...
Secondly, the curves in the letters that are not derived from Times are very uneven, and ungraceful. Because of this, there are a pleathora of points describing what is essentially a simple clean curve.
A good example of this would be the char in l.c. "i" and the l.c. "k".. they're wavy snaky things with about 5x as many points as they need, and that's even accounting for the quadratic curve description differences in TrueType.
The letter spacing is mediocre. There are a few combos that could use some kerning, but the real problem lies in how letters that have identical forms are given different side bearings. Example: in English the letters (in helvetica / arial) l, h, and b sould have extremely similar if not largely identical left sidebearing values. In Adobe Helvetica, the left sidebearings for k, b, h, and l are: 67, 58, 65, and 67.
For letters q, w, y, and t in Tengwar Times, which all have very similar left side shapes, and similar counter spaces, have values of : 12, 25, 12 and 0. Which is crap.
So, overall, I give these fonts a C+.
They'll do the trick for the unclued, but they're not art.
Also, they are not available in Mac format, and for a graphics oriented font, that's a really sad thing to overlook. But it was devised by Geeks for other Geeks using MS Word, so, we're talking dupes of the conspiracy here.
RS
Re:Ohhhhh Elvish (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Seen this. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I guess you answered the question of why she is your EX-girlfriend...
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Re:very cool (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:very cool (Score:3, Funny)
(Goddamn, I hate Java and Java evangelism, but I couldn't resist). +5 funny to the parent as well.
Re:Mac font (Score:5, Insightful)
Which fonts aren't available? There are several tools for cross-platform conversion. For Truetype, use TTconverter [versiontracker.com]. But I'd be amazed if they weren't already in Mac format.
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They all work fine on my Mac.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Elvish Pickup Lines? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Helllllllo copyright violation (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright FAQ, question 3.3 [faqs.org]
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