Tengwar

English

A sample of Tengwar; the inscription of the One Ring in Black Speech

Etymology

Developed by J. R. R. Tolkien. From tengwar, the term Tolkien invented to represent the glyphs found in Tengwar. From tengwa, the singular of "tengwar", a single glyph.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈtɛŋ.ɡwɑː/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈtɛŋ.ɡwɑɹ/

Proper noun

Tengwar

1. A constructed script created by J. R. R. Tolkien for his invented Elvish constructed languages of Sindarin (ISO 639 code sjn) and Quenya (ISO 639 code qya).
   • 1969, Leland Sapiro, editor, Riverside Quarterly, volume 4, page 75:

     He's now trying to arrange for a type font set in the Tengwar alphabet

   • 2012, Jon Orwant, Programming Perl, →ISBN, page 311:

     For example, Unicode hasn't yet incorporated Tengwar (an elvish script) into its official repertoire (although it's on the roadmap—there are, after all, many maps of Middle Earth).

   • 2013, Simon Horobin, Does Spelling Matter?, →ISBN, page 36:

     An innovative feature of the Tengwar is that the shapes of the individual letters were designed to record phonetic features

   • 2016 January 20, Anna Sorokina, “Want to translate from English to Elvish? Yandex can help”, in Russia Beyond‎^[1]:

     The translator uses the Tengwar script to display Sindarin.

   • 2019 September 13, Bettina Beinhoff, “Want to build a language from scratch? Start with the question who will speak it, and why”, in Scroll.in‎^[2]:

     The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in JRR Tolkien’s Tengwar script (transcribed from English).

   • 2020 November 9, Eric Mack, “Next US military spy satellite launch has inexplicable Lord of the Rings theme”, in cNet‎^[3]:

     The poster for the mission, which is officially called NROL-101, sports a pretty clear Lord of the Rings theme, featuring a pair of interlocking golden rings and the phrase "goodness persists" written in both English and Elvish Tengwar script, the fictional language dreamed up entirely by author J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

Usage notes

The Tengwar script is codified as the ISO 15924 code Teng.

Hypernyms

• alphabet
• artificial script
• constructed script
• Elvish
• glyph
• script

 

Coordinate terms

• Black Speech
• Quenya
• Sindarin

 

Related terms

• tengwa (a glyph in Tengwar)
• tengwar (the glyphs found in Tengwar)

 

Translations

Translations

• Esperanto: Tengvaro
• Farsi: تنگوار
• French: Tengwar
• German: Tengwar
• Italian: Tengwar
• Japanese: テングワール
• Korean: 텡과르 (tenggwareu)
• Polish: Tengwar
• Russian: Тенгвар (Tengvar)
• Serbo-Croatian: Тенгвар, Tengwar
• Slovenian: Tengvar
• Spanish: Tengwar

See also

• Appendix: Tengwar

Anagrams

• twanger