Poking through old threads for entertainment, I took a look at the Tengwar briefly discussed here, and they're
really weird.
To save people visiting the Daily Mail:
The actual translation of the Tengwar here is pretty dull:
Esgaroth
Esgaroth
Above Esgaroth upon the long lake
Smaug the magnificent
King of the dragons of the north
Broadly speaking, it's written in
the Westron convention, as used in the Book of Mazarbul pictures. But that 'broadly' covers a multitude of quirks:
-The first 'Esgaroth' is almost readable as English; that cross-bar on the E isn't from any form of Elvish! Tolkien also used a Z/SS for S, and put a lovely curl into the final TH letter, all to make it look more English. He's also chosen to use 'o' to mean, uh, O, which doesn't seem to be his normal use - as far as I can tell, as a vowel it is almost universally U.
-The second 'Esgaroth' is a more standard rendering on the same word. That 'c' symbol for E is still highly unusual, but he's switched to an S rather than a Z, and gotten rid of the curl on the TH. What are we seeing here? Was this one the first written, with the 'first Esgaroth' an attempt to make it look like English (maybe for use as a label)? Or was the 'first Esgaroth' first, as its position might suggest - which implies this comes from Tolkien's actual development of the Tengwar?
-'Above Esgaroth upon the Long Lake' is my English gloss, but the words here are written phonetically. The actual transcription looks like 'uhbuv Esgaroth [identical to 'second Esgaroth'] uhpon the Long Lák'. 'Uh' is the letter written as upside-down e in the IPA; I think it's a schwa. 'The' is a single character, which is standard for the Westron convention - but the vowel use is still all 'wrong'! It's consistent with the 'Esgaroth's, but not with any later text.
-'Smaug the Magnifisent / King of the dragons of the North'; this is the text found elsewhere in English, and supports the idea that Tolkien was planning to write Elvish border text onto some of his 'Hobbit' pictures. Generally this follows the same style as the rest of the page; it looks like the AU symbol (an A with a curl above) is elsewhere rendered AW, but we can assume that's phonetically identical. The most interesting letters are actually the two S: Tolkien usually draws these as curls, but originally wrote both as a 'u' shape with a diagonal line affixed, and then
changed the first one to the more familiar curl.
In conclusion: if you read Tengwar, this is a really weird experience.
hS