r/Tengwar

I want to get matching tattoos with my sister and want them to be in tolkien elvish and say "Sisters". Could anyone add an accurate photo of what that translation would look like? I've seen multiple different translation websites, and they look slightly different. Please help!!!

Hi all,

My dad loved all of Tolkien's works, and they were an important part of his life, childhood, and my childhood as a consequence. I have been thinking for years about getting his favorite Bible verse as a tattoo in Quenya, as a way to remember him and the message the verse carries.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven."

I was lucky to find a translation into romanized neo-Quenya on ardalambion (I think kudos go to Helge Fauskanger?), which provided my starting point:

Ilquan ea lúme, ar lú ilya natton nu Anar

For everything there is an hour, and a time for every affair under the sun

Which I appreciate the spirit of.

I then, following the resources linked on this subreddit, reviewed the language and its grammar to produce a, hopefully, mechanically sound translation:

https://preview.redd.it/1wzjmrm1jy1h1.png?width=1514&format=png&auto=webp&s=70c6355c012a0c65f8eced5584c2f2c7629ccc57

This is the translation using Tecendil's Quenya mode, and it (thankfully!) matches my handwritten transcription line-for-line.

So, I wanted to consult this community, before I ever draft an email to a tattoo artist, if there is anything amiss with this transcription. My primary concern is anything that is "technically" correct, but "would never be written that way".

Thanks in advance! 😄

Situation: I want to get a "choose happiness" tattoo, but only in Chinese 选择幸福,2 hieroglyph on one hand and 2 on the other (on the wrists).But I'm not sure that maybe in China this phrase has some incomprehensible meaning for me and the Chinese will laugh at me when they read this. In general, I need help from those who know the subject, is this a normal tattoo or not and is this something strange?

I'm trying to get my wedding band inscribed with the nicknames of me and my fiance, I want the same font as the one ring from the films, but Tecendil doesn't have italic?

Also is putting the English to Tengwar enough? Or should I look up similar words in Sindarin and then transcrive them?

Edit: I meant Artano not Annatar

When I was young, before we had the Internet and an easy ability to connect with other Tolkien nerds, I developed my own mode for writing English. It used tehtar placed over the preceding consonant, and was a mix between representing English spelling & phonetics.

Now I'd like to learn how to write in what I think is usually called "common mode", because it's much more widely used and understood. I can find a number of web sites that describe it or try to explain it, but my problem is that none of them have nearly enough examples for me to know how exactly to apply their rules and logic to various situations. For example:

• Do you indicate when a vowel is representing an English great-vowel-shifted "long" sound, and if so, how? For example, how would I write the word "hope"? Do I just put both the o above and the dot below the parma, and people understand it's a vowel-shifted-long o because there's a silent e?

• How would I write the word "you"? anna followed by two carriers, with o and u tehtar, to represent the English spelling? Or just one carrier with a u tehta, because it's just one vowel sounds? Or one of the diphthong makrs?

• If common mode is supposed to represent English spelling, what do I use for the letter "c"? Do I ignore that it's spelled with "c" and use either silme or quesse depending on the sound? Or wouldn't that be phonemic spelling and not what common mode is supposed to do? (In my English mode, I used silme for "s", silme nuquerna for "c", esse for "ss", and esse nuquerna for "z")

In addition to answers to these specific questions, I'd love some better source of plenty of examples that could answer many other questions like these examples. Something definitively in the "common mode" that is widely used these days, that illustrates how to do it.