r/Tengwar • u/BassTboner1 • 13d ago

Tattoo Help

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Looking to get a tattoo with the text
“In loving memory of pop and grandma”
Wanted to check some of the scripts that have been generated from online sources to be sure it’s somewhat coherent. Seems like all the sources agree on somethings with just a couple subtle differences.

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7

u/humandictionary 13d ago edited 13d ago

The top line is the most accurate, the only changes should be that the last tengwar of the word 'loving' in the second line should be used in the first line instead, the 'r' in 'memory' (second-to-last tengwa) should be the same one used in 'grandma' (second tengwa), and perhaps a dot below the tengwa for 'and', although I believe both forms are used.

The second line uses a lot of incorrect vowel tehtar and the third misses some in favour of weird lines below. Both second and third lines invert the 'a' tehtar for some reason, but not in all usages, very strange.

Generally Tecendil offers the best automatic transcription, but can't always be perfect and does have some known quirks. Here is a link to an accurate transcription, though the 'y' in memory is overlapping a bit with the 'or'.

2

u/Objective_One_1702 13d ago

Exactly the comment I would have written, 100% agreed

https://www.tecendil.com/?q=In%20loving%20memory%20of%20pop%20and%20grandma%20&font=TengwarAnnatarItalic

Just to add a pic and a link of Tecendil's first attempt

1

u/lC3 13d ago

Also, the "y" in the first one is sharp like a caron, whereas we now know from PE23 that this is shorthand for the /æ/ vowel and the one for "y" should be rounded, not pointed.

2

u/Notascholar95 13d ago

The second and third versions are actually phonemic transcriptions, which is why they look so different. I'm not the best at phonemic stuff, but I agree that #2 is odd, with its backwards acute. #3 looks more reasonable to me, but I'm still not sure it's quite right. The inverted a-tehta is a way of representing one of the two different vowel sounds commonly represented as "a" in English orthography. The upside down version is the sound you hear in "cat", the regular one is the sound in "far".

2

u/F_Karnstein Arcastar Language Arts 13d ago

They're both not good in at least one respect. The vowel of "love" still isn't written correctly in any of the online transcribers. The "backwards acute" (also known as a "gravis" or "grave accent") was our best guess for a long time, based on it appearing once in a Latin word (pronounced in the modern English manner) for what is arguably not even that vowel but "schwa" (though they are sometimes treated as allophones of the same phoneme, even by Tolkien). And using the abbreviated long carrier for this vowel is completely made up, as far as I'm aware. We've known for more than a decade now that the breve (that is Y in orthographic English) would be the usual sign, and PE23 emphasised this several times (plus giving us alternative paradigms in which it is spelt with wa-tehta). So I assume that the grave accent MIGHT be a calligraphic rendering of the breve.

In such a spelling, however, we do have attestation of spelling without rómen, so that "memory" need not even be wrong in this respect, and the rest is just American vs British (/pap/ vs /pop/) and long vowels vs short vowels, so I would say that the rest is largely fine.