1, language.
Usually we don't pay much attention to English and Chinese, and think they are the same concept. But in fact, this is completely different.
English is a language, not what we say, not sound.
Words are words, words written by us, and graphics.
As long as people are not born with birth defects and are not raised by wild animals, they can speak.
But speaking doesn't mean writing. As far as primitive people are concerned, having language does not mean having words-there are many primitive people, but there are no original words at all. Even in modern society, there are many "illiterates" in the world, but illiterates can still speak.
Characters have developed into recording languages, so we often mix "language" with "characters". Chinese is also called "Chinese", English is also called "English" and elvish is also called "elvish", but you must understand that English and Chinese are absolutely different.
Characters can be divided into two categories: ideographic characters and phonography (phonography).
Our Chinese characters are ideographic, that is to say, a Chinese character can directly see its meaning or at least its meaning category just by looking at its shape (without knowing its pronunciation at all). So ideographs are easy to read.
At present, most of the characters in the world, except Chinese characters, are still in use, and almost all of them are phonography. Phonetic symbols only record the pronunciation of words, so we should "read" the sound and associate it with words in the language, so as to understand the meaning of words.
One of the characteristics of phonetic symbols is that the same set of characters can record different languages. Because no matter how complicated the phonetic system of a language is, it won't be too complicated (on the contrary, the meaning system is very complicated-imagine that if we learn English, we can learn to read the phonetic symbols in less than a week, but maybe it will take us ten or eight years to learn the meaning of an English article, so we can naturally record another language by changing the phonetic symbols slightly.
2. Elvish and Elvish
Elvish is the language spoken by elves. The oldest elvish language is called "Primitive Kunya". Later, with the migration and differentiation of elves, the language differences of elves living in different places increased. I don't want to elaborate on the evolution of elvish here. There are about four or five known elvish languages, among which Kunya and Cinda are the most famous. Among them, Kunya language is closer to the original Kunya language and its form is more ancient. The elves in Zhongzhou generally don't need it. Xinda is what Zhongzhou calls "elvish language".
Of course, elves can't write at first. At first, they had no words.
Later, Aman said that Kunya's elves and Zhongzhou's Cinda-speaking elves invented characters respectively.
What they "invented" (in fact, of course, it was designed by the author) were all pinyin characters.
It is said that there are several sets of characters invented by Kunya elves. The first set has hardly been circulated in Zhongzhou, so I won't mention it here. The other set is Tengvall's Letters. Of course, the Tengwa letter was originally used to spell Kunya. Later, these elves returned to Zhongzhou for various reasons, and the Tengwa alphabet system was also brought to Zhongzhou by them. At this time, the Sindh elves in Zhongzhou thought this set of letters was good, so they absorbed the language used to spell themselves. As we said before, after the phonetic symbols change the rules of phonetic changes, the Tengwa letters can also be spelled as Sinda. There are also "black words" spelled with Tengwa, and the words on Sauron's ring are spelled with Tengwa.
The Sinda-speaking elves also have a set of letters invented by themselves, that is, "runic letters", which were originally used to spell Sinda. Even if Sindahl later used Tengwa letters, it also used Runi letters in parallel. Runi letters are widely circulated in Zhongzhou. As a phonetic symbol, it can also be used to spell other languages after changing the phonetic symbol rules. Dwarves use runi letters a lot.
3. Tengwa font and Runi font
Tengwa font is a computer font made according to the shape of Tengwa. As a kind of writing, rattan tile naturally has a variety of "calligraphy", just as Chinese characters have different writing styles such as Songti, Kaiti, Lishu and Weibei. If downloaded, there are Tengvall Parmet, which is a solemn institution, and Tengvall cursive script, which is a beautiful cursive script style.
Runi font, named after its elvish name, is called "Cirth font". There are several fonts in the download package, but the actual difference is not big, mainly because the decoration pattern is simple and complicated.
Font files are files with suffixes. Download the TTF in the package.
4, font installation
The so-called installation is to copy font files (. TTF file) to the font directory of Windows.
Specifically-if your Windows operating system is installed on drive C, find a folder named Windows under drive C. After opening this folder, you can find a folder named Font inside. Just put the font file in this font folder.
5. Font input
Take the use of Word as an example.
Open Word, enter a character such as "12345", select these characters, and then go to the "font" box to select the elvish style you need. Please note that in the figure below, the version of wizard text above Word 2000 directly shows the shape of wizard text itself.
However, when we input fonts, we should pay special attention to the fact that the elvish words do not have any corresponding sound value with the symbols on our keyboard. That is to say, if you press the A key on the keyboard, the elvish text output will never represent the pronunciation of A. In the font download package provided by this website, the font maker wrote an English description explaining the elvish font corresponding to each key on the keyboard. For example, if you enter the symbol "12345" on the keyboard and convert it into Tengwa characters, these are the Tengwa characters shown in the figure below. When you spell Kunya, it stands for T, nd, (empty), nt, N, and when you spell Sinda, it stands for T, D, th, N. These instructions are very simple and can be understood by looking at the keyboard diagram, so I didn't translate them into Chinese. If you think it's necessary, we'll talk.
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6. How to spell various languages in elvish?
Because Tengwa and Runi are both phonography, as we said before, it is theoretically possible to formulate spelling rules in various languages, not necessarily limited to elvish.
Among them, because of Tengwa alphabet system, the author designed a "general rule", which can change Tengwa's specific pinyin rules to adapt to various languages, so now many fans have designed various rules for Tengwa to spell today's languages. For example, spelling English, spelling Swedish, spelling Italian and so on. I personally designed a Chinese Tengwa Pinyin scheme (we usually use Chinese Roman Pinyin scheme).
Of course, as far as the author is concerned, there are general rules of Tengwa phonetic notation, Tengwa spelling Kunya rules, Tengwa spelling Cinda rules and Tengwa spelling black rules. Such as Nip Na Xin's rules, such as Nip the dwarves' rules.
So how do we learn these specific rules?
Tengwa's spelling rules are difficult to learn. I'll give you the easiest way-don't learn.
There is an online translation website on the Internet. If you enter the elvish language spelled with Roman letters, it will be translated into elvish language spelled with Tengwa letters for you.
Address: :http://mimas.ceti.pl/tengwar/ott/start.php? .
This website has a small trap. Please note that when you open a webpage, its default Input Language is English, which means "Mode (Input Language). You must remember to change it to the language you want first-such as Queenia, Sindahl and Black.
As for the spelling of Sinda and Dwarf in Runi letters, the method is also very simple. As long as there is a corresponding phonetic table between Nepalese alphabet and sinda, and between Nepalese alphabet and Dwarf language, it is ok.
This phonetic correspondence table can be found at the back of the appendix of The Lord of the Rings, but the translation of the current version is rather confusing. So you can look at the instructions in the Cirth font download package, which was written by the producer in English. But it's also very simple. Just look at the table inside.
7. Do you have to learn Tengwa's spelling rules?
The general rules of Tengwa's phonetic notation: This is explained in detail in the appendix "Spelling and Language" of the Lord of the Rings. There is no translation in the translated version, but they said it should be added in the new revised version, so I don't intend to translate it again. Of course, for people without phonetics knowledge, this thing seems more difficult. If you are interested, it is suggested to study some basic phonetics courses first (in fact, it is not difficult to find the textbook Modern Chinese, and you can understand it by learning the phonetics knowledge of Chinese). Of course, even if you don't know what this general rule is saying, it doesn't affect your learning specific spelling rules. It's just that after you know this general rule, you can not only design the spelling rules of various languages by yourself, but also better understand the specific rules and remember them more easily.
Tengwa Pinkunya, Cinda, Hei: There are English courses, and I will also write corresponding Chinese courses. Now Tengwa's Kunya Chinese course has been written. You can download it in the "Software Download" section of this website.
Today, I designed a Chinese Tengwa Pinyin scheme myself, and the "Software Download" column has been downloaded. As for other languages, we will speak them if we are interested. In addition, the online conversion website I introduced above also provides automatic spelling in English, German and Czech.