Check it out in action!
Êl síla erin lû e-govaded ‘wînA star shines on the hour of our meeting
Cirth: ña %;ac b@l, ak bRð4c9b9 F;,
Tengwar, Mode of Beleriand: lFj 8`Vj] l7`6 j.F l shr]2l2 ½n`V6
Tengwar, Classical Mode: ~Vj 8~Bj`C 7F5% j~M `V xr^2#2$ y~B5
The adventure for adding the Tengwar and Cirth to the phrasebooks was a long one, with a lot of setbacks.
First, there was the getting the Cirth and Tengwar fonts to work at all. That took multiple tries and Shihali cracking open the lid on the Cirth Erebor fonts to see why they weren’t working anymore. (Thank you so much for that!)
Next was the slow process of writing all of the phrases in the fonts. None of these fonts use a QWERTY keyboard. I used some auto-transliterators to speed things up: Glǽmscribe, Online Tengwar Transcriber, and The Tengwar Scribe because they were able to handle the large blocks of text I dropped into them. But, none of them could do the type of Cirth I prefer for Sindarin, based off of the beautiful manuscript found in The Treason of Isengard. It’s got all of Sindarin’s vowel’s and diphthongs as well as many of its common consonant clusters. It makes the system found in the back of The Lord of the Rings looks like the scribblings of a distracted dwarf’s. So, I had to do that entirely by hand.
Which turned out to be not so bad! Because…
After months of work on the phrasebooks adding this stuff in, somehow, in the Sindarin phrasebook Excel spreadsheet, every single instance of a space followed by the lower-case “i” was deleted. It was deleted from the Sindarin and English sections. As some of you may know, the Sindarin word for “the” is “i”. So, all of the “the”s were gone. This meant “start over from scratch” or “just try to find all of the space+i’s that are missing and put them back.” So I opted for the second one.
With the tengwar partially handled, I used the slow process of copying all of the phrases into Cirth as a way to check every single phrase for missing “the”s. It worked. I found and fixed hundreds of missing “i”s. I think I got them all in the Sindarin parts. The parts where I may have missed a few would be the English sections, since I didn’t have anything forcing me to be really methodical about checking those.
If you come across any missing space+i’s in the English part, please let me know! You can PM me or comment on this post. Just link the offending phrase and tell me where the missing “i” should be.
So, it’s done! It’s finally done! This project that I’ve had on the back-burner for years is finally available! Enjoy everyone!