How to Write in Elvish the Simple Way.

So I love languages. Especially made up ones or secret codes. So today I'm going to share the simple way to write in Elvish (Yes, LOTR style). The fantastic, simple way was provided from Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes.

This is from the site. I enlarged it so you can see it properly. 

So you'll notice on this picture that it looks fairly simple. It is. Once you learn the rules. As of now, I can read and write it pretty fluently. Sadly, there's no pronounceable key, so I don't know how to speak it. But note the differences between the K & W, M & V, G & Qu, and P & T. My cousin wrote those letters down wrong and got very confused. They're similar, so make sure to point out the subtle differences. 

One of the most important things is that the vowels go above or below the constants You can put the vowels above the letter they follow (Quenya style) or above the letter they precede (Sindarin style). Also note the R,  E, S, Y, and Z alternate forms. Those are important. 

 The site is primarily for writing names, but I figured you can use it for any word. Here's my lesson on it. Provided with pictures that I drew on my white board for you. And yes, I have my own mini white board. I am proud of it.  Here's my first example. Most of these will be in three steps. Sorry for how dark the pictures are, when I took them, I didn't realize how dark they were. If you have trouble seeing any, let me know and I'll try my best to fix them!

Here, I used my name. The first step, you see the name and some lines (in the later example these lines and symbols change to blue.). 2nd step, I place the letters above or below the base letters (the letters you see that fit into a line) and I seperate them into boxes. Later, combined letters will have their own box. And finally, the 3rd step is how it looks like in Elvish. The bottom right example is in Sindarin. But I usually write in the Quenya version.

Most of the time, vowels go above the consonants, but sometimes (in the case of Y and silent E), you put them below. This example uses a new symbol, a straight line uneath the consonant that indicates a double consonant. Use the line for any consonant. For this example, I also used the site's example.

I like using this name for examples because its kinda complicated. Step 1: The lines above the first two vowels indicates that they go up. But the capitilzed Is (sometimes I put lines) below indicates a "carrier". Carriers are for vowels when there's no consonant to put them above. Two vowels usually don't fit onto one consonant or carrier. Here we also see that the E and the Y above and below one consonant.

Here's I don't use a name. But as you can tell in Step 2, the CH is doubled or put together (The __ underneath indicates this) (a list of letters that can be combined is provided beneath this example). You can also see that the Os go above. The first O goes above the combined letters and the second one gets a carrier.

List of combined letters. 

In this list, make sure to note the differences between the RD vs the hard R (red: in the alaphabet [ITA]), TH vs the soft R (car: ITA), NT vs T (ITA), MP vs P (ITA), and the differences between CH and SH. The site notes:

The line above a consonant means that a nasal N or M precedes the consonant in question. In the next example, we use the nasal modifier and we see what to do with vowels when there's no consonant in the right place to put it above. 

Because I'm not sure what they mean by "a nasal N or M" I usually ignore the rule and just use the list above. I also provide the example they're talking about.

In this example, I use the one from the site because its a good one. Unlike the previous example, a line with two dots (._.) indicates a "put together" consonant. The A gets its own carrier and the Y goes below.

 Here I use another site example. The SH and the LD are combined. The E and O are shifted to the left and we leave the N alone.

 

This time I wrote you a short message with a translation. Underneath the double L of "Hello" we see the line to announce that there's a double consonant. In "Birdes" the E gets a carrier and I use the upside swirly S. I prefer to use the upside one vs the downside one because the downside often looks like a 6 when  I write it. But it doesn't matter which you use.

Here I wrote "I am teaching you how to write in Elvish". The blueish lines indicate where I put spaces, but I only did this on the white board so you could tell where the separate words are.

 And this I wrote on lined paper for you to see how it looks. I usually leave a space between lines so that I don't have to cram my vowels and other odd symbols. It reads: "I am writing this in Elvish. I usually write in Quenya."

Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes. also would like to advise its readers that there are many ways to write English words in Elvish. And that this is the one they use and they tried to make it as simple as possible. If you would like to learn the deep details or just learn more, check out Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes.. They provide more examples as well as the ones I did in more detail. They also give more sources to learn more. But when I tried them, they didn't work.

Happy writing! I hope this was useful.

Resources:
Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes. 

(And for more names in Elvish, check out Quenya Lapseparma)

EDIT (4/20/2012)- I recently (today) found out how to write numbers and punctuation in elvish, so I've decided to share it here. But because I found them on a video, I wrote them up on my erase board.

So here's numbers. They kinda remind me of roman numerals. (By the way, the lines on 1, 2, & 3 over the little dot-ends are kinda too long, they can be closer together). 

And here's punctuation. I don't know if the comma/apostrophe dot is in the middle of a line or at the bottom but I think you could use it either way.

Sincerely,
Sareh