Blog / "Can I touch your butt" in Elvish

Posted by Matthew Roberts on December 25, 2012

No! You people are all wrong. That is Quenya Tengwar, not Sindarin Tengwar! If you are going to write in Sindarin, use the proper alphabet! Sindarin doesn’t use tehtar for vowels. Tolkien newbs.

The proper Tengwar Sindarin would be:

Can I touch your butt in Elvish

wilwheaton:

lunapics:

spastasmagoria:

tseecka:

samandriel:

dajo42:

“Can I touch your butt” in Elvish. http://31.media.tumblr.com/902b42ccce2d8bbba41de5f57616ac24/tumblr_mevvxqT0dJ1qehul1o1_500.png

This is so useful

No, this is not “Can I touch your butt” in Elvish. This is “Can I touch your butt?” in English, transcribed using the letters of the Elvish alphabet. There is a difference. 

In Elvish, the letters of the alphabet correspond to sounds, not to words. The above text spells it out using one symbol to represent one letter of the original English, which is incorrect:

c-a-n  i  t-o-u-c-h  y-o-u-r  b-u-t-t

If you really want to spell out an English phrase using the Elvish alphabet, you would do so phonetically, which would basically equate to one symbol per phoneme (sound):

c-a-n  a-i  t-u-ch  y-o-r  b-u-t

If you actually wanted to write “Can I touch your butt?” in Elvish, one (very rough) translation would be: Annog nin daf pladan tele ci? Which, in Sindarin Elvish, roughly translates to, “Would you give me permission to touch your rear?”

Written in tengwar (the Elvish alphabet), it would look like this: http://i.imgur.com/kNq4F.png Sorry for the blurry quality.

There is no nerdcore like the Tumblr nerdcore. Only here would a grammar and linguistics argument involve Tolkien and butts.

BUTTS.