onald Kyrmse is a Brasilian Tolkiendil who has been fascinated by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien for more than a quarter century. Together with friends, he founded what was at the time (March 1989) the only smial on the Southern Hemisphere - Heren Hyarmeno, the “Order of the South”. He has translated or acted as a consultant on translation of all of Tolkien’s works published in Brasil since 1994, and of several books about that author, as well as the Brasilian subtitling of Peter Jackson’s movie. He has written Explicando Tolkien, “Explaining Tolkien”, a collection of articles and essays on Tolkien’s world and on the impact he has had on readers and on literature, as well as cinema and other disciplines.
Ronald Kyrmse — November 2003
When speaking about tengwar, the writing characters created by the Elves, two kinds of modes may be distinguished: tehta-modes, where vowels are represented by tehtar, or diacritics above, below and sometimes inside the tengwar, and full modes, which have a separate tengwa, or character, for each vowel. The use of diacritics for non-vowel functions, does not serve as a distinction between tehta- and full modes.
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Ronald Kyrmse — 2005
Here follows the standard keyboard mapping for tengwar fonts, first designed by Dan Smith. Most existing tengwar fonts use the same set of characters. It has been widely adopted due to the fact that the Fëanorian tengwar do not have a fixed phonetic value, and that the same sound can be represented by different tengwar depending on its position in the word and on the surrounding signs.
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Ronald Kyrmse — June 2002
These runes are known to us only from a slip of paper written by J.R.R. Tolkien, a photocopy of which Christopher Tolkien sent to Paul Nolan Hyde in February 1992, and which was published, together with an extensive analysis, in the Summer 1992 issue of Mythlore. Lisa Star published a table of these runes on her website Tyalie Tyelelliéva. The table below shows the Gondolinic Runes in a systematic way from a phonetic standpoint.
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