Elvish writing - phonetic mode for English

Introduction | Tengwar | Tehtar

The table below shows how the tehtar can be used to represent the various English vowel sounds.

	a	e	i	o	u	schwa [note 1]
short	fat apple pack	bet egg said	bit pick	got box chomp	put book should	but rough ago
long	past laugh	keep bean eat		bought caught bawl	flute moon chew shoe
+y [note 2]	play mane great braid		fly chide light strife	joy moist
+w	gown pounce prowl	few mute beauty		show tote loan
+r [note 3]	scar char	her girl scourge		score lord port	tour sure
+re	scare chair	here beer fear	hire pyre		lure

In the modes for writing English a tehta above the tengwa represents a vowel sound followed by a consonant. If a vowel appears without a following consonant, the tehta is written instead above a carrier letter. A carrier letter is required at the end of a word and for the initial vowels in a sequence of consecutive vowels. There are two carrier letters, one for short vowel sounds and another for long ones .

The A, E, O and U tehta may be doubled to represent long vowel sounds. To write a long vowel when there is no following tengwa use a single tehta over the long carrier. Double tehta are never used over the long carrier. Where the tehtar appears over the short carrier in the 'short' row of the table that tehta may be placed over any other tengwa without changing the vowel sound.

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