What's New in Tecendil

August 22, 2022

July 19, 2022

  • Added Hungarian language mode, contributed by @krmarci

April 14, 2022

March 29, 2022

  • All modes: in some cases, words would be displayed with a double-capital (for example "Celegorn")
  • All modes: Fixed the spacing around commas
  • In some cases, a [dot-below] or [bar-below] would not display in the correct position with the tengwa Lambe
  • Improved rendering of tehtar above silme in Dan Smith fonts
  • English Mode: improved transcription of cappuccino, choose, fernanda, goes, giant, hers, larceny, please, ancient, facade(s), bronchitis, seethe, smooth, smoothest, Tecendil, teethe, therefore, uncharacteristic, virus, penis, schools and more.
  • Quenya Mode: ethenta- and derived forms are transcribed with a tinco, because of the "et" prefix (it's not "e'th", it's "et'h").
  • Cirth Mode: new lines are preserved
  • Cirth Mode: improved punctuation
  • Cirth Mode: x is transcribed as ks

January 28, 2022

  • English mode: use [quesse-extended] in some words of Greek origin: technology, mechanic, schema...

January 20, 2022

  • Backend: Updated to Eldamo 0.8.0
  • Backend: improved performance of queries by 10x, spin up of backend dyno by 30x
  • Added Polish mode, contributed by Andrzej Zielinski
  • Improved fonts for Chinese traditional and simplified
  • Backend: improved scoring of results
  • Added support for Alcarin font by Toshi Omagari
  • Ensure hook-below is closer to tengwa than dot-below
  • Fixed placement of diacritics over silme for DanSmith fonts
  • Fixed punctuation in DanSmith fonts
  • Fixed acute-below and double-acute-below for DanSmith fonts
  • Fixed width of {tilde-above}, {tilde-below} and {tilde-high} for DanSmith fonts
  • Display dot-below (silent-E) on the current tengwa, except when no tengwa
  • In dictionary entries, transcribe for more languages
  • Fixed service worker caching
  • Handbook: clarify geminated Sindarin consonnants
  • Show the Welcome panel by default, rather than the empty state

December 20, 2021

  • Added Inside Tecendil page
  • Rewrite of transcription engine for improved accuracy
  • Numerous corrections to the english, sindarin and beleriand modes
  • Updates to the Tengwar Handbook, including clarifications and some corrections. Thanks to Jakob Teuber (/u/jakoboss) for some extensive feedback.

September 24, 2021

  • New "Westron" mode, an orthographic mode for english with separate tengwa for vowels. Contributed by /u/NachoFailconi.

September 23, 2021

  • English mode: fix transcription of words containing a dash, e.g. "twenty-one"
  • English mode: fix transcription of words containing "nce" or "mce", e.g. "pronounced". The "e" was on the wrong tengwa.

September 20, 2021

  • English mode: fix transcription of "cy" digraph (the chevron was placed on the wrong tengwa)
  • Added support to [thinnas]

July 31, 2021

  • End donation campaign.

July 23, 2021

  • Fixed localization for Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hong-Kong Chinese.

May 17, 2021

  • Added option to load a mode file by dragging it in the window. This makes testing new mode files much easier.

April 29, 2021

Improvements

  • Sindarin: replace intraword dashes with spaces
  • Punctuation: increase spacing to the left of comma and full-stop.
  • Added note about Edge of Night/Pippin's Song, including Sindarin translation by /u/elaran.
  • Improved robustness of language detection to avoid spurious warnings

April 29, 2021

Improvements

  • Dropped the English Traditional mode.
  • English Mode: Added "ç" and "s*" as a synonym for Silme Nuquerna, , "r*" for Ròmen and "a*", "e*", "i*", "o*", "u*" for vowels on long-carrier.

February 24, 2021

Bug fix

  • Quenya: better rendering of vowel cluster "ièo"

December 7, 2020

Bug fix

  • English: use a short-carrier in "this".

October 30, 2020

Bug fix

  • English: always use Silme for "s"
  • English: Use a long carrier for acute accent (e.g. "Lúthien").
  • English: use Parma Extended for "ph"
  • Italiano Esteso: various corrections.

October 26, 2020

Bug fix

  • Quenya: fix "iu" diphthongs.
  • Italiano Esteso: various corrections.

August 11, 2020

New Feature

  • Support for Italian Full Mode contributed by Guido Laudenzi (IG @guido_laudenzi)

August 11, 2020

New Feature

  • Support for Italian Full Mode contributed by Guido Laudenzi (IG @guido_laudenzi)

August 4, 2020

Bug Fix

  • Beleriand Mode: use Anga for "gw" instead of "ungwe"
  • Quenya Mode: fix "triphthong" "eoi" to correctly produce Yanta

March 30, 2020

New Features

  • Support for Italian mode contributed by Guido Laudenzi (IG @guido_laudenzi)

March 10, 2020

Bug Fixes

  • When the dictionary entry contained a square bracket, the entry would not be displayed correctly.
  • Cirth: the rendered image would not include capital letters and in some cases the layout would be incorrect.
  • All modes: the rendered image would not use the correct font in some cases, for example when loading the page with a URL specifying some content: the fonts would not be loaded by the time the rendered image was generated.

Improvements

  • Cirth: now includes some variants which can be accessed by appending stars "*" after a letter: /r*/, /n*/, /n**/, /g*/, /gh*/, /s*/, /ng*/, /ŋ/, /e*/, /ə/, /u*/, /ʌ/
  • Cirth: more complete numerals (1 through 6)

February 27, 2020

Bug Fixes

  • In English mode, do not use nasalization mark for <n> or <m> around vowels, e.g. "animal".

Improvements

  • Dropped Caslon font due to poor shapes of Tengwar (e.g. Lambe)
  • Tengwar Handbook: added section on variants from Christopher Tolkien
  • Tengwar Handbook: clarified usage of extended tengwar
  • English Mode: avoid conventions from Christopher Tolkien (AI with Anna instead of Yanta), word "to" as two tengar, use Ungwe for soft-G,
  • English Mode: correctly transcribe some compound words (anthill, goatherd, knighthood, lighthouse, lightheaded, outhouse, pothead)
  • English Mode: use Quesse Extended for CH pronounced as /k/ and tinco extended for TH pronounced as /t/

February 20, 2020

Bug Fix

  • In Cirth (Erebor Angerthas Daeron), the phoneme /r/ was incorrectly transcribed.
  • In English mode, words ending in consonants+/y/ (e.g. "fly") would have an extra short-carrier inserted.

Improvements

  • In English mode, words that begin with "some" are treated as compounds with a silent-e when appropriate ("sometimes", "somewhere", but not "Somerset")

February 1, 2020

New Feature

  • Long text transcription: on the desktop, you can drop a text file in the Tecendil window to transcribe a long text. This works well with texts from the Gutenberg project, for example.

Improvements

  • Correctly capitalize words on the exception list (e.g. "He"). They were previously always displayed in lowercase
  • Correctly handle some compound words, for example "face-to-face"
  • When using a Unicode font, pass through characters that are not recognized rather than dropping them

January 15, 2020

Bug Fix

  • English Mode: fixed an issue transcribing soft-C with Silme Nuquerna when preceded by a nasalizing consonants ("evidence", "substance")

October 17, 2019

Bug Fix

  • Fix Wikipedia feature (it would not consistently display)
  • Beleriand mode: Fix "au"/"aw" transcription

Improvements

  • Improved layout and content of Tengwar Handbook

October 13, 2019

Bug Fix

  • Adjusted positioning of vowel tehta for non-Unicode fonts (e.g. "ai", "ei", "ach", etc... in Sindarin)

October 9, 2019

Bug Fix

  • English mode: Fix an issue where the "ench", "anch", "onch", etc... sequences would incorrectly use a Quesse (K) instead of a {calma} (CH). Add exceptions for common english words (anchor, melancholy, inchoate, bronchitis, uncharacteristic, etc...)
  • All modes: Fix an issue with non-Unicode fonts where the consonant doubling mark (bar below) would be too long.

September 3, 2019

New Features

  • Italian localization (contributed by @bySaber

Improvements

  • Quenya mode: Fixed an issue "qu" generated an extra "u".
  • Spanish mode: Fixed an issue where "y" was not properly transcribed.
  • Fixed an issue where some tengwar fonts were not displayed correctly in the Tengwar Handbook

August 1, 2019

New Features

  • Italian localization, contributed by @bySaber
  • The background of the saved screenshot is now white instead of transparent.

Improvements

  • The "ui" grapheme in Sindarin is rendered better in Annatar Italic
  • The "double-o", "double-u" and "double-i" tehtar are rendered correctly in all fonts, except Tengwar Formal. Several fonts now support Dan Smith Alt encoding.
  • In English Phonemic mode, render the /j/ phoneme with "anna" (e.g. "communication"). It was previously rendered with two-dots below, which was confusing when combined with a schwa (which was rendered with a single dot).

June 19, 2019

New Features

  • The dictionary entries now list the actual language name for each entry, rather than a language group.
  • The dictionary entries will no longer include as "Sindarin" and "Quenya" entries from before the "canon period". These entries are now categorized as "Proto-Elvish". Which category of entries are displayed can still be set in the Settings panel.
  • Created a GitHub repo for modes and localizations.

June 18, 2019

New Features

  • New UI, rewritten from scratch, with fresh visuals and better layout on mobile devices
  • Support for dark mode (detect initial user preference and can subsequently be changed in the Setting panel
  • When using the Telcontar font, words with an initial capital are written with a double-bar.
  • The Wikipedia article section can be toggled on/off. There is also an option in the Settings panel to turn it off.
  • Improved rendering of nasalized consonnants in the Spanish mode ("andar")
  • Added support to download a screenshot
  • On Android, support for the system Share Sheet
  • Dynamic type sizing of the output
  • Improved performance for initial launch and slow networks
  • Added localization for Spanish, French, German and Chinese Simplified
  • Added Elfic Caslon font from Peter Wiegel
  • In the English mode, added support for alternate transcriptions of long vowels using a long carrier: à, è, ì, ò, ù. This can be useful to transcribe some names, e.g. Sumit (SOO-mit) (/ˈso͞omit/)/
  • Display appropriate glyph for em-dash

Improvements/Bug Fixes

  • Correctly handle hyphenated words (e.g. "ta-da")
  • Fixed an issue with the Eldamar font
  • Fixed an issue with transcription of CV+long V.
  • Updated the Sindarin translation of The Riddle of Strider with a translation from /u/Elaran

May 10, 2019

New Features

  • A transcription of a Wikipedia article for the entered text is output when available.
  • If the input is "wikipedia", a random article from Wikipedia is transcribed.

June 11, 2018

New Features

  • In English mode, transcribed voiced <th> with "anto", for example, "brother", "smooth", "clothing".

May 20, 2018

New Features

  • Improved layout on mobile to make the dictionary entries easier to discover

Bug Fixes

  • In English Phonemic mode, fixed transcription of /ʊ/ + /ɪ/, for example "gooey"

Backend Server

  • Improved performance with added caching

May 15, 2018

New Features

  • Added support for Spanish mode
  • Added support for Cirth (Angerthas Erebor)
  • Refreshed visual design on the desktop.
  • When available, provide derivation information in the dictionary. For example: Gondor: Stone-land [from: gond stone, rock, stone (as a material) + dôr land]
  • Added support for offline use (PWA).
  • Registered tecendil.app

Bug Fixes

  • In English mode, fixed transcription of un.
  • In English Phonemic mode, fixed transcription of n followed by sh.

April 29, 2018

New Features

  • Added support for LaTeX commands from the TengwarScript package of Ignacio Fernández Galván. For example: "\Tquesse\TTacute\Ttinco\TTdoubler\TTthreedots". See the list of commands and the documentation. Thanks to /u/HarryPotter5777 for the inspiration.

April 26, 2018

Bug Fixes

  • In Quenya mode, 'ya' should be transcribed with a 'anna', not a short-carrier, for example "Aldúya". Thanks for Wolfeur for reporting this issue.

New Features

  • In Quenya mode, long vowels indicated with a circumflex or acute accent are now always transcribed as a vowel over a long-carrier (previously, long e was transcribed as a double-e diacritic). Long-vowels indicated with a grace accent are transcribed as a double-diacritic for "o", "i", "e" and "u". For "a", it is transcribed as an upside down "a" diacritic. Thanks to Wolfeur for this suggestion.
  • Improved rendering of nasalisation mark with Unicode fonts by placing it right above the tengwa, with the tehta above it.

March 25, 2018

Bug Fixes

  • In Quenya mode, some diphthongs following a hyarmen were displayed on top of each other. The second vowel is now displayed on a short-carrier. Thanks to Paul Strack who reported this issue which was first discovered by South Cingalia

November 7, 2017

Bug Fixes

  • The double-e combination was not displayed correctly when using a non-Unicode font, e.g. Annatar. For example, 'yeeni' in Quenya.

August 15, 2017

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed missing "nazg" in the "one ring" encyclopedic entry.
  • Fixed Celebdil, Celebros, Celegorm, Celebrían, Celecormë, Celebrant, Celeborn, Celepharn, Celebrimbor, Celebrindor, Celebrindal, Celerdain and Celebrant to be transcribed with a "quesse" rather than "silme" in english.
  • Fixed the placement of tehtar over "a-tengwa" in Belerian mode.
  • Fixed typo (missing long-O) in Lóriendesse in the Namarie encyclopedic entry.
  • Fixed the placement of the double-dot below when tengwa had a double-E above, for example in "Yéni"
  • In Quenya, use "silme" instead of "silme-nuquerna" when there are no tehtar above

August 13, 2017

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed ‘pedo’ transcription in handbook to ‘mellon’.
  • Cleaned up Tengwar table in encyclopedic entry

August 11, 2017

New Features

  • Added support for Tengwar Telcontar Unicode font, designed by Johan Winge and Mach Wust.

June 23, 2017

Bug Fixes

  • In Quenya mode, use a long carrier for the combination vowel+long-E
  • In Quenya mode, use silme nuquerna when applicable. The Namarie Jacket does make use of them.
  • In Quenya mode, use ungwe for "NGW", e.g. "ringwë" or... er... "ungwë"
  • In all modes, correctly display ".." as a "end of paragraph" sign (quad-dot)
  • When using Dan's Mode encoding, correctly render the "end of paragraph" sign.

February 19, 2017

Bug Fixes

  • In Quenya mode, use long-carrier for long-U, for consistency with the Namarie Jacket. Also use double-E for long-E, although the Namarie jacket uses both double-E and long-carrier (yeeni).

November 7, 2016

Bug Fixes

  • In English mode, for -i diphthongs use anna tengwa instead of yanta, which is used in Quenya. See Amanie Tenceli
  • In English Classical mode, do not use tengwa combinations for -i or -y diphthongs.

October 8, 2016

Bug Fixes

  • In Phonemic Mode, use over-twist for labialized consonants, not under-curl. For example, "quiet".

New Features

  • Improved the layout of the Tengwar Handbook. Expanded content with additional examples.

September 28, 2016

Bug Fixes

  • When using normal form, tengwa names that contained a dash were not parsed correctly. For example {extended-calma}.

September 25, 2016

New Features

  • Styling options, including shadow, letterpress, embossed and inset, alignment (left, center, right, justified) and background (white, dark, linen, flecks, construction paper and ivory).
  • In the Share panel, new button to copy the URL to the clipboard.
  • In the Share panel, new button to view the transcribed tengwar in full screen mode, and option to add full screen to the shared URL.
  • Added Sindarin translation of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the encyclopedia.

Bug Fixes

  • Dates separated with a ., e.g. 02.03.2015 and decimal numbers (e.g. 3.15) were not displayed correctly.
  • Decimal numbers were not displayed correctly. Changed the decimal prefix to #
  • In Beleriand Mode, in some cases the tehtar were incorrectly place on the preceding tengwa.
  • In Sindarin Mode, the letter Y was incorrectly transcribed as a tengwa instead of the the double-dot tehta (reported by Алексей Летунов)

September 24, 2016

New Features

  • Increased the maximum character count for the input field to 2,048 from 512.

Bug Fixes

  • In Sindarin Mode, only use the labialization mark for DW and GW. Correctly output sequences of VOWEL + GW/DW. This addresses an issue where Arwen and gwannassen were transcribed incorrectly (reported by Алексей Летунов)
  • In Sindarin Mode, special case irregular pronunciation and spelling for panthael (pant + hael) and arnoediad (arnediad).

September 23, 2016

New Features

  • Added support for the Constructium font by Rebecca Bettencourt (KreativeKorp).
  • Added Ave Maria and Pater Noster in the encyclopedia with their Quenya translations by JRR Tolkien. To access them, enter Ave Maria or Pater Noster or Our Father in the input field.
  • In Sindarin Mode, added support for intra-word mark. A "." in a word will be transcribed with a middle-dot, e.g. "Haud.en.Elleth". Dashes inside a word are not represented in the transcription.

Bug Fixes

  • In Sindarin Mode, D was transcribed with anto instead of ando.
  • In Quenya Mode, fixed support for intraword separator (') (i.e. as'elye will now render correctly). In some cases, the necessary short-carriers were omitted.
  • In Quenya Mode, now use double-tehtar for long U and long O, as per Amanye Tenceli.
  • In English Mode, use double-short carrier for long vowels, instead of long carrier. The front page of Unfinished Tales does use a long carrier for a long O (book), but the inscription is by Christopher Tolkien and not consider canonical (source: private conversation with Måns Björkman).
  • In Sindarin Mode, do not use silme nuquerna, even when there are tehtar above it. Use silme instead.
  • In Quenya Mode, do not use sa-rince for final-S.

September 20, 2016

This update includes improvements to the web client and the backend server.

Web Client

  • In Quenya Mode, words ending in -re were incorrectly transcribed with a órë.
  • In Quenya Mode, some words with consecutive vowels were incorrectly transcribed with multiple tehtar over a tengwa. For example, hroa
  • In English Mode, some words with -ya were incorrectly transcribed with multiple tehtar over a tengwa. For example, Ryan and Aditya
  • In English Mode, some combinations of vowel + -m did were not transcribed with a nasalization park. For example, empire, amber
  • In English Mode, the -U diphthongs were using úre instead of vala
  • In English Mode, the -CK consonant cluster was not transcribed with a doubling mark. Example: check, rock
  • In English Mode, soft-C is now transcribed with a silme nuquerna. A soft-C is the letter C followed by E, I or Y, except in ancient, capuccino, celt, celtic, ciao and concerto. In English Classical mode, S is always transcribed with silme, while in English mode S is transcribed either with silme or silme nuquerna depending if there are tehtar above it or not. Existing fonts do not always render well tehtar above silme and LOTR Appendix E specifically indicates:
    29 (silme) represented "s" and 31 (with doubles curl) (esse) represented "z" in those languages that required it. The inverted form, 30 (silme-nuquerna) and 32 (esse-nuquerna), though available for use as separate signs, were mostly used as mere variants of 29 and 31, according to the convenience of writing, e.g., they were much used when accompanied by superimposed tehtar

Backend Server

  • The dictionary entries for Quenya words written written with súlë or noldo were incorrectly returned with s or n. They are now returned with Þ and ñ, respectively, so they can be properly transcribed. For example, sambë, narmo, Narsil and Sauron