Tyelpetéma

Tyelpetéma was one of the five témar or sound-series of the Tengwar writing system.

The Tyelpetéma appears to have been unique; while each of the other four series consisted of a set of six individual 'letters', the palatal sounds of the Tyelpetéma were formed by adding a diacritic mark of two dots beneath another character. This is the equivalent of adding a 'y' after the letter in English to form a single distinct consonant sound. As an example, the sound 'ty' here has the same sound as the initial consonant in the (British pronunciation of) the English word 'tune' - something close to, but distinct from, 'ch'.

The names of the tengwar of that series were: Tyelpe, Indyo, Istyar, Intya, Nyelle and Arya.

In languages like the Westron, which made much use of consonants such as our ch, j, sh, Series III was usually applied to these; in which case Series IV was applied to the normal k-series (calmatéma). In Quenya, which possessed besides the calmatéma both a palatal series (tyelpetéma) and a labialize series (quessetema), the palatals were represented by a Fëanorian diacritic denoting ‘following y’ (usually two underposed dots), while Series IV was a kw-series.

The representation of the sounds here is the same as that employed in transcription and described above, except that here ‘’ch’’ represents the ‘’ch’’ in English ‘’church’’; ‘’j’’ represents the sound of English ‘’j’’, and ‘’zh’’ the sound heard in ‘’azure’’ and ‘’occasion’’.