: Re: Constructed Language - spelled like it sounds? Note: This may be more suited to Worldbuilding SE. I believe it belongs here, because it is about how to write a conlang, but if not, please

@Merenda569

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Your question is based on a faulty connection between "English" letters and Elvish letters and between English sounds and English letters. We use the Latin alphabet to write English words, by a series of approximations where one, two, or more letters represent a single sound. Think of the list of vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. Except vowels aren't letters, they're sounds. Those are the letters we use to represent the sounds. But, for example, the most common vowel in English is shwa, and we don't have a letter for that (instead, almost any 'vowel' letter will be used).

Elvish will be its own language with its own rules. The notion that it doesn't have a "K" but has a k sound is a little odd. Of course it doesn't have a letter K, because it doesn't have any letters from the Latin alphabet. Similarly it doesn't have a C or an S. Make up whatever glyphs you want for whatever kind of writing system you want.

When it comes down to writing it in English, what you are doing is, essentially, transliterating or Romanizing it. In this case you use our alphabet's letters to represent the sounds of the Elvish alphabet. as @what said, it's very similar to how we write Chinese words in English. The word 错 (meaning "wrong, bad") is not spelled with any Latin letters in Chinese, but in Pinyin (a sort of romanization) it's spelled cuò and pronounced like (roughly) tswo. (Pinyin uses c to represent a ts sound).

When devising a romanization, it's common that you'll run out of letters to represent sounds. English certainly has more sounds than it has letters. Consider bath and bathe; there the a represents two different vowels, the th represents one sound, but a different one in each word, and the e serves to silently convert the short A to long A AND to indicate the pronunciation of the th. Tolkien himself struggled with this and decided to use th always for the soft sound (as in bath) and dh for the voiced sound (as in bathe). Since dh doesn't appear in English, normally, the only way a reader can tell how to pronounce that is through a glossary.

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