Right when I realized that Tolkien was in the same boat as I was with all that fictional language and culture and stuff, I started being active in the local Tolkien society and did several secondary language and world building work over the years. One of the first contributions was a Tengwar mode for Hungarian which I originally published in the Hungarian Tolkien forum (tolkien.hu) in 2003. The original mode employed similar conventions to the preexisting ones, but as my linguistic understanding imroved it grew somewhat different and has retained its uniqueness ever since in that it is developed with phonological logic as a first consideration rather than building on conventions more suitable for representing English or other Indo-European languages.

Fig. 1. Phonological Hungarian Tengwar mode with the Ring Poem as example

The mode is phonological, it distinguishes neither small phonetic details native speakers usually aren’t aware of like the palatal fricatives in <dobj> and <kapj> (their slot in the mode is used for the alveolar fricatives <s> and <zs> instead as they fit neatly into the system) nor peculiarities of the orthography like <x> for <ksz> and <y> for <i> in names.

The most important feature is that the mode doesn’t use the 3rd column as a shortcut for alveolar fricatives based on the English and Westron usage but for palatals (<ty> <gy> and <ny>), which is the fourth major place of articulation in Hungarian. Other modes use palatalisation dots for these sounds, however in Hungarian there is no palatalization but there are 3 (+2) palatal sounds, stops and nasal so their phoneme values differ from the apparent systematic palatalization in Quenya*.

The English usage is logical for English as it only has the affricates <ch, j>, but Hungarian also has <c, dz> and thus, using separate rows for these sounds is more reasonable than an “alveolar column” with stops which just happen to be affricates as it is in English.
Also, the alveolar fricatives and affricates nicely fit into the palatal column at the 3rd to 4th and 5th to 6th row.

There are alternative encodings like using the s-curls for c and dz for calligraphic reasons similar to the upside down s-z. Also note the alternative encodings for <v>. Usually the last row of the P-column is used for [w] which doesn’t exist in Hungarian, however the normal <v> in Hungarian is phonetically a labial approximant rather than a proper voiced fricative, so the alternation makes sense phonetically as the last row is used for approximants and glides. Of course it is still allowed to only use the “usual” v in your writings or you can experiment with a completely phonetic usage.


* There was historically one palatalized sound currently still written as “ly” but in the standard dialect it has merged completely with <j> so unless you are writing in a dialect that has an actual “ly” sound like “palóc”, I don’t recommend using an l with dots for it.