From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Wed Jan 31 05:36:45 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: iad@math.bas.bg X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_2_1); 31 Jan 2001 13:36:35 -0000 Received: (qmail 48894 invoked from network); 31 Jan 2001 13:32:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 31 Jan 2001 13:32:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta1 with SMTP; 31 Jan 2001 13:32:15 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp6.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.6]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.11.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id f0VDWKx09220 for ; Wed, 31 Jan 2001 15:32:20 +0200 Message-ID: <3A781385.A35E4CDD@math.bas.bg> Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 15:30:45 +0200 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Tehtar for vowels, and nasals References: <0101302242280B.07119@neofelis> <3A779AE6.FF362500@math.bas.bg> <0101310700130C.07119@neofelis> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 5215 I generally dislike the idea of writing Lojban in tengwar, so I don't know what I'm doing participating in this debate. But ... Elrond wrote: > On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Pierre Abbat wrote: > > That would mean that the tengwar 21 and 22 are not needed for > > vowels, and we can use them for n and m, instead of 17 and 18 > > which are longer. > > I disagree. While 17 and 18 are longer, 21 and 22 never were ever > used for nasals. Of course they were! Look at the Sindarin text of `A Elbereth', _tRGEO_ p. 62, or at the inscription of the Moria gate in _tLotR_. > Remember that the tengwar set (at least the base one) was designed > to be phonemic, and the very shape of the tengwar should inform on > the way they are pronounced. That is not true either. Appendix E II (i) is as clear on this point as it could be: `None of the letters had in itself a fixed value'. > IMHO, If you start mangling the set, you are going to > puzzle tengwar-enabled readers who do not know your mode, > where it shouldn't be the case... I don't see why not. The Ring Inscription is certainly going to puzzle one who expects to be able to read it in the Quenya mode. > If you really think that tengwar nûmen and malta are too long to write, > perhaps you should have a look at the Ring Inscription. You can find on it > a beautiful example of an overbar (an horizontal curl above a consonant) > used to mean that it is preceded by a nasal. This is a fairly common > representation for nasals. Yes, but it doesn't make much sense for Lojban, where clusters of homorganic nasal + stop are neither particularly frequent nor special in any other way. One of the beautiful things about Lojban is that every gismu contains exactly 3 consonants and 2 vowels, which means 5 letters in an alphabet as the one normally used, or perhaps 3 tengwar and 2 tehtar. Any deviation from this (such as replacing one of the 3 tengwar by a tehta iff it is a nasal preceding another consonant) would in my eyes constitute an act of uglification. Pierre Abbat wrote: [following up to my reply to him that I should've sent to the List -- I always forget that the Lojban List does not set the Reply-To to itself, as some other mailing lists do] > >Another possibility: put one tehta above the tengwa and the other one > >upside down below the tengwa. See _Sauron Defeated_, pp. 319-321 > >(specifically _weorulde_ and _oferliodon_, line 1 on p. 321). > > Wouldn't work - {uy} and {ui} would come out looking identical. Why would they? You'd write a curl above for the {u}, and either one or two dots below, depending on whether you want {y} or {i}. --Ivan