Tengwar

[Nick NICHOLAS <nicholas@uci.edu>]

Yes, I must be going insane to be doing this when I've already run out of
Lojban time. But:

Just learnt elron's mapping of Lojban to Tengwar. It is cool. But ---

(In the following, I use 0 for the short vowel carrier, and _ for the long
vowel carrier.)

1. {uu} in Lojban is not a double vowel under any circumstances. It has a
non-syllabic initial vowel, same as {ua} and {ue}. To write {ua} as
"0u0a", but {uu} as "_u", is seriously misleading, and not at all cute.

2. Elron uses the tengwar halla thing for apostrophe --- which I'll
transcribe here as h. This means {oi} is written as "0o0i", and {o'i} as
{0oh0i}. Since we're mostly doing Tengwar for aesthetic reasons, I think
this is still much too prominent for {'}. {'} is really meant to be just a
syllabic delimiter; {o'i} and {oi} should look more similar than that. In
fact, in my own handwritten Lojban, I tend to write (smart) apostrophe
*over* the previous letter. (In this, I run counter to And's amity for
'h'. Then again, I doubt And thinks that highly of Tengwar. :-)

3. Ergo, since we have an available vowel carrier that doesn't actually
fit Lojban, and a treatment of apostrophe that I think overkill, why don't
we kill two birds with one rune, and make the long vowel carrier into the
apostrophe? That way you'd get {oi} as "0o0i", and {o'i} as "0o_i". More
importantly, {uu} as "0u0u", and {u'u} as "0u_u" --- not "_u", which looks
nothing like "0u0u". You'd get a much less prolix Tengwar, and I think
it'd be easier to read.

I'm perfectly happy to let a thousand flowers wither in the desert in this
one --- Tengwar is not exactly popular in Lojbanistan anyway, although I
think it would make for some fitting Lojban Brochure & Lessons cover art.
What I worry about is that what little Lojban Tengwar work has already
been done may have made Elron's mapping sacred.

So how about it, you two other Lojbanists who know that Lojban Tengwar
even exists? Admit this as an alternative mode? Or damn it as making
Lojban Tengwar even more intractable? I think as an alternative mode it'll
cause little damage, myself: the minute you see more than one long vowel
carrier, you'll know this is not a text abounding in {.ii} and {.uu}
attitudinals...

P.S. I know Elron advocates Mode 3, which uses full vowels to handle the
sundry diphthongs. I don't know about Tengwar accepted practice, but I do
think this is ugly, and defeats the whole point of a CV-like 'syllabary'.
So I'd like a solution in place without 'matres lectionis'.

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing  {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
nicholas@uci.edu                   -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias