From grey.havens@earthling.net Tue Jan 30 23:55:26 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: grey.havens@earthling.net X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_2_1); 31 Jan 2001 07:55:26 -0000 Received: (qmail 14116 invoked from network); 31 Jan 2001 07:55:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 31 Jan 2001 07:55:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO hermes.epita.fr) (163.5.255.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 31 Jan 2001 07:55:24 -0000 Received: from ding.epx.epita.fr (ding.epx.epita.fr [10.225.7.13]) by hermes.epita.fr id IAA27626 for EPITA Paris France Wed, 31 Jan 2001 08:54:24 GMT Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 08:53:58 +0100 (CET) X-Sender: To: jboste Subject: Re: [lojban] Tehtar for vowels, and nasals In-Reply-To: <0101302242280B.07119@neofelis> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE From: Elrond On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Pierre Abbat wrote: > Since Lojban has no triphthongs, could we not express diphthongs by putti= ng two > tehtar on one tengwa? The first would be to the left of the second, unles= s the > second were y, in which case the first is above and the y below, or the t= engwa > is halla, in which case maybe one is to the left of the halla and the oth= er to > its right, or maybe the first is just above the second (there isn't > room on top of a halla for tehtar). True. This is the very idea that makes recognition of lojban syllabaries written with tengwar much much easier. However a decent set of full-letter vowels (additionnaly to the tehtar) should be chosen for it to remain eye-appealing. > > 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. 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. 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... If you really think that tengwar n=FBmen 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. By agreeing that (for example) a single curl stands for `n' and a double one for `m', and allowing for placement either above or below other tengwar, writing the nasals just becomes far simpler. Hope that helps. raph --=20 While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. -- Linus