Subject: Re: [lojban] Tehtar for vowels, and nasals

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 15:30:45 +0200

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