From Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Fri Aug 10 00:13:07 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 10 Aug 2001 07:13:07 -0000 Received: (qmail 43923 invoked from network); 10 Aug 2001 07:13:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 10 Aug 2001 07:13:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO n31.groups.yahoo.com) (10.1.2.220) by mta1 with SMTP; 10 Aug 2001 07:13:07 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Received: from [10.1.2.51] by hp.egroups.com with NNFMP; 10 Aug 2001 07:13:06 -0000 Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 07:13:05 -0000 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: Tengwar Message-ID: <9l01i1+hncu@eGroups.com> In-Reply-To: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Length: 3024 X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster X-Originating-IP: 62.104.218.72 From: "A.W.T." --- In lojban@y..., Nick NICHOLAS wrote: > > 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'. Some time ago, I was "earnestly playing around" with adjusting my own tengwar fonts mapping for my German keyboard. I followed elrond's line, just altered the "apostrophe" a bit. Don't think that the long carrier (not needed elsewhere) is too bad an idea for making an abbreviature for {.uu}. Here are some samples on http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/LOJBAN.RXML .aulun.