Subject: Re: [lojban] Tengwar

From: cmeclax po'u le cmevi'u ke'umri <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:51:45 -0400

On Thursday 09 August 2001 21:15, 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.

The way I do it is like this:

A consonant with two vowels (like {bai}) is written as "bai", with both 
vowels on one letter. The first is to the left of the second, unless the 
second is y, in which case it is a dot below the letter.

An apostrophe is written as halla, with the vowel attached to its upper 
right, unless it is y. If there are two vowels, the first is above the 
second, unless the second is y, in which case the first is attached to the 
upper right, and the second is below the halla.

A vowel separated by a comma from the previous vowel is written on the short 
carrier. Thus {seka'a la mori,as bau la kuzdul} is written as "sekaha 
lamori0as baulakuzdul". Words may be run together when the lexing algorithm 
makes it clear where the breaks are.

I have one example of this so far, at the top of my website: 
http://lexx.shinn.net/cmeclax/. I intend to put some more up, but hacking 
nilsimsa, resending bounced remail, and real life take priority.

co'omi'e cmeclax.