Re: New Site
From: | Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> |
Date: | Friday, August 8, 2003, 13:57 |
Quoting Jean-François Colson <bn130627@...>:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ian Spackman" <ianspackman@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 1:48 PM
> Subject: Re: New Site
>
>
> > >
> > >There's something I don't understand in the title written with the
> Tengwar
> > >script.
> > >Why is there a vowel carrier (the last character) with no vowel diacritic
> > >above or below it?
> >
> >
> > IIRC Tolkien wrote that one vowel - often a - was often taken as
> > understood. It seems especially appropriate in rendering something
> Indian,
> > since the Indic scripts often have an "inherent" a, albeit of another
> sort?
>
> Sorry, YRC: "In Quenya in which a was very frequent, its vowel sign was
> often omitted altogether. Thus for calma 'lamp' clm could be written. This
> would naturally read as calma, since cl was not in Quenya a possible initial
> combination, and m never occured finally. A possible reading was calama, but
> no such word existed."
>
> IIRC in most (all?) Indic scripts there's a diacritic which supresses the
> inherent vowel. How do you represent that in Tengwar?
You don't. You might want to look at David Salo's piece on Quenya spelling,
which can be found at http://www.elvish.org/elm/spelling.html .
Andreas