Tolkien's elfish script (was: Re: demuan identifiers

Fabian scripsit:

> Good point. Personally, I regard most indic scrpts as being separate from
> true syllabaries, as each glyph has a default vowel sound. glyphs for other
> CV combos are made with diacritics, unlike true syllabaries which have
> totally different glyphs.
Well, some do and some don't.  Ethiopic (which will be in Unicode 3.0)
is usually reckoned a true syllabary, but the modifications made to
each grade of letter to show the vowel are pretty systematic.  In
Canadian Syllabics (also in 3.0) they're totally systematic: the vowel
is shown by rotating the glyph, and if there's no vowel, the glyph is
written as a superscript.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin