para-grammatogenesis

Some people amuse themselves at inventing languages and scripts; that sport’s most famous player was of course Tolkien. And some avidly study whatever notes Tolkien left concerning his Elvish language family.

Tolkien invented at least three scripts: Sarati, an alphasyllabary; cirth, a full alphabet; and tengwar, used both as an alphasyllabary (in the Ring Verse) and as a full alphabet (on the West Gate of Moria). But in human history such scripts have been invented less often than syllabaries, in which no two of the symbols for ti ta ki ka are similar. (The alphabets listed are more numerous, but most of them are descended from the same Semitic ancestor and most of the alphasyllabaries from Brahmî.) So I wonder whether the T-linguists would be offended if one were to design a syllabary for Elvish.

A syllabary works best for a language in which each syllable consists of a single consonant (or none) followed by a single vowel, as in many Polynesian languages. None of the attested Elvish languages has this property, but Proto-Eldarin apparently “did” (or came as near it as does Japanese); we can imagine an Elvish orthography as conservative as that of modern Greek, in which several different vowels and diphthongs converged to /i/ but are still distinguished in writing. Ventris cracked Linear B on the assumption that it was Greek written in an open syllabary — though Greek never had only open syllables.

Sindarin has a vowel that was not used in the protolanguage; this came about by umlaut as in German: /u, o/ was partially assimilated to /i/ in the next syllable, becoming /y, œ/*; and the final /i/ was later lost — but could be retained in writing, affecting the preceding vowel just as does English final e. Hm, that means a word that really does end in /i/, e.g. Istari (Wizards), would need an extra explicit vowel in writing; such words are relatively rare.
(*In Sindarin, /œ/ later merged with /y/ or /e/ depending on context, bringing the repertoire of vowels to six.)