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.<\/p>\n
Tolkien invented at least three scripts: Sarati<\/a>, an alphasyllabary<\/a>; cirth<\/a>, a full alphabet<\/a>; and tengwar<\/a>, 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<\/a>, in which no two of the symbols for ti ta ki ka<\/i> 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. 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<\/i>. Hm, that means a word that really does end in \/i\/, e.g. Istari<\/i> (Wizards), would need an extra explicit vowel in writing; such words are relatively rare. 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; … Continue reading
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\nA 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<\/a>); 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<\/a> on the assumption that it was Greek written in an open syllabary — though Greek never had only open syllables.<\/p>\n
\n(*In Sindarin, \/œ\/ later merged with \/y\/ or \/e\/ depending on context, bringing the repertoire of vowels to six.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"