At 18:25 -0500 2001-11-08, John Cowan wrote:

>To some degree. Tengwar (in its own world, not in our world)
>began as an abjad with vowel signs and evolved into a
>full alphabet, both modes eventually being in use simultaneously,
>more or less analogous to Hebrew (abjad-style) and Yiddish (alphabet-
>style).

Just so.

>Many but not all of the letters are featural. Those which are,
>have a vertical part which encodes manner of articulation and a looping
>part which encodes place of articulation; e.g. a descender means
>"voiceless stop" and a clockwise loop to the left of the descender
>means "labial", so the unique letter with both encodes /p/.
>Pictures and text at http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.html

Updated documents:

http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1641/n1641.htm
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/tengwar.pdf
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/tengwar-numbers.pdf
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/tengwar-vowels.pdf

> > Anyway, I don't recall any Tolkien script having an inherent
> > unmarked vowel.
>
>In the Tolkien language Quenya when written in Tengwar, the vowel sign
>for /a/ is optional because reconstructible. This is not true for
>other languages when written in Tengwar (nor for Quenya written in Latin
>script).

If I were devising a Tengwar mode for Devanagari (and I suppose I
will do) I would assume the inherent vowel.
--
Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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