In a message dated 2001-07-06 17:25:33 Pacific Daylight Time,
cowan@mercury.ccil.org writes:
>> Although nobody denies the
>> greatness of J.R.R. Tolkien as an author and scholar, it is extremely
>> unlikely that he intended the beautiful and carefully designed Tengwar and
>> Cirth scripts to be used by real humans to write real languages for use in
>> everyday life.
>
> Well, real humans *have* done so, starting with JRRT and his son
Christopher,
> and going on to lots of enthusiasts, and if they are not exactly used for
> laundry lists, the same is true of many other scripts as well.
Perhaps I should have said that real-life use was not Tolkien's *primary*
intent for the scripts. Of course there are some who might want to use them,
more or less seriously.
I can identify with Michael Everson and his refrigerator notes because I do
the same thing, although my repertoire is certainly much more limited than
his. I sometimes write shopping lists and such in Cyrillic, Greek, Runic, or
my own conscript. If someone wants to do the same with Tengwar or Cirth,
more power to them.
The difference is that Deseret and Shavian were designed with this as the
*primary* goal -- that people would use these scripts on *at least* equal
footing with the Latin script, for everything from shopping lists and love
letters to traffic signs, marriage licenses and government proclamations.
> Furthermore, the Tengwar and the Cirth have been used and are being used
> to write English as well as JRRT's invented languages, and in such a way
> that (unlike Pigpen, e.g.) they cannot be taken as mere ciphers.
Very true. How did these usages develop? Are they mentioned in Tolkien's
manuscripts, or did they develop later?
>> This goes double for some of the other scripts
>> listed in the ConScript registry. Some appear *only* on the author's Web
>> pages, alongside elaborate descriptions of fantasy worlds.
>
> I don't think that anyone, certainly not Michael or I, ever intended the
> CSUR as a sort of vestibule or waiting area for Unicode registry. Lots of
> the scripts there should never move from it. But some few have Real
> World justifications which ought not to be dismissed out of hand.
I definitely agree, and did not intend to sound otherwise. In addition to
the scripts that have been proposed for Unicode (Deseret, Klingon, Tengwar,
Cirth), there are lots of scripts that haven't been and never will be. As I
wrote some months ago, I proposed my own conscript for CSUR but would never
dream of proposing it for Unicode, because it doesn't belong there.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Jul 07 2001 - 02:22:03 EDT