The Tengwar in English and Japanese (日本語のテングゥアのモード)

J.R.R. ト−ルキンの文字は美しいけど、英語はその字がちょっと複雑です。テングゥア（トールキンの字）で、英語より日本語は書きやすいよ。そして、これは”日本語のテングゥアのモード”です。上の図はいろは歌 です。中の図は用例です。下の図は五十音です。
このウェブサイトに、テングゥアについて英語で読める。

J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar, used for writing his Elvish languages as well as English and other European languages, is truly a beautiful script: it is steeped in the calligraphic traditions of medieval European writing, elegantly and systematically represents most consonant sounds, has strong lines and a hypnotic, engaging repetition of basic shapes.

But, as a script, the tengwar causes me great frustration. Tolkien devised an extraordinarily elegant way of representing consonants, but he never really settled on a way of consistent or systematic way of representing vowels. There are full modes and tehta modes, all varying. Even the full modes barely have enough vowels for English, and the tehta modes are wholly inadequate. Furthermore, many fans of the scripts find phonemic English writing confusing, and so most people write in the so-called "orthographic" modes, which often write consonants phonemically and vowels according to their representation in the Latin alphabet.

Using the five vowels of the Latin alphabet to write the dozen-plus vowels of English is an ugly hack. Using the Latin vowels as written in English in an otherwise phonemic script is an ugly hack of an ugly hack.

Many people are intrigued by the idea of writing English in an abugida, and the tehta modes are probably as close as it's practical to come. But I find it pretty awkward. There are a two main problems with writing English this way: English has numerous consonant clusters, and English has too many vowels to use diacritics easily.

But it'd be great for Japanese! Japanese has a simple syllable structure, a simple vowel inventory, and is already written with a syllabary. So here is a Japanese mode for the tengwar.

For more information about the tengwar, consult the guides at Amanye Tenceli or Tolkien script publishing. These samples were created using the Code2000 font, which encodes the tengwar as in the ConScript Unicode Registry. The iroha is above, a a few sample sentences follow, and the tables of tengwar and kana are at the bottom.

These tengwar here generally follow rōmaji. The usage of súle for つ and anto for づ are unsystematic, but seemed like the best borrowing. The long vowel carrier is used in an unusual way; it is merely placed after a letter to show that the vowel is long. Note also the bottom bar used for palatized consonants, and I've offered no way to represent the sokuon っ.

このモードはロマ字みたい。本当は日本語を日本語の字で書くことがいいけど、テングゥアが面白い。





EDIT (July 26, 2009)
Significantly revised, so one can write with a sokuon. Use the doubler bar (underbar) to mark a consonant that would be proceeded by a sokuon.

今このモードで促音を書ける。