Tengwar, Burmese, Lao, etc.
When I was in high school, I invented
"Mlang",
a
nearly phonetic alphabet
for representing English (standard Southern
California TV accent (pre-ValleyGirl)).
I took class notes in Mlang
all through college, and I still write faster in its
cursive form than in English.
I also adapted Tolkien's Elvish letters
(the Tengwar:
)
to a SoCal English set of phonemes.
(Sorry, no online examples.)
My posting a couple of days ago,
about
A History of Writing, prompted me to look again
for the scripts that are most similar to the Tengwar.
Online pages about Tolkien's language often mention
that Quenya (the Elves' language) was heavily influenced
by Finnish, but I couldn't find any mention of what real-world
written languages influenced the Tengwar.
Looking at the script dictionary in the back of the
Gaur book, it appears to me that the most influential
letterings would have been Burmese, Lao, Malayalam,
and Sinhalese, with Thai being a bit further away.
Leftover links, from this and my other weblog:
Oh, and I haven't seen "Return of the King" yet.
I will.
2:53:52 PM
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