> As someone or other said, "I believe that hitherto -- *hitherto,* markyou -- [we have] entirely overlooked the existence of", well, scripts that might cause a conflict between these esteemed principles.
The reason why the UTC should tackle the encoding of Tengwar is not so much because it would help in the publication of Elvish poetry, but because confronting the architectural issues it poses for encoding would make an excellent tutorial case for how the two principles of combining mark order and
logical order impact the task of coming up with an appropriate encoding for a complex script. And it would starkly illustrate the fact that an appropriate character encoding does not necessarily directly reflect the phonological structure of a language as represented by that script.
Some rather old discussion papers on this topic may be found at http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/tengwar-vowels.pdf and http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/tengwar.pdf
It *is* a problem. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
