John Cowan wrote:
Mark E. Shoulson scripsit:
It's not unlike what Hebrew does on a very small scale with its furtive
patah: the vowel is encoded after the consonant but pronounced before
it. It may not look too sensible when you read the sequence of
characters--but who reads the sequence of characters anyway? *Writing*
the sequence of characters may be a little more tricky, but generally
things are read more than they are written anyway.
Yeah, but we're talking a *radical* rearrangement that would make
textual analysis practically impossible:
a lebrethe glithnoile
slivirne pnena mriile
o mnele galra lenetha!
na-chraede plana-driile
o gladharmemni nenrotha
fnauliso el lninthano
nve aera, si nve aerano.
Try doing sensible morphological analysis of *that*.
If you know you're analyzing Sindarin, then you know what the
rearrangement has done. Morphological analysis is a complicated thing;
a program doing it can surely be smart enough to put the vowels back
into logical order from canonical. And if you're not doing it by
computer, why, where's the problem?
And of course, in the mode of Beleriand the text would be completely
different, and not just because vowel letters were replacing the vowel
signs.
Of course it would be. And Arabic written in Latin letters has to be
analyzed differently too (yes, the situations aren't really symmetric,
since Latin isn't a native script for Arabic. But I think it still
makes sense).
Besides, you have a better idea? :)
~mark
