From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 21:07:04 EDT
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
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