Thank you both for shedding a little light into a dust-bunny and odd-sock
decorated cranny of the RR.
I just wanted to add a comment on the Alphabets:
The Tengwar as described seems to me more a table for decoding pronunciation
than an alphabet as such. I have always suspected that it is a slight
rebuke to the way English is spelled and coded into writing: The letter
shapes go back 3000 years, and no longer refer to the original meanings (for
example, our letter A was originally upside-down, was a picture of a cow's face
with horns, and the original letter upside-down-a was the word for cow.
Now A's just an arbitrary symbol. The shapes of the other letters, except
'O', don't give a clue to their pronunciation either. I think JRRT liked
his way of coding speech, and deliberately designed the tengwar so that the
rows and columns coincided with pronunciation. This makes it especially
easy to learn, and I secretly prefer it to our current
alphabet.
Some who wander are lost.
