Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[Richard Wordingham]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2022 09:57:39 -0700
Doug Ewell via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> In separate messages, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> 
> > Might there be a copyright protection on 20th century additions to
> > the Cyrillic script that prohibits their use to bring the Russian
> > government into disrepute?  
> 
> That depends on what the attorneys retained by the Estate of the
> Preslav Literary School have to say about it.
> 
> I guess this was a facetious question, but other than making a
> comment about current events, I'm not sure what purpose it serves
> with relation to Tolkien’s scripts.

It's a possible case where untrammelled permission to use new letters
may not have been given.

> > For example, are the tehtar compulsorily ligated letters (2001
> > proposal) or combining marks (earlier, apparent encoding in the
> > CSUR). The CSUR appears to lack an encoding for Tengwar - it has a
> > provisional encoding, which is no better than a font-encoding.  
> 
> The section “Modes” in the CSUR proposal is instructive here; it
> reconciles the fact that the tehtar are non-spacing characters with
> the dotted-line glyphs in the chart.

The description at https://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.html
implies that that tehta codepoints are applied to the previous
consonant, which implies a visual order encoding, as opposed to the
2001 phonetic order encoding.  While a phonetic order encoding seems
appealing for a language with two modes mostly differing as CV v. VC
ligaturing, the scheme does seem to need language tagging for tolerable
rendering.  Under the 2001 scheme, which proposes an encoding in the
SMP, not in a PUA, the tehtar would merit being letters, just like the
non-spacing letter U+0D4E MALAYALAM LETTER DOT REPH.

> The Tengwar proposal, like many CSUR proposals (but unlike most
> “real” Unicode proposals in recent years), lacks a list of Unicode
> properties in UnicodeData.txt format. But in general, the distinction
> between an “encoding” and a “provisional encoding” seems overly
> pedantic for CSUR, which was always a fun, part-time project, and on
> which most work ended almost 20 years ago.

Nothing to do with interoperability, then?

Richard.