Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 3/12/22 20:38, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
> Unicode's mission is to provide a standard encoding for the world's 
> writing systems.  Tengwar is one of those systems. Suggestions made 
> earlier regarding working around the estate's bans aren't about 
> fooling anybody.  Rather the goal should be to get Tengwar encoded 
> while honoring the estate's wishes.  Such a blind encoding shouldn't 
> be viewed as "pseudo-coding".  As has been pointed out, Unicode does 
> not encode glyphs, so Tolkien's glyphs aren't necessary.  Chart glyphs 
> could be control pictures along the lines of "last resort" fonts.  If 
> the naming convention for CJK ideographs and other encoded scripts 
> isn't good enough for Tengwar, then name them something else.  Like 
> "FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT TT LETTER A", or whatever.

OK, to be sure, CJK ideographs have meaningless names (mostly). But 
there is also information in the standard which specifies clearly 
exactly which graph is intended.  That's part of the standard, or nobody 
would know what you meant.

Like Ken said before, if all you say is "FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT TT LETTER 
A" and don't define what that means in the standard, it might as well be 
PUA.  If you *do* define what it means in the standard, then it doesn't 
matter what the _name_ is, you still run the risk of annoying whomever 
you don't want to annoy.

> Meanwhile, the encoding should avoid any mention of Tolkien, his 
> works, his art, his glyphs, and his critters. 

If you don't mention them, how are you describing what the character 
refers to?

~mark