Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[James Kass]

On 2022-03-15 12:09 AM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> 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?

It's an abstract character with a unique name.

The suggestion was put forward with the idea of expunging any reference 
to anybody's intellectual property, thereby eliminating any risk of any 
estate getting sand in their knickers.

Of course it is not an optimal solution, interim workarounds seldom are.

Users who really, really need to see the glyphs can install an 
appropriate font and fire up Unibook or BabelMap.

If the estate were presented with two proposals, Plan A and Plan B, 
where Plan A would be optimal and Plan B would be interim -- and the 
estate was advised that the optimal Plan A could not move forward 
without their release but that Plan B needed no such release -- the 
estate might do the right thing.

Maybe the estate will become enlightened in ten or twenty years. Maybe 
it won't.  Would the user community be better served by maintaining the 
status quo or by standardization?

Tolkien didn't invent the concept of abstract characters.