Part 3 · phonology — Chapter 8 · music of phi

Writing Phi down

Every Phi sentence in this book is spelled with nineteen letters and letter-pairs: ten consonant letters, four two-letter fricatives, and five vowels. That set is not a stand-in for some real orthography waiting elsewhere. It is the orthography: one spelling per sound and one sound per spelling, so anything you can say you can write, and anything you can read you already know how to pronounce. There are no silent letters and no spellings to memorize. If you worked through chapter 7, your spelling lessons ended there, and you never noticed having them. The dots that split syllables when a word is introduced (mi · a) are a teaching aid, not spelling; the written word is just mia.

Two absences do as much work as the letters. Phi writes no capital letters: not for sentence openings, not for names. Case is a habit of the Latin script, and what a capital does for a name, the particle ne does aloud. And the page carries exactly one silent mark, the period. Everything else English trusts to symbols, Phi says: wa is the question mark, shola and sholo are the quotation marks, kona is the comma of address. The spoken punctuation pamphlet walks the whole audit. The rule underneath it is the one to carry forward: a mark may carry meaning only if every way of writing Phi can carry it.

That rule matters because romanization is one hand among peers, not the language itself. Phi has a second hand already: a Tengwar mode, fitted to the script Fëanor gave Quenya and Sindarin. The fit is unusually clean, because tengwar want exactly what Phi's phonology guarantees. Every syllable opens with a consonant, so every syllable is one consonant shape wearing its vowel as a small mark above it, and when a second vowel follows in hiatus, that vowel rides below the same shape. Other tengwar modes need a carrier stroke for vowels with no consonant to sit on; Phi never leaves a vowel stranded, so its mode needs no carrier at all. The tengwar_mode pamphlet teaches the hand glyph by glyph, and its pages render every line twice, once in each script.

The third mode is, for now, a name. Canon reserves a place beside these two for the glyph mode: a script of Phi's own design, owing nothing to any other language's letters. No such script yet exists. Until it does, the romanization is the script of record and the Tengwar mode is its calligraphic companion. The reservation is already doing quiet work in every sentence you have read: because a mark must survive every mode, including one not yet drawn, the page holds one silent mark and a language that says the rest.