The silent marks

silero maeli nai.
star quiet be.
(The star is quiet.)

Silmë has two shapes in the classical modes, and Phi keeps only one of them on the page. Every Phi syllable is open (it ends in a vowel, never a bare consonant), so every s in Phi always carries a tehta. Silmë nuquerna is the shape built to hold one comfortably, low enough that a vowel mark above it never crowds the letter beneath. Plain silmë still exists, for a calligrapher who wants it, but the mode this pamphlet teaches writes nuquerna throughout, because throughout is exactly how often the choice actually comes up.

Punctuation is where the mode stops needing new marks almost entirely, because Phi already moved its punctuation into speech. The comma of address, the question mark, the quotation marks: all of them are words (kona, wa, shola and sholo), and a word writes the same in Tengwar as anywhere else. Only two marks in the whole mode are silent, and both exist because a silent mark is justified exactly where no word is standing there to do the work.

The separator is calligraphy's choice, not a rule: plain spacing between words already carries everything the dot would add, and most Phi Tengwar in practice uses it. The period is the one mark every line needs, because sentence-end is the one place in a spoken language that has no word standing at it: nothing is said there, so nothing but a mark can show it. spoken_punctuation is the pamphlet that earns this point in full; here, it is enough to know that Phi did not forget to give Tengwar a comma. It never needed one.