You know you're spending too much time thinking about Unicode when you hear about the new "Lord of the Rings" movie and your first thought is about Tengwar and Cirth, the scripts invented by Tolkien and encoded in the ConScript Unicode Registry <http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/index.html> but not, at least yet, in Unicode proper.
If you have seen the movie or even the trailer, you may have noticed the Tengwar inscription on the ring. I thought, "Uh oh, I wonder if I'm going to have to learn Tengwar now." I never learned it due to the spookily abstract way it was described in the ConScript proposal: "The Tengwar script is a system of consonantal signs without strictly fixed values; their glyphic structure comprises a matrix of potential phonetic relationships, rather than a set of fixed relationships between sound and character." Whoa, that's deep. Anyway, the main point of this post is to show that some folks still haven't grasped the distinction between fact (full-fledged Unicode) and fiction (ConScript). If you visit the official Web site for the "Lord of the Rings" movie at <http://www.thelordoftherings.com> and click on "Tengwar Links," you will discover the following links: > Unicode Standard: Cirth ConScript > Unicode specifications of the Cirith [sic] script. > > Unicode Standard: Tengwar ConScript > Unicode specifications of the Tengwar script. So now a whole lot of Tolkien fans, old and new, are going to find these links to the CSUR pages for Tengwar and Cirth, without knowing the difference between Unicode and ConScript and without seeing the main CSUR page that explains this difference, and will conclude that these two Elvish scripts are officially encoded in Unicode. Oh well. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
