xeeniseit wrote:

>My dictionary tells me the same thing, but I imagine that in exaggerated or at
>least very emphatic pronunciation, the last vowel of "gladiolus" could be the
>same as the vowel of "but".

Certainly.

>Supposed the grave accent in that word would represent a schwa sound.
>Then the question is: Why hasn't that schwa sound been represented by a dot
>underneath? Imagine the word with a dot underneath instead of the grave
>accent: that dot would be placed under the lambe, but then the word would
>most probably be misread as 'gladi-owel-ce' instead of 'gladi-o-lus'.

I assume that you meant "placed under the silme", but yes, I think
that's true. Perhaps it's simply *because* of such a possible
confusion that the grave accent tehta was used here instead of the
subscript dot. Another possibility is that in this particular mode
the subscript dot was only used to represent silent _e_ and not weak,
schwa-like vowels (see below). It's also possible that the subscript
dot was not used in this particular mode at all. (By "this
particular mode" I mean the mode used specifically in this document
alone, which may or may not be identical in all respects to modes
used in other documents.)

Two important points to consider:

(1) Tolkien's phonemic systems don't necessarily distinguish between
the schwa and the sound in "cup". No such distinction is made in
Rúmilian modes for English: in Rúmilian documents R8, R10, and R11 in
_Parma Eldalamberon_ #13 the single dot is explicitly stated to
represent *both* of those sounds.

(2) The grave accent tehta appears only once in Tolkien's unpublished
papers, to the best of my knowledge, and there it is used over óre to
represent the sound that we normally see represented by óre with a
subscript dot, i.e. the "er" sound. In the document in which this
appears (circa 1968), the subscript dot is only used to represent
silent _e_, and the discussion of vowel tehtar in this document makes
no mention of a tehta specifically for the vowel of "but".

In conclusion, I think you would be well within your rights to use
the grave accent to represent the vowel of "but", but I think you
could use it for schwa as well.

Cheers!

Arden

--
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Arden R. Smith erilaz@...

Perilme metto aimaktur perperienta.
--Elvish proverb
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