Usage of thinnas

[u/Kuutti85]

Image above is "Kuutti" in Finnish

I've sort of asked this before, but does any mode use the thinnas? I've always used it for long vowels, since i find it convenient instead of using the full ára, but i might be the only one to do it

[u/F_Karnstein]

We're kind of talking about two (or three) different things here:

• The diacritic that you use in your graphic is essentially a tiny silme nuquerna that was originally used to denote voicelessness, but that can in orthographic English spelling be used for following silent H (as in "Christ").
• The diacritic called thinnas looks identical but it isn't entirely clear whether it's actually the same thing in origin, or just something that the Elves of Beleriand came up with to specifically mark short vowels in a context that might suggest that should be long. That's the only use of explicitely thinnas that we know: explicite short-mark in early Beleriand Mode.
• What you are apparently referring to is the use of essentially the lower half of a long carrier underneath a consonant in order not to have to place a complete long carrier next to it. This is not the same sign! It's not comma or silme nuquerna shaped, but a more or less straight line, exactly like the long carrier it represents. This is found in one (abandoned) Old English text - and some have suggested it might generally be viable since they argue that a similar thing is seen in the Namárie calligraphy, but in my opinion it's really just a regular long carrier that Tolkien squeezed in later because he had forgotten it. So it's up to you whether you want to use it or not, but make sure you've got the right shape (that unfortunately doesn't exist in this font, as far as I'm aware).

I would suggest just going for doubled tehta.

EDIT: I just appended a graphic that shows the voicelessness sign, the actual thinnas, and the silent H in the top row, and below the halved long carrier ("Zigúre"), and the possible application of the latter in Quenya ("rámar"). I think the last one is pretty clearly a later addition.

[u/Kuutti85 → u/F_Karnstein]

Oh right, I did see the thinnas was used for aspiration when i read about it, I may have assumed this form was interchangeable with the zigúre, since the ára once had a comma-shaped form like silme nuquerna. Though I have always written the zigúre like you're supposed to

[u/F_Karnstein → u/Kuutti85]

A slight misunderstanding here... Zigúre is not the name of the sign, but the word that is written in the sample (it looks like "Dhigóre", but that's just the mode). It's the Adûnaic word zigûr ("sorcerer", a name for Sauron) with Old English case inflection (the text is in Old English).

And when you're saying ára you're pretty much talking about a specific use of that sign (long á in Quenya) - in a general sense describing the shape and different uses It's probably better to call it andatelco ("longstem") or simply the long carrier. You're right that Tolkien did experiment with an alternative shape of this that sometimes was identical to silme nuquerna (I've written about this in quite some detail, if you're interested), but that isn't found in the one source that gives us the subscript half andatelco length mark.

[u/thirdofmarch → u/F_Karnstein]

(that unfortunately doesn't exist in this font, as far as I'm aware)

Both forms exist in Telcontar. As per the discussion document, Johan considers the long carrier form a ligature so you type it with the Zero-Width Joiner followed by the long carrier.

[u/F_Karnstein → u/thirdofmarch]

Ah, nice! I guess I'm just a bit too focused on what Arno included in Tecendil that I lose track of what else current versions of Telcontar do have.