Phi practice How Phi names people

Reading 7 of 11

Part 6

The spoken capital

Phi vocabulary and productive Phi-form names have no capital letters: not for sentences, not for names, in either mode of writing. The canon ruling (Letters) rests on one principle: romanization is only one way of writing Phi, with Tengwar as its peer, and Phi meaning cannot depend on Latin case. What capitals do for names, ne does aloud.

This chapter is the writer's checklist: four surfaces where an English-trained hand will reach for a capital, and what Phi does instead on each.

01Romanized Phi

Phi text stays lowercase at sentence starts, in titles, and in names. ne sulae shua. and ne samira shua. never grow a capital, whatever position they hold on the page. A source name outside Phi preserves whatever case and script its own medium requires without creating an exception inside Phi.

02Gloss lines

A name glosses as itself: the gloss line under ne thinoe reads NAME thinoe, never NAME seed, and the line under ne samira reads NAME samira even though no lexicon entry exists. A name is carried, not translated: the referent crosses into the gloss line, while lexical meaning does not. (The uppercase in NAME belongs to the particle's label, like PST or VOC; labels are spelled by the lexicon, and they are the only tall letters a gloss line ever has.)

03English narration

When English hosts a Phi name (in a translation line, a note, a story about the household) the name stays lowercase: sulae arrives with siora. English is hosting the name, not naturalizing it; the word belongs to Phi, where no case exists to inherit. This one is not enforced by any validator. It is yours to keep.

04Tengwar

Open the Tengwar pamphlet and look at any paired line: nothing is taller than anything else, and nothing ever was. The mode never had a case to lose, which is exactly the situation the ruling protects. A name written in tengwar looks like the word it is; the only thing that marks the person is the small sign of ne standing before them, same as the voice does. The reader of that mode does not see the capital. They hear it, the way a listener always has.

05Why the language holds this line

Phi's punctuation ruling and its letters ruling are the same thought twice: a silent mark is justified only where no word is visible to do its work. The question mark fell to wa, the quotation marks to sha … sho, the comma of address to kona, and the capital letter of a name fell to ne, the one that was audible all along. Only the period survives, because sentence-end genuinely has no word. A name does.

06Drill: lower the flags

Each item has been damaged by an English-trained hand. Repair what needs repairing.

  1. Narration: Sulae carries a gift.
  2. The gloss line under ne thinoe seniku.: NAME seed smile.
  3. A romanized line opening a paragraph: Ne keruko shua.
  4. A line of the tengwar mode, checked letter by letter for a stray capital.

Answers: 1. sulae carries a gift. 2. NAME thinoe smile.: the person crosses into the gloss, the seed stays home. 3. ne keruko shua.: paragraph position earns nothing. 4. nothing to repair, and there never will be; that mode is the reason the rule exists.