"Plene" spellings (with extra vowel glyphs, like ma-a-an instead of ma-an or e-es-zi instead of es-zi) are common in Anatolian cuneiform. Sometimes they disambiguate between signs with multiple readings: ke can also be read as ki, and er as ir, so the extra vowel in har-ke-e-er makes it clear that the word is harker rather than *harkir.
Other times, though, there's no ambiguity, so the plene spelling seems to indicate some other kind of distinction. I've seen arguments for vowel length, accentuation, glottal stops, and various combinations of the three. But it's not clear to me which of these theories is most widely accepted, if any.
Is there any sort of consensus on what these plene spellings represented?
