Shavian eGroup Archive Browser

PRONUNCIATION versus GRAMMAR


Paige Gabhart writes: “I believe the idea that Shavian spells everything one way is clearly wrong and not necessary for good communication.”

In my country where there are eleven official languages, standard PRONUNCIATION is essential for communication. English is the lingua franca of the courts, parliament, schools and universities most of the population are trying to deal with a language that is not their own. English taught by non-English teachers leads to distortion of the language, which is becoming unrecognisable in some instances. Even newscasters can be unintelligible. We hear that “a bed flew into a Boeing”, “The President unvealed a plague” and other misleading information, the meaning of which must be guessed at. Bad grammar is far less misleading.

As I aim at using Shavian for teaching by writing it under the word, it is imperative that a standard pronunciation be agreed on for the purpose. Since all traditional alphabet printing adheres to traditional English spelling as used in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the pronunciation guide of the OED that I intend to use. Swerving from this can only lead to confusion, as there are so many accents and variations around. Robert Burns might like all spelling to be like his own:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

And foolish notion.

If one is using the Shavian symbols as a game played as a hobby, it is interesting and amusing to “hear” the different accents of Australia, the Deep South of America and ‘Oxford’ English, but these variations have to be for the pleasure of advanced students who have mastered a standard pronunciation. L’Académie Française was formed by the Cardinal de Richelieu in 1635 to allay the chaos caused by erratic spelling and pronunciation that made French almost unintelligible to the French. Standardisation of spelling et cetera saved the country millions. The whole purpose of Shavian is to obviate ambiguity. The problem of ambiguity would fall away if each sound were to have a symbol of its own. The sound of the symbol would be inflexible – it would be foolish to re-create a possibility of ambiguity in spelling.

I believe that Shavian should standardise spelling to suit the pronunciation of the English language most easily understood by those who do not have English as their first language and have difficulty in grasping the meaning of it.

Remember that people never use words they do not know how to pronounce and so vocabulary dwindles and common expletives are used instead of meaningful words. Whole film scripts are made up of oaths and obscenities to characterise people unable better to express themselves.

May I have your comments and transliteration to the Shavian alphabet of the two sentences:

A bird flew into a Boeing, & The President unveiled a plaque.




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It is difficult for me to agree with your last sentence. My explanation follows. Quentin Kyle c/o cutler@... <mailto:cutler@...>

-

PRONUNCIATION versus GRAMMAR


Paige Gabhart writes: “I believe the idea that Shavian spells everything one way is clearly wrong and not necessary for good communication.”

In my country where there are eleven official languages, standard PRONUNCIATION is essential for communication. English is the lingua franca of the courts, parliament, schools and universities most of the population are trying to deal with a language that is not their own. English taught by non-English teachers leads to distortion of the language, which is becoming unrecognisable in some instances. Even newscasters can be unintelligible. We hear that “a bed flew into a Boeing”, “The President unvealed a plague” and other misleading information, the meaning of which must be guessed at. Bad grammar is far less misleading.

As I aim at using Shavian for teaching by writing it under the word, it is imperative that a standard pronunciation be agreed on for the purpose. Since all traditional alphabet printing adheres to traditional English spelling as used in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the pronunciation guide of the OED that I intend to use. Swerving from this can only lead to confusion, as there are so many accents and variations around. Robert Burns might like all spelling to be like his own:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

And foolish notion.



If one is using the Shavian symbols as a game played as a hobby, it is interesting and amusing to “hear” the different accents of Australia, the Deep South of America and ‘Oxford’ English, but these variations have to be for the pleasure of advanced students who have mastered a standard pronunciation. L’Académie Française was formed by the Cardinal de Richelieu in 1635 to allay the chaos caused by erratic spelling and pronunciation that made French almost unintelligible to the French. Standardisation of spelling et cetera saved the country millions. The whole purpose of Shavian is to obviate ambiguity. The problem of ambiguity would fall away if each sound were to have a symbol of its own. The sound of the symbol would be inflexible – it would be foolish to re-create a possibility of ambiguity in spelling.

I believe that Shavian should standardise spelling to suit the pronunciation of the English language most easily understood by those who do not have English as their first language and have difficulty in grasping the meaning of it.

Remember that people never use words they do not know how to pronounce and so vocabulary dwindles and common expletives are used instead of meaningful words. Whole film scripts are made up of oaths and obscenities to characterise people unable better to express themselves.

May I have your comments and transliteration to the Shavian alphabet of the two sentences:

A bird flew into a Boeing, & The President unveiled a plaque.

---- Original Message -----

From: Paige Gabhart <mailto:pgabhart@...>
To: shavian@... <mailto:shavian@...>
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 3:07 AM
Subject: Re: [shavian] A kwCi

At 05:46 PM 5/29/2001 -0400, you wrote:


Am I correct in concluding that, if Shavian were the "kQn v H relm ," this program


(snip)



3) ...would achieve almost complete accuracy, because every word has only one spelling, and its spelling is not context-dependant.


I would have to say "3)" above is not correct. The posts on this site in Shavian quite regularly spell words differently than I would. When the differences are not due to their or my lack of familiarity with Shavian, it appears to be because they pronounce the words differently than I do.

In the Quikscript Manual, Kingsley Read wrote that spelling should not be a cultural fetish. I believe he meant that spelling should be permitted to reflect the speech of the writer. It should not be imposed from on high by teachers and dictionaries, and its importance should not be over-emphasized, as it is now. After all, given the poor correspondence between the roman alphabet and English phonemes, a "good speller" is just someone with a better memory than average.

The only way to reach one "standard" spelling per word is to attempt to impose a standard speech on English speakers, and then you have the impossible task of choosing whose speech to emulate. Additionally, since the English-speaking world has no equivalent of the Academie Francaise, who would enforce this choice?

I do not find variant spellings much of a problem. First, the actual number of variants is not all that large in a typical piece of writing. Secondly, when you do encounter a word spelled differently than you would spell it, you can almost always decipher it. Generally, it merely causes a temporary slowing in reading speed.

In closing, I believe the idea that Shavian spells everything one way is clearly wrong and not necessary for good communication.


Paige Gabhart




- /bob /mk/brMm
/wUdstak /nV /jDk

"wun simpol Az az gUd Az anuHD prOvFdid evriwun atAcez H sEm mIniN tM it."
- /gRJ /bxnRd /SP

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On Friday, June 1, 2001, at 12:30 , cutler wrote:



May I have your comments and transliteration to the Shavian alphabet of the two sentences:



A bird flew into a Boeing, & The President unveiled a plaque.




a bxd flM intM a /bOiN, n H prezadant unvEld a plAk


--
Scott Harrison

/SFvWn: kMx fP disleksW ?



Excerpted from an article in the US edition of TIME MAGAZINE, March 26, 2001:

In the past couple of decades, scientists have learned a great deal about the neurological causes of dyslexia. But what they hadn't yet explained is why its incidence varies so from country to country - and what that difference means. Last week, Italian French and British researchers proposed an answer. The variability, they wrote in Science, depends greatly on the complexity of writing systems.....

The findings mesh perfectly with what we already know about how the brain reads, says Dr, Bennett Shaywitz who co-directs the Center for the Study of Learning and Attenttion at Yale Unicersity. The brain, he explains, does not have an innate reading ability - as it does for speech - so it deals with the written word by converting it into the nuts an bolts of famliar phobetic language. According to prevailing theory, the reading centers of the brain break words down into sound units known as phonemes and recognize them as the elements of a phonetic code. Then the centers assemble that code to derive meaning fron the symbols on the page. Most of us learn to do this seamlessly by the time we're seven years old.

In their study, the scientists compared the reading ability of dyslexics from Britain, France and Italy and found that Italian dyslexics read far better than their French and English counterparts. ... : The difference is not in the languages themselves," says lead author Eralso Paulescu of the Uniseristy of Milan Bicocca. "It's in their writing systems, which vary in complexity for historical reasons."

English has 1,120 different ways of spelling its 40 phomemes. By contrast, Italian needs only 33 combinations of lettters to spell out its 25 phonemes. As a result, reading Italian takes a lot less effort, and that's probably why the reported rate of dyslexia in Italy is barely half that in the US, where about 15% of the population is afffected to varying degrees. By some estimates, Americans spend more than $1 billion a year to help their kids cope with dyslexia. Many Italian dyslexics, on the other hand, aren't even aware they have a problem - and would notice it only if given a battery of psychological tests.
-0-

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Cutler wrote:

May I have your comments and transliteration to the Shavian alphabet of the two sentences:

A bird flew into a Boeing, & The President unveiled a plaque.


a bxd flM intM a /bOiN, n H prezadant unvEld a plAk

(I've noticed that this is identical to how Scott writes it)

Hugh Birkenhead

All,

Over the last few weeks I have been working to construct a set of advanced
Shavian message boards, designed to complement the current eGroups
e-mail-based solution.

The message boards cater for postings in both Roman and Shaw alphabets. The
boards are also web-based, and so require no HTML-enabled mail reader to
post in Shavian. The Shavian postings utilise the 'Lionspaw' font, which
seems to be the most commonly held font face.

My main reason for wishing to departing from the current eGroups system is
that some longstanding members of the group seem to be becoming somewhat
alienated by the dominance of certain topics, e.g. phonetics, use of
characters, etc. Everyone has to read what one person has to say, whether
they want to read it or not. With the message boards, topics can be
discussed in separate forums, and only accessed if the reader expresses an
interest in doing so. Also, if more people are going to join the Shavian
online community, there should be a way that they can ask their questions
without them getting swamped by other ongoing discussions.

At present the boards can be found HERE:
http://www.shavian.f2s.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

It would be great if as many of you as possible could try these boards out,
if only for you to decide if my solution is any improvement on our current
system. If it turns out that it is lacking in certain areas I would
appreciate it if people could let me know by posting on the boards. If it
turns out that it works well, I would equally appreciate feedback.

Many thanks in advance for any comments received.

Regards,
Hugh Birkenhead
www.mixsynth.btinternet.co.uk




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At 12:38 PM 6/1/01 +0200, you wrote:





PRONUNCIATION versus GRAMMAR



Paige Gabhart writes: I believe the idea that Shavian spells everything one way is clearly wrong and not necessary for good communication.

In my country where there are eleven official languages, standard PRONUNCIATION is essential for communication. English is the lingua franca of the courts, parliament, schools and universities most of the population are trying to deal with a language that is not their own. English taught by non-English teachers leads to distortion of the language, which is becoming unrecognisable in some instances. Even newscasters can be unintelligible. We hear that a bed flew into a Boeing , The President unvealed a plague and other misleading information, the meaning of which must be guessed at. Bad grammar is far less misleading.


You are in a situation vastly different from most English speech communities around the world. English makes distinctions between its vowels, which many non-native speakers apparently find difficult to hear and reproduce. You clearly have newscasters who have not mastered English phonemes if they are making statements such as you quote above.

But my point was that English is spoken world-wide. There are and I expect there will always be some variations in pronunciations. Americans do not have much trouble understanding what Australians say, any more than the British have trouble understanding the speech of Canadians. If we can understand the speech, it is obvious we can understand the minor variations in spelling that will inevitably occur. The widespread dissemination of all types of English speech by modern telecommunications seems likely to prevent any further significant fracturing of English into parochial dialects that are unintelligible to other English speech communities. No matter what major variety of English -- American, British, Canadian, Austalian, etc. -- you base your Shavian writing upon, your students can learn that and they will be intelligible to other English speakers. And they won't be flying "beds" into Boeings.

If you try to mandate "correct" spellings of words, which does not mirror the actual speech of a given community of speakers then you are putting us back into the same situation we have now with the roman alphabet -- an ostensible alphabetic system which fails the basic premise of an alphabet, i.e. one symbol for each sound in the language. Secondly, given the inevitable, although slow, shift of pronounciation over time, maintaining the concept of a "correct" spelling in a revised alphabet such as Shavian or Quikscript will tend to fossilize the written form of the language so that spelling does not evolve and stay current with pronunciation. Thus, over time we would be back in the same boat we are in now with the roman alphabet.

As Kingsley Read noted in the introduction to his Quikscript Manual, one of the reasons he discarded the roman alphabet was because of the prejudice favoring "correct" spellings. Any attempted revision of the roman alphabet to make it more phonetic while retaining the existing letters runs us headlong into the "correct" spelling problem. For example, can you write "wuz" for "was" or "ruff" for "rough" and not feel illiterate? I cannot.



L Académie Française was formed by the Cardinal de Richelieu in 1635 to allay the chaos caused by erratic spelling and pronunciation that made French almost unintelligible to the French. Standardisation of spelling et cetera saved the country millions.


Yet, as a later post pointed out, French shares with English the distinction of being so inefficient in protraying its pronunciation that its dyslexics have far more trouble than native Italian speakers. I remember a conversation with a French ballet instructor, who was irritated when I commented that French spelling was not phonetic. She told me that French was completely phonetic. The verb ending "aient" comes to mind, which, if I remember correctly, is not pronounced at all. That is certainly phonetic! It would have been useful while they were standardizing French spelling to have made it phonetic at the same time.

Nevertheless, I am not suggesting that some standardization of spelling is not useful. My contention is that the majority of words will be spelled by fluent English speakers the same way. A much smaller percentage will exhibit differences from one speech community to another.



The whole purpose of Shavian is to obviate ambiguity. The problem of ambiguity would fall away if each sound were to have a symbol of its own. The sound of the symbol would be inflexible it would be foolish to re-create a possibility of ambiguity in spelling.


English speakers already pronounce various words differently. You cannot pretend they don't by trying to force one manner of spelling on them. I have read posts by British English speakers stating they use a particular vowel in several words given as examples. Since I would have used 2 or sometimes 3 different vowels in the examples they chose, I am left clueless as to how they actually pronounce that particular symbol. Absent audio files, we cannot know how someone else pronounces a given Shavian symbol.



I believe that Shavian should standardise spelling to suit the pronunciation of the English language most easily understood by those who do not have English as their first language and have difficulty in grasping the meaning of it.


How in the world would you determine this, and whose standard would be chosen?



Remember that people never use words they do not know how to pronounce and so vocabulary dwindles and common expletives are used instead of meaningful words. Whole film scripts are made up of oaths and obscenities to characterise people unable better to express themselves.


You think thugs in movies use expletives because the roman alphabet let them down and they are afraid to pronounce words in front of their peers?



A bird flew into a Boeing, & The President unveiled a plaque.

a bard flM intM a /bOIN. H prezadant anvEld a plAk.


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Thanks for pointing this out. I have been complaining for years that the educational establishment seems to have no cognizance of the connection between the inefficiency of the roman alphabet for writing English and the prevalence of students who cannot read. Their solution is always boils down to "we have to throw more money at the problem and do a better job of teaching students." They seem to have no awareness that, just perhaps, the basic system they are attempting to teach is fatally flawed.

Imagine if you told a student that 2+2=4, except sometimes it equals 5. Oh yeah, and on occasion it equals 7. How well would students learn addition? Is this really much different for a student trying to figure out the rules, who is told that "read" (present tense) is pronounced like "reed," but that "read" (past tense) is pronounced "red."

Rudolf Fleisch, in his book, "Why Johnny Can't Read," addressed this some 40 years ago, yet no one seemed to have heard or believed him.

Paige Gabhart

At 10:45 PM 6/1/01 -0400, you wrote:


/SFvWn: kMx fP disleksW ?

Excerpted from an article in the US edition of TIME MAGAZINE, March 26, 2001:

In the past couple of decades, scientists have learned a great deal about the neurological causes of dyslexia. But what they hadn't yet explained is why its incidence varies so from country to country - and what that difference means. Last week, Italian French and British researchers proposed an answer. The variability, they wrote in Science, depends greatly on the complexity of writing systems.....

According to prevailing theory, the reading centers of the brain break words down into sound units known as phonemes and recognize them as the elements of a phonetic code. Then the centers assemble that code to derive meaning fron the symbols on the page. Most of us learn to do this seamlessly by the time we're seven years old.


I would question this statement, given the prevalence of remedial reading classes.



English has 1,120 different ways of spelling its 40 phomemes. By contrast, Italian needs only 33 combinations of lettters to spell out its 25 phonemes. As a result, reading Italian takes a lot less effort, and that's probably why the reported rate of dyslexia in Italy is barely half that in the US, where about 15% of the population is afffected to varying degrees. By some estimates, Americans spend more than $1 billion a year to help their kids cope with dyslexia. Many Italian dyslexics, on the other hand, aren't even aware they have a problem - and would notice it only if given a battery of psychological tests.



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Hugh:

I've registered on your Shavian BB. It looks great to me.

I would like to make a request. How much trouble would it be to add a
board where people could practice Quikscript in addition to Shavian? We
have the "jerome" font available for writing Quikscript.

Thanks

Paige Gabhart

At 02:39 PM 6/2/01 +0100, you wrote:
>All,
>
>Over the last few weeks I have been working to construct a set of advanced
>Shavian message boards, designed to complement the current eGroups
>e-mail-based solution.
>
>The message boards cater for postings in both Roman and Shaw alphabets. The
>boards are also web-based, and so require no HTML-enabled mail reader to
>post in Shavian. The Shavian postings utilise the 'Lionspaw' font, which
>seems to be the most commonly held font face.
>
>My main reason for wishing to departing from the current eGroups system is
>that some longstanding members of the group seem to be becoming somewhat
>alienated by the dominance of certain topics, e.g. phonetics, use of
>characters, etc. Everyone has to read what one person has to say, whether
>they want to read it or not. With the message boards, topics can be
>discussed in separate forums, and only accessed if the reader expresses an
>interest in doing so. Also, if more people are going to join the Shavian
>online community, there should be a way that they can ask their questions
>without them getting swamped by other ongoing discussions.
>
>At present the boards can be found HERE:
>http://www.shavian.f2s.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi
>
>It would be great if as many of you as possible could try these boards out,
>if only for you to decide if my solution is any improvement on our current
>system. If it turns out that it is lacking in certain areas I would
>appreciate it if people could let me know by posting on the boards. If it
>turns out that it works well, I would equally appreciate feedback.
>
>Many thanks in advance for any comments received.
>
>Regards,
>Hugh Birkenhead
>www.mixsynth.btinternet.co.uk
>
>
>
>
>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/





Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Hi,

I signed up today. It said it was going to mail me my password. That
was four hours ago. When will I get my password?

Thanks...

--- In shavian@y..., Paige Gabhart <pgabhart@c...> wrote:
> Hugh:
>
> I've registered on your Shavian BB. It looks great to me.
>
> I would like to make a request. How much trouble would it be to
add a
> board where people could practice Quikscript in addition to
Shavian? We
> have the "jerome" font available for writing Quikscript.
>
> Thanks
>
> Paige Gabhart
>
> At 02:39 PM 6/2/01 +0100, you wrote:
> >All,
> >
> >Over the last few weeks I have been working to construct a set of
advanced
> >Shavian message boards, designed to complement the current eGroups
> >e-mail-based solution.
> >
> >The message boards cater for postings in both Roman and Shaw
alphabets. The
> >boards are also web-based, and so require no HTML-enabled mail
reader to
> >post in Shavian. The Shavian postings utilise the 'Lionspaw' font,
which
> >seems to be the most commonly held font face.
> >
> >My main reason for wishing to departing from the current eGroups
system is
> >that some longstanding members of the group seem to be becoming
somewhat
> >alienated by the dominance of certain topics, e.g. phonetics, use
of
> >characters, etc. Everyone has to read what one person has to say,
whether
> >they want to read it or not. With the message boards, topics can be
> >discussed in separate forums, and only accessed if the reader
expresses an
> >interest in doing so. Also, if more people are going to join the
Shavian
> >online community, there should be a way that they can ask their
questions
> >without them getting swamped by other ongoing discussions.
> >
> >At present the boards can be found HERE:
> >http://www.shavian.f2s.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi
> >
> >It would be great if as many of you as possible could try these
boards out,
> >if only for you to decide if my solution is any improvement on our
current
> >system. If it turns out that it is lacking in certain areas I would
> >appreciate it if people could let me know by posting on the
boards. If it
> >turns out that it works well, I would equally appreciate feedback.
> >
> >Many thanks in advance for any comments received.
> >
> >Regards,
> >Hugh Birkenhead
> >www.mixsynth.btinternet.co.uk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/




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