Shavian eGroup Archive Browser

This is true - 'Shavian' is only a recent dubbing for the alphabet; but bear THIS in mind:

Internet search engines don't search for names of sites. Whatever other 'keywords' are listed under the 'META NAME=keywords' tag are indexed too, so the site would come up on a search engine regardless of whether the granddaughter searched for either 'shaw alphabet' or 'shavian alphabet'.

At present, I have listed a great many keywords under the 'META NAME=keywords' tag. They are:

shavian, shaw alphabet, alphabet, shaw, shavian alphabet, george bernard shaw, bernard shaw, kingsley read, phonetics, phonetic alphabet, proposed british alphabet, new alphabet, spelling reform, orthography, androcles, androcles and the lion, hugh birkenhead, ross demeyere, lionel ghoti, bob richmond, dennis falk, lee miller, andrew callaway, phillip newton, sidney tanaban, neil stewart, michael rider

(If there are any glaring omissions, or problems, please mention them to me.)

Hugh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rsrichmond@... [mailto:rsrichmond@...]
> Sent: 07 April 1999 03:31
> To: shavian@...
> Subject: [shavian] The Name of the Rows
>
>
> In thinking of a name for our permanent Web site, we need to
> consider Internet search engines and the people we hope will be
> using them to find us.
> The alphabet is consistently called Shaw Alphabet in Androcles
> and the Lion, which I believe does not use the word Shavian at
> all. The use of the word Shavian to describe the alphabet came
> much later. A searcher, particularly an elderly one, is much more
> likely to know about Shaw Alphabet than about Shavian.
> Remember that the scenario we hope for is the Web savvy
> granddaughter asking the computer illiterate grandfather
> "Grandpa, what's that funny writing you and Aunt Jane write to
> each other with?" And Grandpa is going to reply "Shaw Alphabet"
> and granddaughter is going to drop that into a search engine....
>
> Bob Richmond
> http://members.aol.com/RSRICHMOND/shavian.html
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
>

> At present, I have listed a great many keywords under the 'META
> NAME=keywords' tag. They are:
>
> shavian, shaw alphabet, alphabet, shaw, shavian alphabet,
> george bernard
> shaw, bernard shaw, kingsley read, phonetics, phonetic
> alphabet, proposed
> british alphabet, new alphabet, spelling reform, orthography,
> androcles,
> androcles and the lion, hugh birkenhead, ross demeyere,
> lionel ghoti, bob
> richmond, dennis falk, lee miller, andrew callaway, phillip
^^^^^^^
> newton, sidney
> tanaban, neil stewart, michael rider
>
> (If there are any glaring omissions, or problems, please
> mention them to me.)

My given name has only one 'L'. Perhaps you can change the spelling in the
META tag.

Thanks a lot & Cheers,
Philip 'one L' Newton

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> At present, I have listed a great many keywords under the 'META
> NAME=keywords' tag. They are:
>
> shavian, shaw alphabet, alphabet, shaw, shavian alphabet,
> george bernard
> shaw, bernard shaw, kingsley read, phonetics, phonetic
> alphabet, proposed
> british alphabet, new alphabet, spelling reform, orthography,
> androcles,
> androcles and the lion, hugh birkenhead, ross demeyere,
> lionel ghoti, bob
> richmond, dennis falk, lee miller, andrew callaway, phillip
^^^^^^^
> newton, sidney
> tanaban, neil stewart, michael rider
>
> (If there are any glaring omissions, or problems, please
> mention them to me.)

My given name has only one 'L'. Perhaps you can change the spelling in the META tag.

Thanks a lot & Cheers,
Philip 'one L' Newton

________________________________

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>
> This is true - 'Shavian' is only a recent dubbing for the alphabet; but bear
> THIS in mind:

I've given my reason for why I prefer Shavian to Shaw on this matter... :)

> Internet search engines don't search for names of sites. Whatever other
> 'keywords' are listed under the 'META NAME=keywords' tag are indexed too, so
> the site would come up on a search engine regardless of whether the
> granddaughter searched for either 'shaw alphabet' or 'shavian alphabet'.

Hotbot does, at least, does check URLs for the keywords, along with others
used on the web pages...

> At present, I have listed a great many keywords under the 'META
> NAME=keywords' tag. They are:
>
> shavian, shaw alphabet, alphabet, shaw, shavian alphabet, george bernard
> shaw, bernard shaw, kingsley read, phonetics, phonetic alphabet, proposed
> british alphabet, new alphabet, spelling reform, orthography, androcles,
> androcles and the lion, hugh birkenhead, ross demeyere, lionel ghoti, bob
> richmond, dennis falk, lee miller, andrew callaway, phillip newton, sidney
> tanaban, neil stewart, michael rider
>
> (If there are any glaring omissions, or problems, please mention them to
> me.)

Those who know of me on the 'net know me best as "Quozl" (named for an
Alan Dean Foster science-fiction novel about aliens resembling
rabbit/monkeys) or "Quozl Mephit"... (Don't delete "Dennis Falk",
though...)

D.M.Falk, aka Quozl!

dC /SEvia,

TANks fP H fIdbAk V hAv givan mI wiH rigRdz t H web sFt; bikoz v it F hAv bIn Ebal t kantinVd bildiN H sFt OvD H pyst fV dEz. unfPcUnatli it stil iznt publiSabal jet; n it mE not bI publiSt fP At lIst anuHD wIk...

F Am gOiN t /Jxmani tamorO (until nekst wIkend), n konsikwentli H web sFt's divelapmant wil bI frOzan until F ritxn. F Am sori abQt His; but F promis V HAt F wil kantinV wxk on it Az sMn Az posibal. mInwFl, plIz kIp sendiN eni ofDiNz HAt V mFt hAv, Ivan if F kynt sE eniTiN in riplF; it wUd mEk mF dE t sI a mElboks fUl v Hem wen F kEm bAk! (but eniTiN At Yl wUd dM.)

F'l spIk t V agen in a wIk; hAv fun!

TANks,

/hV
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A brief history of the Shaw alphabet

By R. G. Collin

George Bernard Shaw, an Irishman by birth, was one of England's greatest playwrights. He was an expert on the English language and served on the BBC's Spoken English Advisory Committee from 1926 to 1939. His continual use of written English drove him to seek a more economical way to write it down. As a result he learned Pitman shorthand and most of his plays were written, fully spelled with this 40-letter alphabet. In his later years he was passionate about reforming written English and sought a wholly new alphabet "to be used and taught concurrently with the old alphabet until one or the other proves the fitter to survive."

As early as 1901 Shaw was publicly supporting spelling reform. Shaw called one of his plays, Pygmalion, an "advertisement in the science of phonetics" and between the first edition in 1912 and the last in 1942 he experimented with different ways to represent the cockney accent of one of the plays characters. Sometime during this period Shaw came to the conclusion that digraphic schemes or proposals that used dicritical marks or extra letters would not suffice to clarify the existing alphabet.

In January 1942 Ronald Kingsley Read (in later life he dropped the Ronald) wrote to Shaw about some ideas for phonetic writing. Shaw was encouraging in his reply and a friendly correspondence ensued. In 1943 Read sent a "manual" to Shaw setting out a new alphabet and its detailed rationale. Shaw was impressed and wrote to another English spelling reformer C. K. Ogden "This is far and away the best alphabet with the best head at the back of it that has yet come my way." Kingsley Read was certainly qualified for designing a new alphabet, he was educated as a designer and started his own company as a lettering expert, supplying everything from neon and shop-signs to sign writing and calligraphy. Furthermore he was interested in phonetics as a result of his involvement in drama and speech training.

Shaw died in 1950 a wealthy man, most of that wealth being earmarked for his new English alphabet, which would use a completely new set of between 40 and 50 characters. His Will also requested that an estimate be made of the world's man-hours wasted in writing and printing English with an alphabet of 26 instead of 40 or more letters, and a valuation in money of those wasted hours. Although Shaw's intentions were clear enough, other beneficiaries of Shaw's Will led by the British Museum, challenged the legal validity of the Clause on development of the new alphabet. After a long and costly hearing this Clause was pronounced invalid on a legal technicality. Eventually, with Sir James Pitman's intervention, some £8,300 from Shaw's estate was given towards the development of the new alphabet.

In 1958 the Public Trustee, as executor, announced a world-wide competition to secure ideal designs for the Shaw alphabet, the main object being "the saving of labour giving a means of writing and printing the English language which will be more economical of the writers time, of the paper and ink of the printer, and of transport and storage." Competitors had one year in which to prepare their alphabetic entries at which time 467 entries were received from around the world. A panel of judges including Sir James Pitman and Peter MacCarthy, a lecturer in phonetics at Leeds University, evaluated the entries. Four of the entries were found to conform to the requirements stipulated in the Will. One of these entries was from a Canadian, Pauline Barrett, the other three were British, J. F. Magrath, S. L. Pugmire and Kingsley Read. The prize money of £500 was distributed evenly amongst these four entries. One of these four, the alphabet designed by Kingsley Read, was eventually chosen to fulfil the final condition in Shaw's Will which was that the chosen alphabet be used alongside conventional written English to produce a book containing his play Androcles and the Lion. This book was to be distributed free to all public libraries of Britain, the Commonwealth and North and South America and to all National libraries of the world.

On 20 November 1962, 12 years after Shaw's death, two editions of the book were published by Penguin Books. The hardcover edition of 13,000 books was distributed free to libraries around the world as stipulated in Shaw's Will while an additional 40, 000 paperback copies were issued commercially. The introduction of Androcles and the Lion included an offer by Sir James Pitman to "arrange 'circles' of five or six who, drawn together in a friendship by Shaw's alphabet, will all circulate their own letters to which each in turn will add." Pitman however became too busy to carry out this promise and Read undertook to handle the invited correspondence from those that were interested in developing their skills in the Shaw alphabet. As a result of this correspondence Read was able to test the first version of the Shaw alphabet through an organised, world-wide correspondence between people of greatly varying speech accents including British (from many counties), American and Australian. He also published a small duplicated magazine in the Shaw alphabet called ShawScript for a number of years after the publication of Androcles and the Lion.
From Read's extensive experience with writers of the alphabet from a number of different English speaking regions of the world he observed some deficiencies in the alphabet. In particular four of the original characters in the Shaw alphabet tended to be "malformed grotesquely." Surprisingly however there was little variation in actual spelling. Read states that "after four years of handing correspondence it seemed clear to me that some graphic and phonetic changes in the alphabet would increase its already striking facilities." Read went on to implement a refined "final alphabet" which was further tested with writers of the original Shaw alphabet willing to trial the changes. Tests of the resultant second alphabet that Read termed Quickscript were excellent. None of the letters were found hard to write or read after a reasonable amount of practice and they could often be joined to each other for even quicker writing without losing their readability. Since 1967 Quickscript has been used satisfactorily and according to Read "all who have experience of writing in both alphabets prefer Quickscript's facilities and its relative simplicity in sound-writing."
Read died in 1975 at the age of 88. He would have been pleased to know that the Quickscript alphabet gained further impetus when in 1979 it was publicised in a widely read and intriguing book published in Australia called The Surprise Edition of Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 2. The 27-page article written by Cole Turnley, who preferred the name Second Shaw Alphabet to Quickscript, gave an extensive introduction to the alphabet including its features and use. Unfortunately the article generated very little interest with the Australian public. It appears that both the original Shaw alphabet and its derivative, Quickscript, have not gained the support that such efficient and effortless methods of writing deserve. Sadly, Shaw's conviction that such an alphabet would quickly gain support through its inherent merits, and become widely adopted, seems as fanciful today as ever.

References
Brown, B. The Shaw alphabet competition - some background. Simplified Spelling Society Newsletter, April 1991.
Turnley, C. Second Shaw alphabet. The surprise edition of Cole's Funny Picture book No. 2, 1979.
Read, K. Quickscript, its alphabet and manual.
Smart, P. The Kingsley Read alphabet collection: a catalogue. The Library University of Reading, 1983.
Shaw, B. Androcles and the lion. Penguin Books, Public Trustees Edition, 1962.
Read, K. Sound-writing 1892-1972. In The Kingsley Read alphabet collection: a catalogue.

Further information
For a comparison of the Shaw alphabet with that of Quickscript see Bob Richmond's site at http://members.aol.com/RSRICHMOND/quickscript.html

Any person interested in obtaining a copy of the Quickscript manual can email me at collinr@.... The manual is 26 pages long and is available for the cost of photocopying and postage.

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Evenin' all

It's on! The beta version of the Phonetic Translator is now available for download at www.ozemail.com.au/~acal/Downloads.html. Also ver 1.01 of my ShawScript font.

Enjoy.

Toodle-Pip
A.M.Callaway
acal@...
www.ozemail.com.au/~acal

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dir /SEvW (And aspeSlI /A./m./kAlawE):

F hAd a gO At pPtiN H fanetik prOgrAm TiNI tM /pxl, Just bEst on H daskripSan ov hQ it wxks. wozn't tM hRd. it duzn't wxk igzAktlI lFk H DiJanal (fP igzympl, it duzn't lMp OvD And OvD until V pres </entD> insted ov entDiN a fFl nEm), but HAt wUdn't bI tM hRd t fiks.

F fQnd it IzID t prOgrAm (n probablI YlsO fystD) if H VzD spesafFz a trAnzlESan tEbl bafP H CMU dikSanerI iz red in, bikoz Hen H lUkup tEbal kAn mAp iNgliS wxdz strEt t /SEvWn, P EAFonetik, P wotevD, insted ov hAviN t trAnzlEt AE And AH And AO etsetxa Ovx n Ovx agen. HAt wE, V kAn OnlI trAnzlEt fFlz wiH H sEm trAnzlESan tEbal in wun seSan, wic -- hQevD -- F dM not balIv t bI a hVJ inkanvInians. wun iz probablI mP lFklI t wont t konvxt fP egzympl menI fFlz Yl tM /SEvWn, HAn fP egzympl wun fFl t bOT /SEvWn n EAfonetik.

if enIwun'z intrastad, F kAn pOst sPs kOd P send sumwun E /zip. F testad H prOgrAm on HP-UX, but it SUd wxk enIwer wer /pxl wxks.

(bF H wE: mF skript trAnslEts AH0 Az 'a' n AH1/AH2 Az 'u' t difDenSiEt batwIn strest SwA [Az in 'up'] n unstrest SwA [Az in 'abQt'].)

wYrniN: big memarI Itx -- wun Vs kEm in At abQt 45 megabFts; if in dQt, /pxl lFks t TrO memadI At a problam, n F'm SUD H CMU dikSanerI in /pxl hAS fPm tEks awE mOst ov HAt. hQevx, His woz bafP F rIrOt Ha prOgrAm t stP Ha CMU dikSanerI in prI-trAnslEtad fPm; it's abQt 13 megabFts yftD HAt.

cirz, /filip

(bF H wE, His tekst woz prI-trAnslEtad wiH mF skript :-)


Dear Shavia (and especially A.M.Callaway):

I had a go at porting the phonetic program thingie to Perl, just based on the description of how it works. Wasn't too hard. It doesn't work exactly like the original (for example, it doesn't loop over and over until you press <Enter> instead of entering a file name), but that wouldn't be too hard to fix.

I found it easier to program (and probably also faster) if the user specifies a translation table before the CMU dictionary is read in, because then the lookup table can map English words straight to Shavian, or EAfonetik, or whatever, instead of having to translate AE and AH and AO etc. over and over again. That way, you can only translate files with the same translation table in one session, which -- however -- I do not believe to be a huge inconvenience. One is probably more likely to want to convert e.g. many files all to Shavian, than e.g. one file to both Shavian and EAfonetik.

If anyone's interested, I can post source code or send someone a ZIP. I tested the program on HP-UX, but it should work anywhere where Perl works.

(By the way: my script translates AH0 as 'a' and AH1/AH2 as 'u' to differentiate between stressed shwa [as in 'up'] and unstressed shwa [as in 'about'].)

Warning: big memory eater -- one use came in at about 45 MB; if in doubt, Perl likes to throw memory at a problem, and I'm sure the CMU dictionary in Perl hash form takes away most of that. However, this was before I rewrote the program to store the CMU dictionary in pre-translated form; it's about 13 MB after that.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>
Datenrevision GmbH, a Hummingbird Company
http://www.datenrevision.de/
Tel: +49-40-797 007-37 Fax: +49-40-797 007-10
________________________________

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I'm pleased to say I like Phillip Driscoll's collection of Shavian
TrueType fonts (both Mac & PC) at http://www2.c4systm.com/~phild - Worth
the downloading... :)

....Quozl!

helO agen /SEvia!

mE F fxst apolaJFz fP not pravFdiN muc inpUt djUDiN H lyst fV wIks; F wil indevD t sE a lot mP in H nC fVcD...

nQ, H 'TYt fP H dE': intDest on H '/net - n posibli bijond.

rIsantli F fQnd an RkFv fP H sci.lang <news:sci.lang> nVzgrMp; in His RkFv woz a sekSan rigRdiN a diskuSan HAt hAd tEkan plEs in 1996 rigRdiN H /SY /Alfabet. (sI H diskuSan hC: http://websom.hut.fi/cgi-bin/imagemap/websom/sci.lang-new/maplinks/1_dx2.map?90,177.)

a numbD v pIpal involvd in H diskuSan wx ripItadli stresiN HX wiS t get in tuc wiH uHD 'SEvian-sAvi' pRtiz. unfPcUnatli H diskuSan drFd up n did not sIm t gO eni fxHD HXyftD; nevDHales, H fAkt HAt F kAn stil fFnd pIpal intDestid in His Alfabet dispFt Yl H sxc-enJin-indekst web sFts n Ivan His mEliN list. hQ meni mP pIpal in H vystnas v H /intDnet R Qt HX wiH hMm wI hAvant spOkan jet?

bikoz H /intDnet iz stil isenSali a mFnoriti mIdia, H maJoriti v iNgliS-spIkiN pIpal mE nevD hAv Vzd it bidP; bX in mFnd HAt H SEvian vxZan v /AndraklIz n H lFan woz brYt Qt wE bAk in 1960. bEst on H patenSal numbD v pIpal intDestid in H Alfabet fQnd on H /intDnet, H numbD v pIpal hM SX H intDest of H /intDnet mE bI At lIst ten tFmz hFD. P pDhAps mF estimESanz R hOplasli roN; mEbi Ivan a hundrad tFmz hFD!

nQ plIz dOnt TiNk HAt F'v gon mAd n F'm Just TiNkiN wiSfUli. F'm Just trFiN t ikspres mF pqnt Adikwatli: wI Just hAv nO FdW At prezant v hQ meni pIpal R solid sapPtDz v H Alfabet. unfPcUnatli, F kAnot saJest hQ H hek wun wUd set avQt fFndiN Qt.

wxT a TYt, F TiNk...

koments welkam - TANks in advyns fP eni risIvd,

/hV
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