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G'day Phillip (and all)
At 12:04 AM 8/19/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Just F.Y.I.: Although Esperanto is already phonetically spelled and so
>does not need Shavian, a man in Kalamazoo (MI, USA) has adapted it.
Wasn't that a song? [g]

>But note that he reassigned several characters to better fit Esperanto's
>set of sounds. If one has not learned the English sounds associated with
>each symbol, then the Esperanto version works very well. But those who
>already know the English will probably have very harsh words to say
>about the Esperanto version.
My interest is that one day I hope to make an artificial language, and I've
been searching for a suitable script for it. That's what brought me in here
in the first place.

[snip]

>--Phillip Driscoll
Cheers
- .+'^'+. A.M.Callaway ----------------- acal@...
- A N D Y Melbourne, Australia --- a.callaway@...
- `+.,.+' www.ozemail.com.au/~acal -------------------------

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> I think (correct
> me anyone if I'm wrong) that with one form of dyslexia the
> sufferer has
> trouble with orientation; that is to say the letters b,p,q &
> d are all the
> same to them, and also n & u. Shavian, I think, would exacerbate this
> problem.

I read something along these lines, too -- Mark Rosenfelder, in his Language
Construction Kit, said (at http://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#alphabet):
"Keep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the
conceptual graphic space, so that letters can't be confused for one another.
Tolkien is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by
dyslexia." This implies that a script such as the Quenya/Sindarin Tengwar
script, with just about all letters looking essentially the same (a stem
with a bow, just differing in number of bows and orientation of stems), is
particularly bad for dyslexics

Cheers,
Philip

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> I think (correct
> me anyone if I'm wrong) that with one form of dyslexia the
> sufferer has
> trouble with orientation; that is to say the letters b,p,q &
> d are all the
> same to them, and also n & u. Shavian, I think, would exacerbate this
> problem.

I read something along these lines, too -- Mark Rosenfelder, in his Language
Construction Kit, said (at http://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#alphabet):
"Keep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the
conceptual graphic space, so that letters can't be confused for one another.
Tolkien is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by
dyslexia." This implies that a script such as the Quenya/Sindarin Tengwar
script, with just about all letters looking essentially the same (a stem
with a bow, just differing in number of bows and orientation of stems), is
particularly bad for dyslexics

Cheers,
Philip

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Well, . . .

> My interest is that one day I hope to make an artificial language, and I've
> been searching for a suitable script for it. That's what brought me in here
> in the first place.

If you want an "artificial" language that has practical benefits and a community of speakers world-wide, you don't need to make one--Esperanto already exists, has two million or more speakers/writers, and has had more than a hundred years of testing and refinement. There have been literally hundreds of other artificial language projects, and none of them has even approximated the successful use of Esperanto. Most of them have remained small projects occupying the interests of small groups of people. I guess it depends on your goal. If you want to do it for fun, creativity, fantasy, etc., inventing your own language is fine. Just don't expect it to be very useful world-wide.

The adaptation of shavian to Esperanto was not very effective. There's a lengthy review in a recent issue of the magazine "Monato" which discusses the problem in detail.

Lee



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Dear Lee, I think you are right on target with your comments on Shavian
and Esperanto. I am an Esperantist and have been since 1963. It may not
be perfect, but it works in fact and in the present. I was a believer on
the basis of ideals prior to visiting Hungary; after that I was even a
pragmatic believer! But this problem and those involving most other
languages are irrelevant to Shavian, which deals with the problem of
English, which has an impossible spelling system. I have my doctorate in
anthropological linguistics, and no language I've dealt with has a
writing system so alien to its pronunciation as does English (excepting
Chinese, which makes no claim to representing speech sounds--and has
developed several phonetic systems to augment the characters; and
Japanese use of kanji--and they also have alternate phonetic writing
systems).
English pelling as it now is, is an unbearable burden we place on our
children. The brightest of my students often could not spell because the
"system" makes no sense. One does, in fact, have to memorize EVERY
single word. There's a reason why in the United States we have an annual
National Spelling Bee. It's to find the child in our country who can
cope with the greatest amount of irrationality.
The "phonics approach" is a bluff that makes some people money. Even if
you posit rules for English Spelling, each rule has so many exceptions,
that you have to memorize which words are in accord with the rules, and
which words are exceptions to the rule. If I speak to you an English
word that you do not know, you cannot write it down correctly with any
certainty whatsoever. It might follow one of the "rules" or it might be
one of the "exceptions."
I suspect that much resistance to reforming English spelling in any way
has to do with the fact that we would be forced into admitting that the
things we are now calling "dialects of English" are not dialects but
separate languages. All languages tend to develop into mutually
incomprehensible forms that are eventually called different languages.
I was a nurse in the United States military. I grew up in the U.S.
Midwest. My Basic Training instructor was from southern Alabama, and I
could not understand him until the last day of this training. I
eventually figured out that you do whatever everyone else is doing, but
as a linguist I would deny we spoke the same language.
For our children's sake we must get rid of the burden of our irrational
spelling system, and spell exactly the way we speak. Children deserve to
discover the wonderful world available in written matter as soon as
possible, instead of spending years and years learning to read and
write. I think that traditional English spelling should qualify under
the U. S. Constitution as "cruel and unusual punishment.
Thanks for the sounding board! Dankon pro via letero!! Via dufoja
sameideano en la s^tato Was^ington. Fr. Dan Szczurek



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Dear Sir, Thank you for the most welcome comments on my suggestions
for modifying Shavian.
Yes, I think your comments on dyslexia are very interesting. I will
run them by someone at the nearby University of Washington at Seattle,
Department of Education, when people come back from summer vacation in a
few weeks. I will look up the site you recommended. Modified Latin
systems, which have such a following in the United States, are like land
mines for dyslexics. Because of the lack of sufficient vowel letters,
they all end up using digraphs for many vowels. Dyslexics need digraphs
like a giraffe needs a sore throat!
As for the difficulty in remembering the abbreviations, I suspect it
may be because we read so little in Shavian! I'm constantly transcribing
the daily prayers (I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian priest) into
Shavian so that I get practice in using them daily. After a while they
come naturally. I suspect children would learn them much more easily. I
did Braille transcription for over 5 years, and to the end had to use
the rule book and dictionary of abbreviations! My abbreviations (I must
check this) should represent the most common words in English. And
reading comes before writing, as understanding comes before speaking. If
there was more to read than one Shaw play, I think you'd find it much
easier to remember. Read first, write later.
For a while I thought of trying Shavian on my children, but I think at
times they already feel like lab rats. Both my wife and I were raised
bilingually. I was raised in Chicago speaking Polish and our primary
school (Eastern-rite Catholic) was multi-bi-lingual. From
8 am until 2:30 pm, the Polish students studied in Polish, the
Ukrainians in Ukrainian, the Bial-orusy in Bial-orus, after Divine
Liturgy in Old Church Slavic at 6:45 am. From 2:30 until 4:30 we were
mixed together to learn English. We always had lots of Polish books at
home, so while I was reading idiot sentences in English, I was learning
science, geography, and history at home in Polish. By the way, Chicago
is to this day a place of ethnic group neighborhoods. The neighborhood
adjacent to ours was Mexican, and at the local playground I picked up
Spanish, which a beloved nun taught me to read in 2 hours.
There are a lot of Szczureks who speak Spanish in Chicago, and a number
of Rodriguezes who can understand Polish.
We wanted to raise our children at least bilingually in principal. I
also speak Macedonian and my wife has picked up some Polish. The
children ended up tri-lingual as a matter of fact. It turned out to be a
very positive benefit. Our children learned to read Polish and
Macedonian easily, so we stocked the shelves with books in both
languages. We also became criminals because we translated our children's
favorite books into both Polish and Makedonski. Then we pasted those
texts over the text in the books, and xeroxed them just for the
children. We don't sell them or anything. Color xerox was [and is] too
expensive, but our children preferred to color the pages in their own
colors anyway. We don't sell them or anything; they're just for private
use. Now, with the liberation of Eastern Europe, books in Polish and
Macedonian are easily available.
Point made: a rational, consistent spelling system allows children to
get interested in the world and follow their curiosity. And I'm FOR
CHILDREN!!! Sorry to have blabbed on so long. I'm disabled and
serve a parish only part time, and the REAL Polish national sport is
passionate discussion.... Thanks, Dan



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Lee A. Miller wrote:
>
>The adaptation of shavian to Esperanto was not very effective. There's a
>lengthy review in a recent issue of the magazine "Monato" which discusses
>the problem in detail.



I read the scathing article in Monato, and I think the reviewer was a bit
unfair. His entire complaint was that he had already learned Shavian for
English, so he found the Esperanto version hard to read because the
sound values for several symbols are quite different. The reviewer
thought the changes to be quite stupid, but there were good reasons
for each change. For those Esperanto speakers who have never seen
Shavian before, the system works quite well.

I have several copies of a 72-page booklet published by Mr. Starling
who adapted the alphabet. It is entirely in Esperanto with some explan-
atory material in the Latin alphabet and reading material in Shavian.
If anyone would like a copy, I'd be glad to send one.

Sorry, I'm not trying to turn this into an Esperanto forum.

--Phillip Driscoll




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> p = people t = to k = can f = for thigh = with > b = but d = do g = go v = of they = the > s = so sh = she ch = each y = yet > z = is j = just w = we h = he > l = like m = me i (if) = in ash = as ou = out > on/ah = on r = are n = and yu = you > I would like to remind you that thigh = with would not work for everyone, because around here, people would spell it "wiH" if I could convince them to use Shavian, and in other regions, people would spell it "wiT" . It is a regional thing. Also "V" is already the spelling for "you." :) If I could make any modification to Shavian, it would be to change the names of the letters. The present ones would be good to use if you're a ham radio operator, but the Layman would prefer shorter letter names, i.e. "pee", "tee", "kay", etc. > Thanks for your attention! Dr.Daniel Szczurek, MST, Ph.D. > (Anthropological Linguistics)

sinsClI,
/lIvF /tUkD
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nerd52-@... wrote:
original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/shavian/?start=226
>There have been literally hundreds of other artificial language
projects...
>
> Lee
>
Correct, and you can see a lot of them at http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk
/conlang.html. I also happen to be a "conlanger" (that's what we model
language builders call ourselves) and I am working on a project to use
Shavian, but there seems to be no letter for a voiceless uvular
fricative...but that isn't a conversation for here. Anyways, most
conlangs are for personal joy (yes, we have fun doing it, too) but a
sizeable amount of them have the dream of being the international
standard. They are to the global community what Shavia are to the
English-speaking community.

Levi


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> Sorry, I'm not trying to turn this into an Esperanto forum.
>
> --Phillip Driscoll
Ni havas ... er, we have plenty of other Esperanto forums. Have you
seen how many are out there? Hope to see you in one of them. :)

Levi


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