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On 19 Jul 2003 at 3:50, Hugh Birkenhead wrote:

> I was going to ask Yahoo Groups if I could take over the moderatorship

Fine with me.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>


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Thanks for your well thought out reply. Comments and corrections below.

--- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On 18 Jul 2003 at 18:55, Star Raven wrote:
>
> > Letter Q W E R T Y U I O P
> > Normal (.) kick ha peep tot lol mum fee sh ch
> > Shift gag ng bib deed roar nun vow zh j
> >
> > A S D F G H J K L
> > out wool on if ash ado egg ah ian
> > oi ooze oh eat ice up age awe
> >
> > Z X C V B N M
> > are air array yea they whip so
> > or ergot ear yew thigh woe zoo

As you can see I have corrected the top row... I had forgotten mum and
nun, so, thanks for the reminder :)

>
> You seem to have put Tall letters on unshifted positions and Deep
> letters on shifted positions, fairly consistently, with a few
> exceptions. I'd suggest you change those for better consistency:
>
> * swap "ha-ha" and "hung" (there's been discussion about whether this
>
> was a mistake or not several times, but that's the way we have the
> alphabet, so I suggest the Tall letter hung be unshifted)
>

Right, I was considering this myself and may yet correct it if there is
more agreement that I should.

> * swap "thigh" and "they" - "thigh" is the Tall letter so should be
> unshifted
>

I used this arrangement because "the" using shavian /they/ in short
form is very common, thus I put it right at hand w/o shifting.

> * "yea" should have "woe" as a shifted equivalent ("yew" could go
> with
> "Ian", for example)
>
> * What's "whip"? (Presumably, this represents the [hw] sound some
> dialects have... what shape does its letter have for you? It's not
> part
> of standard Shavian.)
>

These two points are related. yea and yew are both y sounds and have
the same general beginning form. Whip is the /hw/ sound. I create this
sound by combining ha and woe with a tiny ha at the lower part of the
slash that makes up woe, I could try to explain this further if you
wish. (It evolved while I was hand-writing William Blake poetry in
shavian :)

> * Where's the namer dot? [Ah, hang on. It's on unshifted Q, right?
> Never mind then.]
>
> * Where are "mime" (unshifted) and "nun" (shifted)?
>

Fixed, see above.

> Otherwise, I can't really comment on the arrangement. It's obviously
> not as mnemonic as the arrangment introduced by Ross DeMeyere in his
> fonts, but I suppose something one could get used to. The "simple"
> vowels seem to be fairly consistently in the middle row, the stops,
> fricatives, and affricates in the top row, and the compound vowels in
>
> the bottom row.
>
> I suppose you've made some analysis of the relative frequency of
> sounds
> to assign more common sounds to keys that are closer to the centre of
>
> the keyboard? (I see that "ado" is near the middle, for example,
> which
> makes sense to me, and "out/oil" and "Ian" are out at the edge, which
>
> is also what I would have expected.)
>
> I see P is still free, but putting "mime/nun" on that key is probably
>
> not a good idea; intuitively I would assume those are both fairly
> frequent sounds, especially N (for example, one common frequency
> chart
> for TO letters begins E T A O I N S H R D L U; N is the second
> consonant in there, so it will probably be near the beginning in a
> Shavian frequency chart, too).
>
> Perhaps yours could be a kind of "Shavian Dvorak" keyboard :) Did you
>
> look at the Dvorak arrangement when deciding on this layout?

I have not seen Dvorak, however, it was my intent to create an easy to
follow quickly learned and typed layout that made more since. I found
if I separated the roman letters from the shavian characters, it is
easier for me to think in shavian. Thanks again for great comments.

--Star


=====
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On 18 Jul 2003 at 22:57, Star Raven wrote:

> > * swap "thigh" and "they" - "thigh" is the Tall letter so should be
> > unshifted
>
> I used this arrangement because "the" using shavian /they/ in short
> form is very common, thus I put it right at hand w/o shifting.

OK, I see your point. I'm still not sure, though, whether that
justifies the departure from the regularity.

> > * "yea" should have "woe" as a shifted equivalent ("yew" could go
> > with
> > "Ian", for example)
> >
> > * What's "whip"? (Presumably, this represents the [hw] sound some
> > dialects have... what shape does its letter have for you? It's not
> > part
> > of standard Shavian.)
> >
>
> These two points are related. yea and yew are both y sounds and have
> the same general beginning form.

True--but yea and woe are exactly opposite (Tall/Deep) and should (IMO)
go on the same key even if yea and yew start similarly. (Also, yew--as
a compound letter--is more suited to the bottom row while yea could go
elsewhere as well.)

> I have not seen Dvorak, however, it was my intent to create an easy to
> follow quickly learned and typed layout that made more since.

Well, AFAIK one of the goals of Dvorak was to make it easier to type
(one of the ways it did so was to place vowels under one hand so that
hands would alternate as much as possible).

http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/ is one page that discusses Dvorak and
also has a picture of the layout.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>


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I just found this, you might find it useful:

http://www.agsforums.com/


18-7-03 12:28:12, "Mike" <theomnis@...> wrote:

>Hello everyone...it's been a long time since I've posted..I've been
>lurking. Two of my hobbies include computer game design and Shavian,
[SNIP]




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> > > * swap "thigh" and "they" - "thigh" is the Tall letter so should
> be
> > > unshifted
> >
> > I used this arrangement because "the" using shavian /they/ in short
> > form is very common, thus I put it right at hand w/o shifting.
>
> OK, I see your point. I'm still not sure, though, whether that
> justifies the departure from the regularity.

I have reconsidered this myself, and may yet switch these as you do
have a good point.

> > > * "yea" should have "woe" as a shifted equivalent ("yew" could go
> > > with
> > > "Ian", for example)
> > >
> > > * What's "whip"? (Presumably, this represents the [hw] sound some
>
> > > dialects have... what shape does its letter have for you? It's
> not
> > > part
> > > of standard Shavian.)
> > >
> >
> > These two points are related. yea and yew are both y sounds and
> have
> > the same general beginning form.
>
> True--but yea and woe are exactly opposite (Tall/Deep) and should
> (IMO)
> go on the same key even if yea and yew start similarly. (Also,
> yew--as
> a compound letter--is more suited to the bottom row while yea could
> go
> elsewhere as well.)
>

Um, while breaking away from the logical flips (I admit the hypocracy)
these letters are the voiced/voiceless (woe/whip) and logical change
(yea's slash/yea+ooze) that made the most sense. This was not the first
break from the orginal design I put in, but I decided to keep only
these changes for ease of use. I will probably change they/thigh so
that it matches the rest however.

I probably traveled along the same road as Dr. Dvorak when I designed
this keyboard layout by using my own writing and paying attn to the
frequency of sounds both in speech and in the written word. Perhaps we
could call this the Shavian Dvorak? or maybe the Shavian Lowe? Hee hee!

--Star

=====
Hand Jive (do each movement twice): Pat Legs, Clap hands, Wave right over left, Wave left over right, Right fist over left, Left Fist over right, Hitchhiker right, Hitchhiker left.

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07/18/03 12:25:51 PM, Scott Stephens <swstephe@...> wrote:

>You make the fact that the future world using Shavian
>is a bad thing. I understand the use of it as a game
>element. Perhaps if the inhabitants of the future
>looked down upon T.O. as archaic and illogical.
>
>But, for what it's worth, I'm on the decline on
>Shavian in my own side-project. I am realizing that
>Shavian is co-dependent on accent and pronunciation
>reforms and have been looking into "Global English"
>and alternative English variants, which is probably
>much more likely in the future.
>

Scott, the only kind of writing which is not dependent on pronunciation at all
is hieroglyphic, cuneiform, CJK, and other such ideographic/logographic writing
systems. We don't want that kind of mess! So the only alternative is an
alphabetic writing system, which is necessarily dependent on pronunciation.
There's no way around it. So we either put up with the ideosyncracies of TO, or
we do something better. Shavian is something better, so it should be used. If
there's a problem with writing in Shavian, which is perfectly suited to the
English language, then it's a problem of the language itself, and the way it is
pronounced.

By the way, what exactly is "Global English" and alternative English varients?

--
Ethan




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There are hundreds of alternatives besides TO and
Shavian. I've done a lot of research lately while
tinkering with a Shavian automated translation engine.
There are ITA, Spanglish, Fonetik, and many others
that use roman alphabets. The point made by the
request for an alphabet like Shavian was that reading
text written phonetically looked unintelligent or
heavily accented compared to TO, (to someone used to
reading TO, of course -- I don't think it would look
this way to someone who grew up reading it). It looks
cool, so I like learning to read it and it would be
interesting in a game, too.

"Global English" refers to a group of people who are
trying to standardize spoken English. It is the
intermediate between our current spoken language,
(with 600,000 word vocabulary and a lot of divergent
grammar systems, ("boot"->"boots","foot"->"feets").
It can mean different things to different people.
English grows by about 3,000 words a year and just
about as many or more words fall out of usage. Some
people are worried about regional differences in
spoken English, ("I mended my motor with a spanner
under the bonnet next to the motorway" vs. "I fixed my
engine with a wrench under the hood next to the
highway"). I've been interested in some movements to
remove gender and certain gramatical cases from the
English language. Someone from 100 years ago in the
past would find much of our English dialect strange,
so I was suggesting that a society of the future would
have many variations from present English.


--- Ethan <ethanl@...> wrote:
> Scott, the only kind of writing which is not
> dependent on pronunciation at all
> is hieroglyphic, cuneiform, CJK, and other such
> ideographic/logographic writing
> systems. We don't want that kind of mess! So the
> only alternative is an
> alphabetic writing system, which is necessarily
> dependent on pronunciation.
> There's no way around it. So we either put up with
> the ideosyncracies of TO, or
> we do something better. Shavian is something
> better, so it should be used. If
> there's a problem with writing in Shavian, which is
> perfectly suited to the
> English language, then it's a problem of the
> language itself, and the way it is
> pronounced.
>
> By the way, what exactly is "Global English" and
> alternative English varients?
>
> --
> Ethan
>
>
>
>


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07/20/03 1:25:30 AM, Scott Stephens <swstephe@...> wrote:

>There are hundreds of alternatives besides TO and
>Shavian. I've done a lot of research lately while
>tinkering with a Shavian automated translation engine.
> There are ITA, Spanglish, Fonetik, and many others
>that use roman alphabets. The point made by the
>request for an alphabet like Shavian was that reading
>text written phonetically looked unintelligent or
>heavily accented compared to TO, (to someone used to
>reading TO, of course -- I don't think it would look
>this way to someone who grew up reading it). It looks
>cool, so I like learning to read it and it would be
>interesting in a game, too.

Thanks for clarifying. I have looked at a number of these "reformed spelling"
systems, and my big gripe about them all is something like this:

They almost all use some system of digraphs to replace the missing letters. A
few use diacritics. English has many more sounds than there are letters in the
Roman alphabet, so to substitute for extra letters, these writing systems use
multiple letters. Often they are used in strange combinations, which have to be
memorized. Some of the systems have more than one way to spell a sound, and/or
more than one sound per spelling. For the most part, they look really bad, if
you ask me! They seem overly simplistic a solution. They do look uneducated,
because they are using the same letters as TO, but in wierd ways. As far as I
know, they all (except perhaps some of the diacritic based systems) increase the
length of many words, making writing more difficult and tiresome. This increase
of word length through the use of so many digraphs makes reading harder, too.

>
>"Global English" refers to a group of people who are
>trying to standardize spoken English. It is the
>intermediate between our current spoken language,
>(with 600,000 word vocabulary and a lot of divergent
>grammar systems, ("boot"->"boots","foot"->"feets").
>It can mean different things to different people.
>English grows by about 3,000 words a year and just
>about as many or more words fall out of usage. Some
>people are worried about regional differences in
>spoken English, ("I mended my motor with a spanner
>under the bonnet next to the motorway" vs. "I fixed my
>engine with a wrench under the hood next to the
>highway"). I've been interested in some movements to
>remove gender and certain gramatical cases from the
>English language. Someone from 100 years ago in the
>past would find much of our English dialect strange,
>so I was suggesting that a society of the future would
>have many variations from present English.

"Global English" sounds to me like the English equivalent to the French DGLF,
«Délégation générale à la langue française», the organization which standardizes
the French language. Thanks for explaining it. I don't know that I could get
enthusiastic about reformed roman spelling or International English, but it is
an interesting study, nonetheless. Still, for now, I think I'll stick with
Shavian, the only completely non-roman English alphabet I know of. Why should
English be forced to conform to a roman alphabet?

You mention efforts to remove gender and grammatical cases. I thought that
English was perhaps the least gender-oriented and case-oriented language in the
indo-european language family. What more needs to be done, and why? For
instance, as far as cases go, we have singular, plural, and possessive cases.
How would you remove them? Our use of gender is much simpler than in most
languages. We use neuter for almost everything, except where the real gender of
the object referred to is known, such as a person or animal. Why is this too
complicated, and how is it proposed to change it?

--
Ethan




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07/20/03 1:25:30 AM, Scott Stephens <swstephe@...> wrote:

>There are hundreds of alternatives besides TO and
>Shavian. I've done a lot of research lately while
>tinkering with a Shavian automated translation engine.
> There are ITA, Spanglish, Fonetik, and many others
>that use roman alphabets. The point made by the
>request for an alphabet like Shavian was that reading
>text written phonetically looked unintelligent or
>heavily accented compared to TO, (to someone used to
>reading TO, of course -- I don't think it would look
>this way to someone who grew up reading it). It looks
>cool, so I like learning to read it and it would be
>interesting in a game, too.

Thanks for clarifying. I have looked at a number of these "reformed spelling"
systems, and my big gripe about them all is something like this:

They almost all use some system of digraphs to replace the missing letters. A
few use diacritics. English has many more sounds than there are letters in the
Roman alphabet, so to substitute for extra letters, these writing systems use
multiple letters. Often they are used in strange combinations, which have to be
memorized. Some of the systems have more than one way to spell a sound, and/or
more than one sound per spelling. For the most part, they look really bad, if
you ask me! They seem overly simplistic a solution. They do look uneducated,
because they are using the same letters as TO, but in wierd ways. As far as I
know, they all (except perhaps some of the diacritic based systems) increase the
length of many words, making writing more difficult and tiresome. This increase
of word length through the use of so many digraphs makes reading harder, too.

>
>"Global English" refers to a group of people who are
>trying to standardize spoken English. It is the
>intermediate between our current spoken language,
>(with 600,000 word vocabulary and a lot of divergent
>grammar systems, ("boot"->"boots","foot"->"feets").
>It can mean different things to different people.
>English grows by about 3,000 words a year and just
>about as many or more words fall out of usage. Some
>people are worried about regional differences in
>spoken English, ("I mended my motor with a spanner
>under the bonnet next to the motorway" vs. "I fixed my
>engine with a wrench under the hood next to the
>highway"). I've been interested in some movements to
>remove gender and certain gramatical cases from the
>English language. Someone from 100 years ago in the
>past would find much of our English dialect strange,
>so I was suggesting that a society of the future would
>have many variations from present English.

"Global English" sounds to me like the English equivalent to the French DGLF,
+Diligation ginirale ` la langue frangaise;, the organization which standardizes
the French language. Thanks for explaining it. I don't know that I could get
enthusiastic about reformed roman spelling or International English, but it is
an interesting study, nonetheless. Still, for now, I think I'll stick with
Shavian, the only completely non-roman English alphabet I know of. Why should
English be forced to conform to a roman alphabet?

You mention efforts to remove gender and grammatical cases. I thought that
English was perhaps the least gender-oriented and case-oriented language in the
indo-european language family. What more needs to be done, and why? For
instance, as far as cases go, we have singular, plural, and possessive cases.
How would you remove them? Our use of gender is much simpler than in most
languages. We use neuter for almost everything, except where the real gender of
the object referred to is known, such as a person or animal. Why is this too
complicated, and how is it proposed to change it?

--
Ethan




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ok, gO for it hU !

Star Raven <celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:

Vote Hugh for moderator! He doesn't really need your support, but vote
for him anyway! :)

--Star


=====
Hand Jive (do each movement twice): Pat Legs, Clap hands, Wave right over left, Wave left over right, Right fist over left, Left Fist over right, Hitchhiker right, Hitchhiker left.

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t = to e = the v = of n = and

AEIOU az in Age Eat Ice Oak yoU

digrafs: ah au ch oo ou oi/oy sh th zh.

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