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Here we go with the bi-monthly rant:

Esperanto is not a solution to our problem, it is a whole new set of
problems. The difficulty is not in spaeking different languages, but,
as English speakers, to understand and write our own language to which
a phonetic alpabet was not gifted, but borrowed and bastardized from
latin. That gives us the problem of spelling that has resulted in the
garish TO that we have today.

Not knowing much about Esperanto, I have heard and seen it. As I
recall, and in my opinion, I believe that Esperanto sounds like the
babble or should I say Babel of children. It has the bounce of Swedish,
the sound of "Spanglish," and the reversed construction of Japanese,
but none of the fun. Japanese is the only successful constructed
language, but even it uses the phonetic alphabet borrowed and
bastardized from the Chinese.

This brings us to the other writing systems. Compared to IPA and the
GrecoRoman-based alphabets, Shavian is easier. Am I incorrect in
recalling that Shaw provided that each character be easily created
without lifting the pen? I can see where a GrecoRoman-based system can
be easy to learn, as we already have a base in the Roman alphabet. Thus
one might think of "truspel" as a proper solution. Truspel, however is
not a step forward into phonetic and thereby better evolving English,
it is a humongous leap into the past and to the time of a culture in
which one out of a thousand might be able to read, an that's being
generous. If we are going to move in that direction, we should do as
they do in Inda and many third-world contries: use pictures. No thanks,
but I'd rather have 600,000 words than 600 pictures.

So here we are left back at the beginning of Shavian. While it may not
be perfect, at least, I believe, it has a better start than truspel and
fewer problems than Esperanto. Besides, after spelling bees during my
primary school years, I can't bring myself to spell phonetically using
our beloved Roman Letters. And Shaw is fairly easy to learn, given
time, practice, and attn to detail.

In closing, I would like to say that we must take charge and be the
custodians of the language. We must show people that English can be
beautiful and easy. Sure it's the hardest language in the world to
learn, even old pro's in the language still miss conjugate verbs or
misdecline our adjectives, but even in that it has it's beauty. Perhaps
one day a thousand years from now when everyone speaks Esperanto,
they'll look back on English as a Scholar's language.

Peace, I'm outie,
--Star

--- Scott Stephens <swstephe@...> wrote:
> Yeah! Esperanto. I learned it way back in high school
> about 20 years ago. I thought it was great. Just
> recently, though, I've picked up on Ido, which is even
> better, (doesn't have case agreement, has genderless
> pronouns, no accented letters). But apparently there
> is quite a flame war between the two groups because of
> the way Ido was introduced.
>
> I saw someone who had applied Shavian to Esperanto and
> it seemed to have worked quite well. Currently Ido
> uses only the unaccented roman alphabet, and yet is
> able to achieve an excelent phonetic mapping.
>
> --- Troy Eckhardt <SpamFilter@BizTaxPros.com> wrote:
> > Esperanto has a rather sizable following. No, it did
> > not become the universal language that Zamenhof
> > thought it might, but still, the congresses are
> > always well populated.
> >
> > Troy
>
>


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On 7/21/2003 at 10:54 AM Star Raven wrote:

>Here we go with the bi-monthly rant:

And now, on with the nitpicking, shall we?

>Esperanto is not a solution to our problem, it is a whole new set of
>problems. The difficulty is not in spaeking different languages, but,
>as English speakers, to understand and write our own language to which
>a phonetic alpabet was not gifted, but borrowed and bastardized from
>latin. That gives us the problem of spelling that has resulted in the
>garish TO that we have today.

The thing is, the current writing system, as convoluted as it is, WORKS. Why? Simply because there are at least 100 major accents and dialects of the English language globally, that the current latin orthography works dynamicly across variant phonemes-- Something both Shavian and Quikscript are incapable of doing without major revision to compensate for dynamic phonemes. I would prefer a dynamic Shavian to dynamic latin any day, though.

English itself is not a phoneticly rigid language, which is the major reason why there is no greater acceptance of Shavian.

>Not knowing much about Esperanto, I have heard and seen it. As I
>recall, and in my opinion, I believe that Esperanto sounds like the
>babble or should I say Babel of children. It has the bounce of Swedish,
>the sound of "Spanglish," and the reversed construction of Japanese,
>but none of the fun. Japanese is the only successful constructed
>language, but even it uses the phonetic alphabet borrowed and
>bastardized from the Chinese.

Esperanto is a separate language, and beyond the scope intended for this forum.

In the case of Japanese, I would NOT call it a "constructed language", as it has existed for at least 3000 years, only, like all languages, it evolves and has evolved, and borrows words from neighbouring and trade languages encountered over the millennia. Its rigid syllablic phonemes stem from the language's distant origins, believed to be of Polynesian descent.

>This brings us to the other writing systems. Compared to IPA and the
>GrecoRoman-based alphabets, Shavian is easier. Am I incorrect in

Yes, it is.

>recalling that Shaw provided that each character be easily created
>without lifting the pen? I can see where a GrecoRoman-based system can

Shaw himself used Pittman Shorthand, which Read's Shavian & Quikscript are based on.

>be easy to learn, as we already have a base in the Roman alphabet. Thus
>one might think of "truspel" as a proper solution. Truspel, however is
>not a step forward into phonetic and thereby better evolving English,
>it is a humongous leap into the past and to the time of a culture in
>which one out of a thousand might be able to read, an that's being
>generous. If we are going to move in that direction, we should do as
>they do in Inda and many third-world contries: use pictures. No thanks,
>but I'd rather have 600,000 words than 600 pictures.

First off, some corrections, if I may.

For starters, India has NO ideogrphic/logographic scripts-- All languages on the subcontinent uses alphabets or syllabaries.

Secondly, ALL alternative spelling & writing methods will only appeal to one in every million, regardless of system used, without making any particular system mandatory.

And for the record, the only ideographic writing systems in wide use are CJK (although Japanese uses 2 syllabaries and the latin alphabet to compliment to 2000 Chinese characters; and Korean uses a compound alphabet, slowly phasing out the Chinese ideographs), the Dongba script of the Naxi people of China, and Blissymbolics- The only constructed script of this type, and the only such script with no phonetic compliment.

I don't know anything about "Truspel".

Lastly, a note: English and Chinese have the largest vocabularies of any language on the planet- Both, as noted, in excess of 600,000 words. (Although Chinese uses 3,000 characters in common use, there are another 80,000 known to exist.) Most languages have between 15 and 30,000 words.

>So here we are left back at the beginning of Shavian. While it may not
>be perfect, at least, I believe, it has a better start than truspel and
>fewer problems than Esperanto. Besides, after spelling bees during my
>primary school years, I can't bring myself to spell phonetically using
>our beloved Roman Letters. And Shaw is fairly easy to learn, given
>time, practice, and attn to detail.

Well, since Esperanto is NOT a script, let's leave that out of this-- It's a whole separate language, and like all languages, it borrows from other languages. And yes, English does that to an immense degree.

>In closing, I would like to say that we must take charge and be the
>custodians of the language. We must show people that English can be
>beautiful and easy. Sure it's the hardest language in the world to
>learn, even old pro's in the language still miss conjugate verbs or
>misdecline our adjectives, but even in that it has it's beauty. Perhaps
>one day a thousand years from now when everyone speaks Esperanto,
>they'll look back on English as a Scholar's language.

English the hardest? No. Try Welsh or Navajo! Navajo is especially difficult, since there are no pure nouns whatsoever.

And for the record, English has ONE successful alternative writing system: BRAILLE!

Of course, we could all go back to writing in runic scripts, something the English language abandoned by the late 13th/early 14th Centuries.

d.m.falk




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Let's ignore Esperanto, I was just giving a high-five
to someone mentioning it and suggesting Ido as a
superior alternative to those funky letters and
complex conjugation rules.

Restarting. What exactly is the problem trying to be
solved by Shavian? I've heard several different
problems at different times.

One is that it would be easier for children to learn,
and they would therefore become literate faster.
However, this sounds like Pittman's ITA, which was
taught to some kids in the 60's. About half of those
students loved it, because it was easy and gave them
confidence, while the other half said it made them
functionally illterate. The failure of that program
was that the alphabet wasn't used in the real world,
so it couldn't be justified. If the entire
English-speaking world switched to Shavian overnight,
it would make learning any other language more
difficult.

The second problem I see around here, is that
foreigners would be able to learn it faster. However,
many different languages already use the roman
languages, with accents and digraphs. To make English
more accessible to that group, simply reform the
spelling, but stick to the roman alphabet. Most
Chinese and Japanese students I have taught learn IPA
to get phonetic spellings before learning English
spellings. If we want to help the largest number of
non-English speakers, we would go after Chinese, Hindi
and Spanish speakers primarily.

The third problem is spelling reform, the original
stated purpose of Shavian, is because TO is irregular
with dozens of ways to spell the same sound and dozens
of sounds for the same sequence of characters.
Spelling reform takes a few leaps every once in a
while, such as Noah Webster's attempt, (and an act of
Congress), which resulted in Americans spelling
"colour" as "color". But Americans didn't have the
authority to make that same change in any other
country in the world. Still, the problem could get
solved by simply taking the worst offenders and
offering alternative spellings.

Shavian seems to take the third problem, then say that
text with reformed spelling looks "bad", but probably
only because we are used to looking at TO all the
time. If we had never seen TO, (does Chaucer look
better to us now), and had only seen any kind of
reformed spelling with roman letters, it would look
fine to us. Perhaps someday our great-grandchildren
will think "c u l8r" look absolutely normal, or even
old-fashioned.

The problem with Shavian that I see most often here,
(anyone for an FAQ?), is people have problems with
sounds that don't have distinctions in their own
dialect, (err/array). The usual advice is that
Shavian can be spelt according to their local dialect
as people feel. I think there is a hidden fear to
that advice. English is not very egalitarian. People
are judged according to their accent. Which accent
you use immediately labels you at a certain social and
economic category. If I wrote a doctoral thesis using
a thick texas twang, people would think I was making a
joke. If I put up a menu in RP for a Texas barbecue,
people would think I was pompous and conceited. TO
avoids this because we are used to reading the
inconsistent TO in our own mental voices, and depend
more on vocabulary to label the writer.

So, my point is that Shavian has to be standardized
and globalized and that means that the English
language itself has to be standardized and globalized,
or else you should pick your favorite international
language and "Shavianize" it. Otherwise, it is just a
writing system you can use personally to record your
own notes and share among other users in your group.


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And now, the Rant's defense :)

> In the case of Japanese, I would NOT call it a "constructed
> language", as it has existed for at least 3000 years, only, like all
> languages, it evolves and has evolved, and borrows words from
> neighbouring and trade languages encountered over the millennia. Its
> rigid syllablic phonemes stem from the language's distant origins,
> believed to be of Polynesian descent.

It may be 3000 years old, but 3000 years ago, a splinter group of
Chinese decided that Chinese was too complex, thus they *constructed*
Japanese. There are several blatant and obvious sparations from
naturally evolving language which occur in the Japanese language, first
and formost being sentance construction and particals. But I'm saving
that for another rant.

> >be easy to learn, as we already have a base in the Roman alphabet.
> Thus
> >one might think of "truspel" as a proper solution. Truspel, however
> is
> >not a step forward into phonetic and thereby better evolving
> English,
> >it is a humongous leap into the past and to the time of a culture in
> >which one out of a thousand might be able to read, an that's being
> >generous. If we are going to move in that direction, we should do as
> >they do in Inda and many third-world contries: use pictures. No
> thanks,
> >but I'd rather have 600,000 words than 600 pictures.
>
> First off, some corrections, if I may.
>
> For starters, India has NO ideogrphic/logographic scripts-- All
> languages on the subcontinent uses alphabets or syllabaries.
>
> Secondly, ALL alternative spelling & writing methods will only appeal
> to one in every million, regardless of system used, without making
> any particular system mandatory.
>
> And for the record, the only ideographic writing systems in wide use
> are CJK (although Japanese uses 2 syllabaries and the latin alphabet
> to compliment to 2000 Chinese characters; and Korean uses a compound
> alphabet, slowly phasing out the Chinese ideographs), the Dongba
> script of the Naxi people of China, and Blissymbolics- The only
> constructed script of this type, and the only such script with no
> phonetic compliment.
>
> I don't know anything about "Truspel".
>
> Lastly, a note: English and Chinese have the largest vocabularies of
> any language on the planet- Both, as noted, in excess of 600,000
> words. (Although Chinese uses 3,000 characters in common use, there
> are another 80,000 known to exist.) Most languages have between 15
> and 30,000 words.

Whoops, in writing that I made a tiny error myself of omission, I would
rather have 600,000 words *of /War and Peace/* than 600 pictures.
Thanks for the corrections, I learned a lot today ;)

> >So here we are left back at the beginning of Shavian. While it may
> not
> >be perfect, at least, I believe, it has a better start than truspel
> and
> >fewer problems than Esperanto. Besides, after spelling bees during
> my
> >primary school years, I can't bring myself to spell phonetically
> using
> >our beloved Roman Letters. And Shaw is fairly easy to learn, given
> >time, practice, and attn to detail.
>
> Well, since Esperanto is NOT a script, let's leave that out of this--
> It's a whole separate language, and like all languages, it borrows
> from other languages. And yes, English does that to an immense
> degree.

Truspel is exactly what it sounds like. Words are spelled the way they
sound using the Latin letters that we all know and love. Furthermore,
Esperanto was mentioned here in response to it's surfacing in a
previous post by a couple of others.

>
> >In closing, I would like to say that we must take charge and be the
> >custodians of the language. We must show people that English can be
> >beautiful and easy. Sure it's the hardest language in the world to
> >learn, even old pro's in the language still miss conjugate verbs or
> >misdecline our adjectives, but even in that it has it's beauty.
> Perhaps
> >one day a thousand years from now when everyone speaks Esperanto,
> >they'll look back on English as a Scholar's language.
>
> English the hardest? No. Try Welsh or Navajo! Navajo is especially
> difficult, since there are no pure nouns whatsoever.
>

Uh, according to Linguists, English is even harder to learn than any
other language in the world, as it is 95% irregular... And in Chinese
as I recal, there are no verbs, it seems in many sentances.

> And for the record, English has ONE successful alternative writing
> system: BRAILLE!
>
> Of course, we could all go back to writing in runic scripts,
> something the English language abandoned by the late 13th/early 14th
> Centuries.

Braille, good point... so to speak... As for the runic scripts, here we
are with the whole "big leap back" again. Ah well... I'm going back to
transliterating William Blake...

--Star

P/S Thanks for your wonderful and thoughtful comments.

=====
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Such wonderfully juicy stuff! My reply is below..

--- Scott Stephens <swstephe@...> wrote:
> Let's ignore Esperanto, I was just giving a high-five
> to someone mentioning it and suggesting Ido as a
> superior alternative to those funky letters and
> complex conjugation rules.

k, done.

>
> Restarting. What exactly is the problem trying to be
> solved by Shavian? I've heard several different
> problems at different times.
>
> One is that it would be easier for children to learn,
> and they would therefore become literate faster.
> However, this sounds like Pittman's ITA, which was
> taught to some kids in the 60's. About half of those
> students loved it, because it was easy and gave them
> confidence, while the other half said it made them
> functionally illterate. The failure of that program
> was that the alphabet wasn't used in the real world,
> so it couldn't be justified. If the entire
> English-speaking world switched to Shavian overnight,
> it would make learning any other language more
> difficult.

You see, the 60's were a time of experimentation. Whatever they were on
is most likely illegal now. Okay, seriously, now. You are right,
Shavian has to have real-world applications. This is why we have to
work on transliterating everything we can get our hands on so that we
can provide hours and hours of reading materials for our growing
constituancy.

>
> The second problem I see around here, is that
> foreigners would be able to learn it faster. However,
> many different languages already use the roman
> languages, with accents and digraphs. To make English
> more accessible to that group, simply reform the
> spelling, but stick to the roman alphabet. Most
> Chinese and Japanese students I have taught learn IPA
> to get phonetic spellings before learning English
> spellings. If we want to help the largest number of
> non-English speakers, we would go after Chinese, Hindi
> and Spanish speakers primarily.
>

Uh... okay...

> Shavian seems to take the third problem, then say that
> text with reformed spelling looks "bad", but probably
> only because we are used to looking at TO all the
> time. If we had never seen TO, (does Chaucer look
> better to us now), and had only seen any kind of
> reformed spelling with roman letters, it would look
> fine to us. Perhaps someday our great-grandchildren
> will think "c u l8r" look absolutely normal, or even
> old-fashioned.

So-eat yew lol-age-tot-ergot

>
> The problem with Shavian that I see most often here,
> (anyone for an FAQ?), is people have problems with
> sounds that don't have distinctions in their own
> dialect, (err/array). The usual advice is that
> Shavian can be spelt according to their local dialect
> as people feel. I think there is a hidden fear to
> that advice. English is not very egalitarian. People
> are judged according to their accent. Which accent
> you use immediately labels you at a certain social and
> economic category. If I wrote a doctoral thesis using
> a thick texas twang, people would think I was making a
> joke. If I put up a menu in RP for a Texas barbecue,
> people would think I was pompous and conceited. TO
> avoids this because we are used to reading the
> inconsistent TO in our own mental voices, and depend
> more on vocabulary to label the writer.
>

Enter American RP, and yes, we do have RP just as the English do.
Americans have the mid-western accent. Perhaps we should use Tom Brokaw
or someone famous behind a news desk as our guide.

I have to say this though. You can't say "haint" (a southern type of
ghost, spook, spirit or demon) without a southern accent. ;)

And finally, as for the spread, we're working on that. I recall the
wise words of my history teacher who said: Nothing ever changes until
rich people get mad.

Thanks for your thoughtful insights.
--Star

=====
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> It may be 3000 years old, but 3000 years ago, a
> splinter group of
> Chinese decided that Chinese was too complex, thus
> they *constructed*
> Japanese. There are several blatant and obvious
> sparations from
> naturally evolving language which occur in the
> Japanese language, first
> and formost being sentance construction and
> particals. But I'm saving
> that for another rant.

Japanese is linguistically unrelated to any other
language, (it is typically thrown in the "other" pile
along with Finnish). However, when they adopted the
Chinese writing system in the Tang dynasty, they also
adopted the Fujian province pronunciations, (yon
readings). Japanese has inflections which do not
exist in Chinese, so they had to adopt Chinese
radicals to create a sylabary, then they rewrote them
using a kind of cursive script.

There have been many efforts by the Chinese to
simplify the language, the most recent being the
standardization in 1949 which created "Simplified
Chinese", which is really nothing more than doing what
people were already doing in informal writing anyway.
They also adopted the roman alphabet for "pinyin",
while Taiwan created "bopomofo"

>
> Uh, according to Linguists, English is even harder
> to learn than any
> other language in the world, as it is 95%
> irregular... And in Chinese
> as I recal, there are no verbs, it seems in many
> sentances.
>

There definitely are too verbs. They are essential to
the language, (many sentences are simply a verb).
Inflections require an additional partical, (one for
past and one for past imperfect), so verb inflection
is usually implied in sentence context, ("I go to
store today", "I go to store tomorrow", "I already go
to store"). There is no inflection due to plurals.

As someone who speaks fluent Chinese, but has English
as my primary language, I can say that spoken Chinese
is one of the simplest languages. The myth has grown
up in English speaking circles that it is complex due
to the number of Chinese characters, but that is a
mistake associating a Chinese character with a letter
of an alphabet. Chinese characters are made up of 1
to 3 "radicals", of which there are only 400,
officially. They mostly hint toward meaning and
phonetic sound. It is possible to guess an unknown
character quite easily based on previous characters.
For example, the character for "mother" contains the
radical for "woman" and the radical for "horse".
Since the "woman" is first, you know that the meaning
is something to do with a woman, the radical "horse"
comes second and hints that the sound is probably
close to "ma", (which is correct in Mandarin dialect).
It has the added ability to be reusable in a
completly different dialect. I've heard someone say
that a person in Europe would know, generally, how to
pronounce the words in a newspaper not in a language
known to him, but not the meaning. A person in China
would know the meaning, but not the pronunciation if
the author spoke a different dialect.

> > And for the record, English has ONE successful
> alternative writing
> > system: BRAILLE!
> >
> > Of course, we could all go back to writing in
> runic scripts,
> > something the English language abandoned by the
> late 13th/early 14th
> > Centuries.
>
> Braille, good point... so to speak... As for the
> runic scripts, here we
> are with the whole "big leap back" again. Ah well...
> I'm going back to
> transliterating William Blake...

And don't forget Moon Writing, (after Dr. Moon), it is
like Shavian, (doesn't require any pen lifts), but the
shapes are somewhat related to roman capital letters.
It was designed for people who lose their site early
in life. It is interesting in that it reverses
direction at the end of each line. It would be a lot
easier than Braille, but it sticks to TO spelling
except for some common endings. It would be
interesting to use it in combination with some
reformed spelling system.


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no offense meant to any speakers of any foreign language. I do know
that Chinese is easy to learn, I never said otherwise. My focus was on
writing systems. And Japanese, being constructed, it lacks a complete
lingual table such as Shavian presents for english. Thus perhaps what I
am not saying but mean to is "stagnation."

>
> > > And for the record, English has ONE successful
> > alternative writing
> > > system: BRAILLE!
> > >
> > > Of course, we could all go back to writing in
> > runic scripts,
> > > something the English language abandoned by the
> > late 13th/early 14th
> > > Centuries.
> >
> > Braille, good point... so to speak... As for the
> > runic scripts, here we
> > are with the whole "big leap back" again. Ah well...
> > I'm going back to
> > transliterating William Blake...
>
> And don't forget Moon Writing, (after Dr. Moon), it is
> like Shavian, (doesn't require any pen lifts), but the
> shapes are somewhat related to roman capital letters.
> It was designed for people who lose their site early
> in life. It is interesting in that it reverses
> direction at the end of each line. It would be a lot
> easier than Braille, but it sticks to TO spelling
> except for some common endings. It would be
> interesting to use it in combination with some
> reformed spelling system.
>
>
Never heard of it, but it sounds neat. Okay, I still haven't finished
"Auguries of Innocence."

I love William Blake
--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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On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 18:39:30 -0700 (PDT), Star Raven
<celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:

>> And don't forget Moon Writing, (after Dr. Moon), it is
>>
> Never heard of it, but it sounds neat. Okay, I still haven't finished

I'm normally a lurker, but I just thought I'd point out that you should
visit
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alternative.htm
sometime to see Moon writing and other interesting alternative English
writing systems. The entire web site is a great place to browse through.

-Ryan

--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark


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----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Stephens" <swstephe@...>
To: <shavian@...>
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 3:43 PM
Subject: Re: [shavian] Disenchanted?


> Let's ignore Esperanto, I was just giving a high-five
> to someone mentioning it and suggesting Ido as a
> superior alternative to those funky letters and
> complex conjugation rules.


I knew that, Scott, and I greet you and thank you.

Troy


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I found an interesting experiment which proves a few of the problems
with many reformed spelling systems which use the Roman alphabet. It
can be easier to learn something totally new and unfamiliar than to
change the way you use something like the Roman alphabet. Oh, and
digraphs stink! And, there is a way to make Shavian work better with
the keyboard. Read this whole page:
http://www.unifon.org/code-switch.html

--
Ethan


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