Interesting. I was originally thinking of foreign
load words with unusual pronunciations, like throwing
in "tres" and "moi" from French. In Roman writing,
you can see that they are French words and apply the
French pronunciation with an immediate understanding
of what the words meant. It would look like you are
trying to indicate a thick American accent if you
tried to spell them out phonetically, ("tray" and
"mwah"?)
Okay, this is the suggestion that I'm driving at. I
think that even if Shavian were adopted throughout the
English world, the roman alphabet, (and foreign
accents), would have to co-exist. Acronyms would
remain in Roman letters, (UN, USA, UK, NATO, ISO,
ASCII, HTML). Only English spelled-out words would be
translated into Shavian, along with anglicized loan
words: "rodeo", "bazaar", "cinema", but words that are
truely foreign, (but in a Roman alphabet), have to be
written in roman font. That means a Shavian world
would have to be able to read both Shavian and Roman
at first, either until (1) all other important Roman
writing systems are abandoned in favor of Shavian, (2)
English is considered too difficult of a language to
learn because of it's weird Shavian writing system, or
(3) an international language is adopted which uses
Shavian.
The Chinese is interesting. What you wrote is
pin-yin, which was standardized as a phonetic system
in China, and is under the ownership of the Chinese,
not English speakers. They use it themselves in
various situations, not just as a way to write Chinese
words in English. In fact, it probably isn't very
good for that, ("x" means "sh+y", "q" means "ch"??),
but it was better than the old wade-giles system for
them. When Chinese write English words, they often
pick phonetically similar Chinese words, (Bush is
written "cloth-wash" in Chinese because it is
pronounced "bu-shee"). Japanese write English words
out in Roman alphabet.
--- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On 25 Jul 2003 at 14:57, Scott Harrison wrote:
>
> > On Sunday, Jul 20, 2003, at 15:26 US/Eastern,
> Scott Stephens wrote:
> >
> > > How would a Shavian
> > > writer write foreign words in French or German?
> > >
> > As I have done in my documents, you write the
> foreign language in the
> > alphabet in which it is normally written.
> Therefore, you do not write
> > German words in Shavian, but in Latin characters.
>
> On the other hand, English speakers using TO don't
> (in general) write
> foreign words using the source alphabet - they
> mangle it into Latin as
> best they can (e.g. George Papandreou, Krushchev,
> Deng Xiaoping).
>
> To my mind, it would make sense to do the same if
> you use Shavian as
> your writing system: write foreign words in Shavian,
> representing the
> foreign phonemes as best you can. (Unless you're the
> sort of pedant who
> writes "glasnost" or "perestroika" in Cyrillic and
> "gyros" and
> "tzatziki" in Greek characters.)
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
> --
> Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>
>
>
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