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In message <20040330211055.80623.qmail@...>, carl
easton <shavintel16@...> writes
>Hi Hugh,
>
>I agree we Shavian Users must use the American Heritage Dictionary for
>Formal Shavian pronouncation, as you have indicated due to it's
>equivalence of Shaw Letters and balance of Brittish and American accents.
>
>regards,
>
>Carl

As someone from the North of England who is educated I thought that the
accent that was preferred by Shaw was "a pronunciation to resemble that
recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described
as Northern English".

I was going to put a joke in here about the colonials not getting above
their station but I thought that probably wouldn't be registered as a
joke by some.

John Warner
--
John Warner

john.warner@...




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> I have two keyboard layouts for Mac OS X available on my website.
> One
> matches the "classic" layout I originally found in the DeMeyere fonts
>
> and the other was posted on this group by Star Raven. As long as the
>
> Mac has a Unicode font that contains Shavian characters at their
> Unicode 4.0 loaded, there is no problem typing and displaying
> Shavian.

I am new to XP (and will soon be moving back to linux) and not sure how
the unicode thing works... Am I just dumb or is it actually
complecated?

--Star


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>
> As someone from the North of England who is educated I thought that
> the
> accent that was preferred by Shaw was "a pronunciation to resemble
> that
> recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes
> described
> as Northern English".
>
> I was going to put a joke in here about the colonials not getting
> above
> their station but I thought that probably wouldn't be registered as a
>
> joke by some.
>
> John Warner

ROFLMGDAO! I love it! I needed a good laugh this morning,

--Star, from the Colonies

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On Mar 31, 2004, at 06:13, Star Raven wrote:

>
>> I have two keyboard layouts for Mac OS X available on my website.
>> One
>> matches the "classic" layout I originally found in the DeMeyere fonts
>>
>> and the other was posted on this group by Star Raven. As long as the
>>
>> Mac has a Unicode font that contains Shavian characters at their
>> Unicode 4.0 loaded, there is no problem typing and displaying
>> Shavian.
>
> I am new to XP (and will soon be moving back to linux) and not sure how
> the unicode thing works... Am I just dumb or is it actually
> complecated?
>
>
In general Unicode is pretty easy, however, since it is new computer
companies tend to make it a little more complicated than it needs be.

Most people are used to having ASCII on their computer systems. This
means when one types, one generates ASCII characters that are used as
input to the test processor or mailer, or whatever program is using
that input. When the characters are displayed some sort of rule book
is used to determine that when an "f" character appears followed by an
"i" character should the thing displayed be a special "fi" ligature
(combined character) or actually just an "f" followed by an "i" like a
lot of people expect. And of course there is the font that actually
shows you the "f" and "i" or "fi" is some appropriate manner -- like
Times Roman or Helvetica Bold.

Unicode is just like ASCII except it covers all the characters in the
world (or at least a reasonable approximation of all the characters).
The problem with Unicode is not everyone is capable of handling data in
Unicode. The three parts to handling data are the input mechanism,
rulebook and font from above. Basically a computer system needs to be
able to generate the appropriate Unicode characters when one types on a
keyboard. This will change depending on the "language" one uses. For
example, with a Russian keyboard the Unicode characters would be
generated in the Cyrillic range. The same goes for Bulgarian. For
Hindi, the Devanagari range of Unicode characters would be used. The
rulebook can be very complicated for character sets that have many
ligatures (like Devanagari, Arabic, etc.). The fonts can be very large
as well. For example, a good Devanagari font will have more than 500
glyphs in it because of all the ligatures possible.

For Shavian we have some fonts already that can handle Shavian
characters at the proper Unicode points. Since Shavian does not have
ligatures (that are not represented as individual characters already)
no rulebook is really needed. You should be able to rely on the
default rulebook built into the font system of the computer. This is
definitely the case for Mac OS X and I believe should be the case for
modern versions of Windows and Linux. The input mechanism already
exists for Mac OS X on my website. And we now know that modern Windows
versions can have one generate a keyboard that should output the proper
Unicode values. I do not know about Linux, but would guess that
creating a "keyboard" to generate the proper Unicode values should not
be a problem since Linux is known for its flexibility. I do not have a
Linux system so would not be able to help in this regard. I would
imagine for Windows XP you should just download Hugh Birkenhead's
keyboard that he is creating. This should allow you to type proper
Shavian Unicode on the XP machine. For Linux, perhaps someone in this
group can help you.

There is one other problem. A lot of applications may not be able to
handle Unicode information. And this is complicated in that there are
multiple versions of Unicode. As Unicode develops it gets better.
However, computer companies take a while to catch up with the latest
version of Unicode. Since Shavian is in Unicode 4.0, some software may
not support it. Actually, it is because Shavian is in the second plane
of Unicode. Most software that supports Unicode can handle the first
plane of Unicode fine. The second is slightly more complicated. Over
time Unicode will be all that any computer system handles. This will
be a good thing, but we are in growing pains at the moment. Luckily
for us, we can really test our software with Shavian since it is sort
of on the cutting edge of Unicode support. By the way, Mac OS X
handles it fine for most everything. Only old programs have a problem.
And those get upgraded over time.

--
Scott Harrison PGP Key ID: 0x0f0b5b86



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----- Original Message -----
From: "John Warner" <john.warner@...>


> As someone from the North of England who is educated I thought that the
> accent that was preferred by Shaw was "a pronunciation to resemble that
> recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described
> as Northern English".

I'm also from England, unfortunately I'm a furry, not a monkey :P

Seriously though, Androcles and the Lion clearly doesn't use exact Northern
English, as it uses rhoticisms that would not occur in northern english
speech. It is clearly then a British-American mix. That's why I think the
A.H. Dictionary is the best choice - plus the fact that its one of the most
accessible resources of its type (www.dictionary.com is pretty easy to
remember I'd think).

> I was going to put a joke in here about the colonials not getting above
> their station but I thought that probably wouldn't be registered as a
> joke by some.

Well you've already put it here now ;)

> John Warner

Hugh B



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--- In shavian@..., John Warner <john.warner@l...> wrote:

[snip]

> I was going to put a joke in here about the colonials not getting above
> their station but I thought that probably wouldn't be registered as a
> joke by some.

I'm not sure if I should be offended by that or not. Honestly, I'm not really sure what
you meant by it. Maybe I'm just slow today. That's probably it.




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Hugh Birkenhead wrote:
> (FAO in particular Phillip Driscoll)
>
> Can anyone tell me what stage we are at regarding Unicode points?
>
> Has Shavian been allocated some permanent points, and if so do we have a
> font that has the Shavian characters at those permanent points?
>
> If the fonts we have have the Shavian characters in the old 'temporary'
> positions, should it be an easy matter to move them to the permanent ones?
>
> Thanks
> Hugh B

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Yes, I can tell you we are at the implementation stage. The more people
implement the standard, the better!

Yes, Shavian has been assigned permanent points starting at U10450,
between Deseret and Osmanya. Here's a code chart which has all three,
which you can use to test fonts and software.
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata104.html

Yes, there are two fonts at least. ESL Gothic Unicode, designed by
yours truely, http://www.30below.com/~ethanl/fonts.html
Also, there is a font called Andagii, which includes the Shavian
characters: http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/unicode-font.html

Yes, it's easy to retrofit fonts when you have the right software. I
can do it in a matter of seconds. Retrofitting documents is a bit
different, but still simple if you have the right software.

--
·𐑰𐑔𐑩𐑯 - Ethan



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Scott Harrison wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2004, at 06:13, Star Raven wrote:

>>I am new to XP (and will soon be moving back to linux) and not sure how
>>the unicode thing works... Am I just dumb or is it actually
>>complecated?
>>
>>
>
> In general Unicode is pretty easy, however, since it is new computer
> companies tend to make it a little more complicated than it needs be.

It's hard to change old habits. Programmers for many decades only had
to worry about US-ASCII, a 7-bit text encoding, or perhaps ISO-8859-1 or
similar 8-bit encodings used in Europe. Unicode is theoretically a
31-bit text encoding, and that means more data must be attached to each
character. Shavian characters take 32 bits per character, which is just
plain weird to a lot of programmers, so it has been taking a bit of time
for software to get caught up to the standards.

An aside here: I hear about "surrogates" quite a bit, even though
surrogate pairs are rarely used, UTF-8 being the preferred encoding.
UTF-8 doesn't need surrogates for plane-1 characters.

(snip)

> For Shavian we have some fonts already that can handle Shavian
> characters at the proper Unicode points. Since Shavian does not have
> ligatures (that are not represented as individual characters already)
> no rulebook is really needed. You should be able to rely on the
> default rulebook built into the font system of the computer. This is
> definitely the case for Mac OS X and I believe should be the case for
> modern versions of Windows and Linux. The input mechanism already
> exists for Mac OS X on my website. And we now know that modern Windows
> versions can have one generate a keyboard that should output the proper
> Unicode values. I do not know about Linux, but would guess that
> creating a "keyboard" to generate the proper Unicode values should not
> be a problem since Linux is known for its flexibility. I do not have a
> Linux system so would not be able to help in this regard. I would
> imagine for Windows XP you should just download Hugh Birkenhead's
> keyboard that he is creating. This should allow you to type proper
> Shavian Unicode on the XP machine. For Linux, perhaps someone in this
> group can help you.

I've been working on a Shavian keyboard for Linux (it should work for
most Unix varients as well, as long as they are using X-Windows with the
standard XKB keyboard extention), but it's not quite ready. My problem
is the lack of good documentation for XKB, the keyboard handler for
XFree86. What information I have been able to find has been rather
incomplete and/or vague, and the writer of the main documentation for
the system doesn't know English very well! I have managed to get it to
work, but I need to slog through more "Engrish" to figure out how to
make it work the way it should. Once I have that part done, it will be
very simple to install a package and then you can either type "setxkbmap
shavian" or, with some systems, simply click on an icon to change to
Shavian.

>
> There is one other problem. A lot of applications may not be able to
> handle Unicode information. And this is complicated in that there are
> multiple versions of Unicode. As Unicode develops it gets better.
> However, computer companies take a while to catch up with the latest
> version of Unicode. Since Shavian is in Unicode 4.0, some software may
> not support it. Actually, it is because Shavian is in the second plane
> of Unicode. Most software that supports Unicode can handle the first
> plane of Unicode fine. The second is slightly more complicated. Over
> time Unicode will be all that any computer system handles. This will
> be a good thing, but we are in growing pains at the moment. Luckily
> for us, we can really test our software with Shavian since it is sort
> of on the cutting edge of Unicode support. By the way, Mac OS X
> handles it fine for most everything. Only old programs have a problem.
> And those get upgraded over time.
>

If you use any Mozilla-based browser, such as Netscape, you can expect
better support for Shavian. Also, I have been unable to find any good
way to convince any version of MS-Windows older than Windows 2000 to
work with plane-1 characters, no matter what the application you may
use. If anybody knows of a way, please let me know!

--
·𐑰𐑔𐑩𐑯 - Ethan


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Hi John,

That's okay. Originally, Kingley Read in Androcles and the Lion, mentioned to use the spellings from that volume when the time came to formalized Shavian spelling. Which is as you have indicated is the Northern England accent.

So, I assume to derive this Northern England accent from a dictionary, one might use the Oxford dictionary. However, due there also being Shavian Ethusiasts around the World. An American Spelling is needed for us western hemisphere people.

regards,

Carl

John Warner <john.warner@...> wrote:

In message <20040330211055.80623.qmail@...>, carl
easton <shavintel16@...> writes
>Hi Hugh,
>
>I agree we Shavian Users must use the American Heritage Dictionary for
>Formal Shavian pronouncation, as you have indicated due to it's
>equivalence of Shaw Letters and balance of Brittish and American accents.
>
>regards,
>
>Carl

As someone from the North of England who is educated I thought that the
accent that was preferred by Shaw was "a pronunciation to resemble that
recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described
as Northern English".

I was going to put a joke in here about the colonials not getting above
their station but I thought that probably wouldn't be registered as a
joke by some.

John Warner
--
John Warner

john.warner@...



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carl easton wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> That's okay. Originally, Kingley Read in Androcles and the Lion,
> mentioned to use the spellings from that volume when the time came to
> formalized Shavian spelling. Which is as you have indicated is the
> Northern England accent.
>
> So, I assume to derive this Northern England accent from a dictionary,
> one might use the Oxford dictionary. However, due there also being
> Shavian Ethusiasts around the World. An American Spelling is needed for
> us western hemisphere people.
>
> regards,
>
> Carl


According to the numbers found at
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/lan_eng_spe

Native English speakers per country, 1984 estimates -
UK: 55 million
US: 210 million

I think that it is important to consider where the people are, and how
they speak when deciding where to standardize. If you go by the
numbers, standard American English should be given preference. Consider
also that most Canadians speak almost the same as standard American English.

That said, it would scarcely be fair to force the American standard on
people who find it strange, so I think it would be good to have at least
a standard for British English as well, so everybody can be as
comfortable as possible. But would either standard be acceptible for
people in, say, Australia, New Zeeland, or South Africa?

--
·𐑰𐑔𐑩𐑯 - Ethan


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