Hi Paige
Thanks for your feedback. Let me respond to the second point you
bring up.
If the only benefit of writing Shavian was to communicate back and
forth real-time (like a telephone) then of course you would have to
get a lot a people to learn it at the same time. And then at some
critical point when enough people in your community know it,
everybody starts to get the benefits.
But that is not the case. Writing is tool for a number of other
activities for which the number of other people knowing how to read
Shavian is irrelevent. Let me list just a few activities where the
Shavian Alphabet shines out ahead of the T.O., even if only a few
people understand it.
1. Jotting notes down in Shavian as a memory aid, memorandums.
2. Transcribing a conversation verbatim, to take notes of a lecture
3. Annotation of a book that you are studying
4. To help teach Phonics and Phonetics
5. A Phonetic standard by which to learn other languages besides
English.
6. To write a diary or other confidential material
7. Eliminating the less significant vowels in a writing a word, can
make Shavian into a reasonably effective shorthand.
We have to stress those benefits, to those parents teaching their
own kids at home.
We use reading and writing as both a way to extend our memory, but
also for Time Shifting. Once material is written down, whatever the
difficulty, that information is no longer time bound. We can learn
something from an author, long dead as if we were speaking to him
face to face. We absorb the information in our own time and at our
own rate. In real sense, we circumvent some of the harsh realities
of our own morality. What is our Will and Last Testament other than
a final chance to close the book our lives with neatness and
deliberation using the written word?
While the T.O. serves the purpose admirably, I think we need to
point out to children with reading and writing difficulties, that
the T.O. is not the only tool that will serve this purpose.
To start with people need to know that such a writing tool exist.
I suspect that Shavian Alphabet would minimize the effects of
Dyslexia and a number of other reading disorders.
It as if Amerslan (ASL) was withheld from the Deaf Community,
because the benefits of even minimal voice communication was
considered better that having full manual communication in an
isolated speech community.
Regards, Paul V.
P.S. I definately think we should we consider producing beginner
texts and workbooks for children in Shavian.
--- In shavian@..., "Paige Gabhart" <pgabhart@a...>
wrote:
> Most people have this idea that learning to read is really hard
for a lot of people. Virtually nobody understands that a big part
of the problem is the alphabet rather than the language. And
teachers don't understand it either because it was never explained
to them when they were in school studying to become teachers, or, as
they prefer, educators. So I would anticipate that it would be
quite difficult to convince a parent home-schooling his child that
they should spend time
> learning to read using an alternative alphabet. The parent knows
the
> child has to learn T.O. and there is so much else to learn as
well, how
> can he devote his child's time to learning something which
virtually
> know one else knows? Obviously, we would have to do an excellent
job
> convincing the parent that the student would receive some benefit
from
> learning the Read alphabet.
>
> Should we consider the possibility of producing beginning texts and
> workbooks in Read? It would be a lot of work. I don't mean to
sound
> negative, but there are some rather large hurdles to overcome.
>
> Paige
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