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In a message dated 9/10/00 7:15:22 PM, pgabhart@... writes:

<< This response seems to show no knowledge of Esperanto, the most widely
disseminated "world language" at this time. Apparently there are several
million Esperanto speakers. The intent of L.L. Zamenhof, the inventor of
Esperanto, was not to develop a language that would in any way replace the
richness and significance of an individual's "mother tongue," but to
develop a logical, simple, yet rich, language that could serve as a "lingua
franca" for everyone around the world so that everyone can communicate with
people you come in contact with who did not learn your language at their
mother's knee. As most of us are not polyglots, learning another language
is a chore which takes significant time and effort. Learning Esperanto has
been estimated in a number of studies to be roughly 4-6 times easier than
learning a "natural," illogical "mother tongue." Esperanto has the further
advantage of being neutral, with no nationalistic overtones. As an aside,
Esperanto has been widely studied in China and other parts of Asia. >>

I learned Esperanto in my youth and corresponded in it for years with
penpals. I gave it up when I realized that there are far more people in the
world eager to speak English than will even even know anything of Esperanto.
My statement doesn't reflect ignorance of Esperanto; merely a rejection of
it. English IS the de facto international language.

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Simon Barne asks:
>>For instance, in RP the word "bother" uses the Shavian "on" vowel, while
"father" uses the "ah" vowel. If most Americans do not distinguish between
these two sounds, should they be spelt using the same letter, and if so,
which?<<

Shavian here simply has one more vowel than I do, and I do not use the "on"
letter at all. - On the other hand, Shavian does not distinguish /w/ and
/hw/, a fully phonemic distinction in my speech, as it is in the speech of a
good many Americans and Scots. I simply write it as hw in Shavian. -
Obviously, spelling would guide any writer of Shavian who wanted to write the
distinction, whether or not he was able to make it in speech. The "on" and
"ah" distinction however cannot be made with certainty by referring to
traditional orthography - you just have to have gone to the right schools (or
look it up in a dictionary) to know whether it's "dawnce" or "daence".

For an extreme example of what we're talking about, look at Chinese. The very
cumbersome historical orthography of Chinese - the kanji, to use the Japanese
form of the word that is rapidly becoming the English word for it -
represents in writing a number of Chinese languages (traditionally called
"dialects" in English) which are not mutually intelligible. In speech, the
language of the Beijing area (Mandarin) is normative, and it has been the
dream of centuries of Chinese governments to enforce this speech standard
over the entire Middle Kingdom. - Now the "Shavian" of romanization (pinyin)
fulfills that dream. A Cantonese speaker has no pinyin, but must learn
Mandarin as a separate language in order to write Chinese in romanization at
all.

Obviously I'm at an extreme in this debate, but I do not believe that Shavian
can function as a historical orthography to force the rest of the world to
learn British Received Pronunciation.

The question everybody needs to ask themselves is: just what do we want
Shavian to do? - And I'm not sure I know the answer to that.

Bob Richmond
Knoxville, Tennessee USA

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C. Paige Gabhart wrote:
> This response seems to show no knowledge of Esperanto, the most widely
> disseminated "world language" at this time.

There's even an adaptation of the Shaw alphabet to Esperanto! Someone (don't
remember who, unfortunately) sent me a little booklet with a story in
Esperanto that progressively introduces more and more Shaw alphabet letters.
There's also a little addendum which introduces some ligatures for such
common combinations as -oj -aj, -is -as -os -us, etc.

> Esperanto has the further advantage of being neutral, with
> no nationalistic overtones.

<snicker> Let's hear you say that on the newsgroup sci.lang. There's a
regular there, Lee Sau Dan (from Hong Kong, I believe) who says Esperanto is
very Eurocentric, from the sentence structure, mandatory adjective-verb
agreement in case and number, the use of plurals which have to be marked,
etc. etc. Basically, while Esperanto is supposed to be governed by the 14(?)
rules of its grammar, he says that there are more, unwritten, rules which
also apply to European languages and so are natural to speakers of those
languages, but not to speakers of e.g. Asian languages -- yet they are
equally binding. Whether that's true or not, I cannot really determine,
since I know too little about idiomatic Esperanto.

Cheers,
Philip

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[Piggybacking on Stuart's message, since Bob's didn't reach me for some
reason.]

Bob Richmond wrote:
> > I would have to look up each word that contains a sound in
> > this range to find out how to spell it. And frankly, my dear,
> > I'd rawther not bawther (or is that rother not bother? or
> > rather not bather?)

Rahther not bother, in RP: /ra:D@ nA.t bA.D@/, or some such, in ASCII IPA.
(Do you rhyme those two words?)

Cheers,
Philip

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>
>
> Shavian advocates may not like standardization, but without it, it has
> little hope of capturing the interest and imagination of more "practical"
> people. I know this because my wife and others whom I have shown this to
> have little to no interest in learning a system that has no
> standardization. That would probably be true of most people.

Maybe, maybe not. In this part of the world (Australia), Shavian (or any
similar scheme) would have no hope if it was forcing people to spell words the
way Americans pronounce them. I'm not knocking American accents, but we don't
talk that way.

- .+'^'+. -- A.M.Callaway --------------------
- A N D Y ------------------------------------
- `+.,.+' -- www.ozemail.com.au/~acal --------

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At 12:48 AM 9/10/00 +0100, you wrote:

>
> <http://www.egroups.com/mygroups>My Groups |
> <http://www.egroups.com/group/shavian>shavian Main Page |
> <http://click.egroups.com/1/8150/11/_/54531/_/968543340/>Start a new group!
>
> Long ago in the past there was a discussion similar to this. I'm glad it has
> returned, as I also believe there should be some degree of concensus in
> spelling standard, if only for official publishing purposes.


[snip]

>
> It is quite clear to me - whether
> or not there is a standard in existence, it would by no means 'force' me to
> change my spelling habits. In fact, everyone about the globe could still
> spell how the heck they wanted to,


Hear, hear.

>
> and if two people, one from Liverpool in
> England, the other from Texas, USA, met on the internet, their informal
> spelling could be quite noticeably different. But the point is, if
> publishers are LOOKING to write their material (which would be viewed by
> thousands, even millions of people, possibly from different places around
> the world) in some form of 'standard' english, they need something to use.


But the thing is, different spellings could be used to represent different
accents or dialects. After all, we hear these accents and dialects all the
time
and have no (well, very little) problem with them. Why not the same with
spelling?



>
> There is also the case of if an Internet user were to type a word (which
> could be spelt a number of different ways depending on their regional
> dialect) into a search engine text box, it would be impossibly difficult for
> the search engine to find what the user wanted, unless it had an enormous
> library of variations on individual words. And I'm sure everybody must
> agree, that is a ridiculous thing to require of search engines and other
> similar utilities,


No, I dont agree, actually. It is my opinion that computers are here to help
us, not the other way around. If a search engine cannot handle different
pronunciations, then it clearly isn't doing its job. If it is forcing the user
to modify her/his behaviour, then it has lost the plot.




- .+'^'+. -- A.M.Callaway --------------------
- A N D Y ------------------------------------
- `+.,.+' -- www.ozemail.com.au/~acal --------

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At 06:56 PM 9/9/00 -0700, you wrote:

>
> <http://www.egroups.com/mygroups>My Groups |
> <http://www.egroups.com/group/shavian>shavian Main Page |
> <http://click.egroups.com/1/8150/11/_/54531/_/968550975/>Start a new group!
>
>
> folks:
>
> [snip-a-bit]




>
> Why? Because fully phonetic alphabets 1) are
> harder for worker bees to learn; 2) encourage the
> music in language, which inevitably distracts from the
> meaning of writing (communication vs. poetry; the
> meaning is in the consonants, which is why there are
> so many in the roman; the music is in the vowels,
> which is why shavian has so many more vowels);


Yes, but I don't think our day to day conversation is conducted in
recitatives.
Compare:
You wanna coffee?
with
A coffee, a magnificent coffee! This cup! Were it worthy of such a bean!

Sorry. I got a bit carried away.


- .+'^'+. -- A.M.Callaway --------------------
- A N D Y ------------------------------------
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>
>
> My guess is that we need to wrap up spelling/alphabet
> reform with language/communication reform. it has
> become a commonplace to say that english has become
> the de facto world language. I'm not so sure. it isn't
> even the most widely spoken language (if you look at
> native-tongue speakers). Chinese is the most widely
> spoken by that standard, and i don't think the chinese
> will be so easy to boss around on this question.


You are nearly correct. Actually, English is more widespread (area-wise), but
Cantonese is spoken by more people. Remember, there are about 1200 million
Chinese.

>
> Of
> course written chinese is a bear to learn, but i think
> that in any future language standardization scheme,
> they (and others) may insist on the creation of a new
> world language to facilitate communication and
> commerce. THAT would be the moment to bring Shaw
> Script to people's attention as a candidate for
> representing english language speaking during the
> creation process of the new world language.


Now I remember why I came in here in the first place. One project I have
planned for the future, is an artificial language based on English. Given that
English is becoming more and more widespread, I thought the best idea would be
to create a 'logical English' with regular grammar, a regular vocabulary and
regular spelling. Being very similar to English, it would be a lot easier to
learn than Esperanto, Interlinga or Volapuk. So I started hunting around for
alternative scripts...

>
> people
> might think, if we're going to have to adjust to a new
> world language for administration/business/commerce
> anyway, why not go the extra mile and change over to
> Shaw Script? This may be our best opportunity for
> getting wide-spread use. eric
>
> (ps. people never accused me of thinking small.)


- .+'^'+. -- A.M.Callaway --------------------
- A N D Y ------------------------------------
- `+.,.+' -- www.ozemail.com.au/~acal --------

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folks:

wow, didn't know i would start such a rumpus! My
reasons for endorsing further alphabet/language reform
are:

1) because english is the de facto international koine
of modern life, it is being worn down, disintegrating
into a form that is hard for native speakers to enrich
with their own idioms/inventions. lovers of english
should prefer the creation of a new language that can
be beat up at will by linguophobes and other
troglodytes.

2) esperanto & other languages are inadequate. A new
world language & alphabet ideally should a) not be
unduly based on any existing language/family of
languages; b) have the full richness of a mother
tongue (though this may take time to acquire); c) be
easily written with a pen, brush, wordprocessor, and
lend themselves to use by blind and deaf people; d) be
beautiful to read (shavian at least meets this test,
whereas the IPA IMHO is ugly).

3) as a further guard against various
standardization/control schemes. a truely phonetic
alphabet would make it more difficult to specific
"correct" spellings and usages, thereby impeding
various government and business control freaks. It
would also help restore the importance of music to
language, an essential part of its "irrational"
dignity. (in the long run this would facilitate the
evolution of the world language into succesor tongues,
but this is the way of language creation, which goes
on all the time, anyway.)

Those are the reasons i can think of at the moment.
eric


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The Lurker wants >>A new world language & alphabet<<

Thlingan Hol maaj!

Bob Richmond
Knoxville, Tennessee USA