Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 21:05:48 -0500
To: shavian@...
From: Paige Gabhart <pgabhart@...>
Subject: Re: [shavian] Many things (roman letters)
At 11:28 PM 12/20/2000 +0000, you wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Jon Zuck <mailto:frimmin@...>
To: shavian@... <mailto:shavian@...>
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 7:57 PM
Subject: [shavian] Many things (roman letters)
[big snip]
Whitewheat "wh" is a sound I don't think I use unless I'm specifically thinking about. I hardly ever hear it. However, for some people, millions of them, it's a vital distinction between which and witch. Paige impressed on me the importance of including it in the Second Shaw mapping.
What was his argument? So far, Gary's argument that it is not vitally important to the meaning of words to have a letter for 'wh' has held fast in my view. It is not a sound spoken by the majority.
It is my suspicion that the people who find a "Whitewheat" letter superfluous are those who rarely or never utter the sound it represents themselves. To those of us who customarily make the distinction, it is important. I have no statistics regarding the prevalence of this sound among English speakers. Do you, Hugh? I have no idea if "Whitewheat" users are actually in the minority as you allege. Let us suppose they are. Since a majority is somewhere between 50 and 100 percent, stating that the majority doesn't use the sound doesn't tell us much. For purpose of discussion let us suppose that sixty percent pronounce "which" and "witch" alike. Are you suggesting the other forty percent -- which would be many millions -- should not have this letter available to accurately represent their speech?
The Read alphabets have the capability of enabling a person to transmit something of his speech -- in addition to the bare text -- to a distant reader. I enjoy that aspect of using QS. Twenty-five years ago when I corresponded with a gentleman from New Zealand, I "heard" his accent in his letters. As we read each other's posts, we can hear to some degree the differences in our speech in the various spellings. An alphabet is a code, which, if it is well-designed for the language in question, enables us to reproduce the sounds of our speech with sufficient accuracy to communicate with others. Should we voluntarily reduce the accuracy of that reproduction because the "majority" doesn't use a a particular sound anymore. I might agree if there were only a few small isolated populations still using the sound. But I don't think that is the case with "Whitewheat."
Someone noted in a post recently a person probably produces over a hundred different vowel sounds. Obviously, it would be futile to attempt to reproduce that level of accuracy in an alphabet. But using "Whitewheat" in the Read alphabets is far from such an overwhelming complexity. It is merely one simple symbol, clearly related to "Win-Win." The letter is certainly not a challenge to read, and should not throw anyone off his stride because he doesn't happen to utter the sound in his own speech. The argument that it is not "vitally important to the meaning of words" begs the question in my view. To attempt to pare down the alphabet to an absolute bare minimum of symbols and, consequently, leave out a symbol used by millions seems to me to be practicing a false economy. It annoys those whose speech is not accurately represented because it implies their speech is less worthy than that of the majority. And the subtrac tion of one symbol from the alphabet does not produce a significant savings in time or effort in writing. If we could ask Read why Shavian has no "Whitewheat" and QS does, I suspect he would tell you that during the extended testing period enough people complained about its absence that he included it in Shavian's revision, and in an ingenuous way, I might add.
I even included two new letter-forms, created by Paige himself, and tested over years.
Sounds interesting - which new letter-forms are those? And what sounds do they represent?
Jon's reference to letters I created gives me more credit than is deserved. In the process of using QS, I extended the use of the half-letters set out by Read in the manual to apply to "Yo" and to "Whitewheat." These additions are perfectly legible in QS. An adept writer in QS connects as many letters as he can, producing a highly cursive appearance in the finished script. Since Shavian is written in non-connected letters, these half-letters have no applicability there. By the way, if any of you are actually writing in either alphabet by hand, I can tell you QS is considerably faster since there are many fewer penlifts.
All:
A quick thought about stress: We often tend to think of the difference of vowels in terms solely of quality, but there is what's called agogic stress: duration. It seems that Read favored If whenever the "ee" or "ih" sound was of a very short duration, hence the -iti, -ali endings, etc. When it's understood that the difference is more of agogic stress than of accented syllables or the shape of the vowel formed in the mouth, I think a lot of our disagreement about using If and Eat might be resolved. That's really what I meant by the crack about "American hillbilly" accents. For instance, the "Texas drawl" in the Dallas area extends vowels sounds several times their normal durations to most people's speech. I think to write /SEvIan instead of /SEvWn suggests that drawl. BTW, I grew up in Texas, but on the Mexican border, very rhotic general American accent.< /blockquote>But why did he favor 'if' in preference to 'eat'? 'Eat' is much closer to how the majority of us say those sounds. In this respect I don't think Read got that one right.
I agree. I assumed it had to do with King George's pronunciation or, perhaps, Read's.
Paige
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