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From: John Burrows <burrows@...>
Date: 2005-11-29 17:07:47 #
Subject: Punctuation

Toggle Shavian
After recent discussion about alphabets, spelling and literacy,
I'd recommend a book on punctuation: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne
Truss.
(ISBN 1-86197-612-7)
It mentions Shaw's concern with spelling reform on ergonomic grounds.
From the bibliography: Abraham Tauber (ed.), George Bernard Shaw on
Language, Peter Owen, 1965.
Has anybody perused the latter work?
Eats, Shoots & Leaves is dedicated, I tell you no porkies:
To the memory of the striking Bolshevik
printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905,
demanded to be paid the same rate for
punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby
directly precipitated the first
Russian Revolution
jb

From: stbetta@...
Date: 2005-12-01 06:36:41 #
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: The Reality of illiteracy

Toggle Shavian
_www.unifon.org_ (http://www.unifon.org)



-----
Paul wrote:

Steve, You are quite correct. With a distinctive font, and a Namer Dot
convention, the new Unifon would serve almost as well as Shavian
as an alternate Alphabet for English. I would say a lot of it does look
like Roman Capitals, but there are a few distinctive letters that make
your case.

SB: An all upper case script would signal that this is not ordinary
spelling. 23 characters are identical to the upper case letters. The 5 long vowels
are the same except for a macron.
This leaves only 12 letters of unique design.

However, I see UNIFON as little bit more of a work in progress, whereas
in the case of Shavian a lot of the issues have been worked out over
the last 50 years.

SB: Unifon and Shavian are the same age. Unifon was even submitted as a
candidate for Shavian. It was quickly rejected because it was not sufficiently
non-Roman.

For example, Shavian is a system that has successfully combined the
printed and the cursive forms. That issue has yet to be dealt with in
UNIFON. It apparently was set up as only a printed form without a lower case.
Regards, Paul V.

------


Paul,

Please elaborate on cursive Shavian. I consider Shavian to be a rapid
monoline script. Cursive has several interpretations. In the Handryting
group we teach an italic hand with few connected letters. I would consider it
a cursive but to some a running hand has to be connected.

Unifon is a transitory phonemic alphabet. It is mastered in 3 months and
only used for writing and a dicitonary key after that. The only reason it is
retained for messaging is because it takes so long to master traditional
spelling. Reading is not that difficult if you have a good foundation in phonemic
awareness.

What we have been working on for the last year is rediscovering the old
Unifon. Several books were published in Unifon but most of these were destroyed.
So we have no long transcriptions. However, Malone, who is in his 90's, is
still alive and has been able to fill in some of the gaps.


_www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifonk05.zip_
(http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/unifonk05.zip)

Malone had no need for a keyboard map so this has been a recent invention.

____________________________attached___________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, stbetta@a... wrote:
G.B. Shaw and Twain, who were both familiar with phonemic spelling in
tradspel,thought that you had to abandon the Roman alphabet to avoid
being labeled as uneducated.
I think that Unifon is sufficiently foreign to be seen as
something new rather than misspelled English.
I would think a distinctive font is all that is required.

----
_http://www.foolswisdom.com/users/sbett/chronology.htm_
(http://www.foolswisdom.com/users/sbett/chronology.htm)
Chronology of Spelling


1908 The formation of the SSB in the U.S. inspires a similar organization
in the U.K.
Both receive some anonymous funding from Andrew Carnegie.

1912 ROBERT BRIDGES (Poet Laureate) belonged to the Society for Pure
English. He removed mute letters, e.g. hav, liv, coud, etc. and recommended changes
in the shapes of some letters. more at _www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/_
(http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/) However, he was concerned with good speech
and did not want the orthography keyed to popular speech. He preferred the
orthography be linked more to literary English and platform speech that to
everyday continuous speech. He opposed the descriptive approach that Daniel
Jones took. He and Shaw corresponded and agreed on many things.

1914 Miss McCALLUM successfully taught a reading system based on the
'International Phonetic Alphabet', at a school in Cowdenbeath.

1941 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [1856-1950] In a long preface to Wilson's book, The
Miraculous Birth of Language, Shaw described the kind of alphabet needed for
English. Shaw used Pitman shorthand and wanted a linear version of it that
would be suitable for typesetting.

Pitman phonetic shorthand had 24 consonants, 12 vowels, and 4 diphthongs.
Shaw was interested "in the introduction of a new English alphabet
containing between 40 and 50 new letters to be used and taught concurrently with the
old alphabet until one or the other proves the fitter to survive," [see
shaw-pref.html]

In his own writings he dropped the u in our endings and apostrophes in noun
possessives, and abbreviated words and phrases. In his will he left most of
his estate for the development of an alphabet to his specifications. The will
was successfully disputed on the grounds that you can only leave money to a
charity not to an idea. In the end the British Museum received most of the
estate and only a small amount of it was dedicated to realizing his dream.
Shortly after his death in 1950, a contest was announced with a prize of 500 BPDs
to the person who submitted the best design. In 1962 a biscriptural version
of his play, Androcles and the Lion was published. [pittman-intro.html].
www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett/shaw-short.htm

Shaw's will specified "an alphabet of at least 40 letters" to be devised by
a qualified phonetician." A committee headed by phonetician P.A.D. McCarthy
declared 4 winners from the hundreds of submissions they received. One of the
winners, typographer Kingsley Read, worked out the final set of shapes and
saw that a font was cut.

1949 Dr. MONT FOLLICK, Labour M. P. for Loughborough introduced a private
members' Spelling Reform Bill into the House of Commons, seconded by Sir
:JAMES PITMAN. The Bill was defeated in a small house by a vote of 84 to 87.



(corrections and elaborations welcomed)

From: "paul vandenbrink" <pvandenbrink11@...>
Date: 2005-12-01 20:06:27 #
Subject: Re: The Reality of illiteracy

Toggle Shavian
Hi Steve
I agreed that Unifon did meet the requirement that it look
sufficiently different from the Roman Letters, so that it would be
considered Novel Alphabet, rather than simply misspelled English.
However, I do not consider that it being spelt in ALL capital letters
to be a good thing. A lot of small children when the begin to write,
print every word in Capital letters. I would not consider it to be a
useful distiguishing feature. Fortunately there are enough other
features (i.e. Geometric Shaping of Letters) so that this point
becomes moot.

As for the other things, thanks for confirming that it is in fact a
work in progress. (Under Revival)

> What we have been working on for the last year is rediscovering
> the old Unifon.
> Several books were published in Unifon but most of these were
> destroyed. So we have no long transcriptions.
> However, Malone, who is in his 90's, is
> still alive and has been able to fill in some of the gaps.

Regards, Paul V.

P.S. Sorry if I confused you. I thought a cursive form would be
obvious next step in the Unifon Alphabet's development.
I meant Cursive in the sense of a script or form of hand writing,
that can easily be done by hand. Every letter need not be joined to
every other letter in this matter.
For example, I consider Shavian to be an adequate cursive script with
only minor modifications. The fact that abbreviations (4 common words)
are already incorporated in the Spelling system is a big plus.
__________________attached_________________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, stbetta@a... wrote:
> SB: Unifon and Shavian are the same age. Unifon was even
submitted as a
> candidate for Shavian. It was quickly rejected because it was not
sufficiently
> non-Roman.
>
> For example, Shavian is a system that has successfully combined
the
> printed and the cursive forms. That issue has yet to be dealt with
in
> UNIFON. It apparently was set up as only a printed form without a
lower case.
> Regards, Paul V.

> Please elaborate on cursive Shavian. I consider Shavian to be a
rapid
> monoline script. Cursive has several interpretations. In the
Handryting
> group we teach an italic hand with few connected letters. I would
consider it
> a cursive but to some a running hand has to be connected.
>
> Unifon is a transitory phonemic alphabet. It is mastered in 3
months and
> only used for writing and a dicitonary key after that. The only
reason it is
> retained for messaging is because it takes so long to master
traditional
> spelling. Reading is not that difficult if you have a good
foundation in phonemic
> awareness.
>
> What we have been working on for the last year is rediscovering
the old
> Unifon. Several books were published in Unifon but most of these
were destroyed.
> So we have no long transcriptions. However, Malone, who is in his
90's, is
> still alive and has been able to fill in some of the gaps.
>
> Malone had no need for a keyboard map so this has been a recent
invention.
> ____________________________attached___________________
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, stbetta@a... wrote:
> I think that Unifon is sufficiently foreign to be seen as
> something new rather than misspelled English.
> I would think a distinctive font is all that is required.

From: "paul vandenbrink" <pvandenbrink11@...>
Date: 2005-12-02 18:48:44 #
Subject: Shavian Dictionary

Toggle Shavian
Hi Hugh
While I think that most of our members have a good ear and are able
to convert what they are saying into what is the phonetically
appropriate Shavian letter, I would like to open up the Shavian
Alphabet to vast majority of people who either don't have that
ability and or both that ability and the necessarily level of
phonetic expertise.
We need a real Shavian English Dictionary.
Leon had a few good points on this matter.
See attached.

Regards, Paul V.

P.S. Without being a prescriptionist about English pronunciation,
I want to provide another route to Shavian English literacy.
Literacy of some kind is an essential skill for surviving in our
Modern world.
____________________________attached_______________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
<pvandenbrink11@h...> wrote for Leon:

I think this is the greatest weakness of a phonemic alphabet.
If we were to conform to a standard (for formal texts, say, such as
newspapers, books, or other documents available on web
sites), then one accent is implicitly asserted to
be superior to all others, or at least "more standard".
And this would place everyone else at a slight disadvantage.
This goes against our ideal of a providing an equal opportunity
writing system for any English speaker.

Having said that, there are at least two different
standardized spelling systems of English using the Roman alphabet
(American and British/International), which are fundamentally
similar, and which are more or less intelligible
to all English speakers, regardless of their accent.

I'd find it hard to imitate, for example,
an American Mid-Western accent in Shavian, since I might not be sure
of the exact distribution of its phonemes (especially vowels) --
but I don't have any problem understanding any American writer's
speech, even when it is rendered into Shavian. As long as we all try
to use the 48 Shavian letters to approximate as best we can our own
accents, I don't think there should be any problem with mutual
intelligibility, even if our spellings might differ a little.
As for a standard, formal paradigm of Shavian spelling,
do we really need one?
Even the use of a single dictionary might be too much of a straight-
jacket.

I think we need to think outside the box (Dictionary) on this issue.
We need our own Shavian Dictionary, that at a minimum indicates
the most common pronunciation for both the British and American
varieties of English, and also flags when that pronunciation as being
common to both Standards of English.
Ideally, people will tend to gravitate to the more mutually
comprehensible words and leave the local idioms behind.

Leon

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
<pvandenbrink11@h...> wrote:
> While I would recommend using a Dictionary, suitable to your accent,
> when you are not certain of the standard pronunciation of a word.
> Say for is a technical word, that you haven't heard used before.
> But for ordinary Letter writing, I would just write what I say.
> The final Arbritor would be simply acceptable/understandable
> pronunciation.
>
> Right now, Shavian is like a loose fitting garment that we have to
> grow into. I am certain that (rule based) spelling standards will
> eventually develop which will make some of these spelling decision
> easier. But for now I think it is a little premature.
>
> I think right now, I am more interested in determining the range
> and limits of these spelling variations at this point.
> In particular, I am interested in using the shorter of any 2
> acceptable Shavian spellings.
> As I have a better understanding of Mid-West American
pronunciation,
> where vowel sounds do seem a little more restricted and simpler,
> this seems to work for me.
> Please do not feel that I am imposing in any way my suggested
> spellings on Non-American English speakers.
>
> Hopefully, in the future someone will develop and provide a
computer
> program, that would convert any particular piece of English text
into
> Standard British, Standard Indian, Standard American or Standard
> Australian.
> I think it is just a case of compiling a big enough Database on the
> variations.

From: "Hugh Birkenhead" <mixsynth@...>
Date: 2005-12-02 20:58:30 #
Subject: RE: [shawalphabet] Shavian Dictionary

Toggle Shavian
We have something as close as possible to a Shavian English dictionary, if
such a thing is desired: The American Heritage Dictionary.

http://www.dictionary.com/

As we know, it's an American dictionary, defaulting very much on General
American for all words where RP would disagree, but its pronunciation guides
use pretty much the same phonemic set as Shavian (unlike those of the OED or
Merriam Webster). Plus, it's easily accessible and easy to query.

If anybody wants to find out the *ideal* Shavian spelling, all they have to
do is look up the word on the site, then translate the pronunciation guide
given to Shavian characters. To make this easier for anyone who hasn't
studied phonetics, I created a conversion chart:

http://mixsynth.fearfulsilence.com/shavian/ahdpronshaw.htm

People don't have to use those spellings, but if they want to write
something that is pretty much "Atlanticly neutral", they're able to fall
back on them.

Hugh B


> -----Original Message-----
> From: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com [mailto:shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com]
> On Behalf Of paul vandenbrink
> Sent: 02 December 2005 18:47
> To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [shawalphabet] Shavian Dictionary
>
> Hi Hugh
> While I think that most of our members have a good ear and are able
> to convert what they are saying into what is the phonetically
> appropriate Shavian letter, I would like to open up the Shavian
> Alphabet to vast majority of people who either don't have that
> ability and or both that ability and the necessarily level of
> phonetic expertise.
> We need a real Shavian English Dictionary.
> Leon had a few good points on this matter.
> See attached.
>
> Regards, Paul V.
>
> P.S. Without being a prescriptionist about English pronunciation,
> I want to provide another route to Shavian English literacy.
> Literacy of some kind is an essential skill for surviving in our
> Modern world.
> ____________________________attached_______________________
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
> <pvandenbrink11@h...> wrote for Leon:
>
> I think this is the greatest weakness of a phonemic alphabet.
> If we were to conform to a standard (for formal texts, say, such as
> newspapers, books, or other documents available on web
> sites), then one accent is implicitly asserted to
> be superior to all others, or at least "more standard".
> And this would place everyone else at a slight disadvantage.
> This goes against our ideal of a providing an equal opportunity
> writing system for any English speaker.
>
> Having said that, there are at least two different
> standardized spelling systems of English using the Roman alphabet
> (American and British/International), which are fundamentally
> similar, and which are more or less intelligible
> to all English speakers, regardless of their accent.
>
> I'd find it hard to imitate, for example,
> an American Mid-Western accent in Shavian, since I might not be sure
> of the exact distribution of its phonemes (especially vowels) --
> but I don't have any problem understanding any American writer's
> speech, even when it is rendered into Shavian. As long as we all try
> to use the 48 Shavian letters to approximate as best we can our own
> accents, I don't think there should be any problem with mutual
> intelligibility, even if our spellings might differ a little.
> As for a standard, formal paradigm of Shavian spelling,
> do we really need one?
> Even the use of a single dictionary might be too much of a straight-
> jacket.
>
> I think we need to think outside the box (Dictionary) on this issue.
> We need our own Shavian Dictionary, that at a minimum indicates
> the most common pronunciation for both the British and American
> varieties of English, and also flags when that pronunciation as being
> common to both Standards of English.
> Ideally, people will tend to gravitate to the more mutually
> comprehensible words and leave the local idioms behind.
>
> Leon
>
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
> <pvandenbrink11@h...> wrote:
> > While I would recommend using a Dictionary, suitable to your accent,
> > when you are not certain of the standard pronunciation of a word.
> > Say for is a technical word, that you haven't heard used before.
> > But for ordinary Letter writing, I would just write what I say.
> > The final Arbritor would be simply acceptable/understandable
> > pronunciation.
> >
> > Right now, Shavian is like a loose fitting garment that we have to
> > grow into. I am certain that (rule based) spelling standards will
> > eventually develop which will make some of these spelling decision
> > easier. But for now I think it is a little premature.
> >
> > I think right now, I am more interested in determining the range
> > and limits of these spelling variations at this point.
> > In particular, I am interested in using the shorter of any 2
> > acceptable Shavian spellings.
> > As I have a better understanding of Mid-West American
> pronunciation,
> > where vowel sounds do seem a little more restricted and simpler,
> > this seems to work for me.
> > Please do not feel that I am imposing in any way my suggested
> > spellings on Non-American English speakers.
> >
> > Hopefully, in the future someone will develop and provide a
> computer
> > program, that would convert any particular piece of English text
> into
> > Standard British, Standard Indian, Standard American or Standard
> > Australian.
> > I think it is just a case of compiling a big enough Database on the
> > variations.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>

From: stbetta@...
Date: 2005-12-04 20:55:14 #
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Comparing Shavian to UNIFON, ENgliS and Pitman's Phonetic ...

Toggle Shavian
Paul and Joe,

Joe has it right. treasure = treZc = treZD

There used to be a backward E to distinguish the e in her from the e sound
in hair and error.
The distinction is still made with hc (H3R) for her and her (HER) for hair.

Unifon has two mergers V+@ up and ago and
3R and @r as in herder H3RD3R instead of
/'h3rd@r/

Relative stress is not marked.

One of the visual disruptions in Unifon is the association of V and @ with u
ugO and sOfu UGΓ“ and SΓ“FU
are less recognizable than agO and sOfa agO and sOfa

--Steve

On the contrary, Unifon has both sounds. The J sound you mention is
written a backward Z, and the schwa is spelled with U. It used to have
a reversed E that was equivalent to u up, but in the revision that's
now given at Unifon.org, it's been joined with an R to make a new
letter equivalent to D array.

Regards,
Joseph Spicer
·𐑑𐑴𐑕𐑧𐑓 ·𐑕𐑐𐑲𐑕𐑼

On Nov 22, 2005, at 11:43 PM, paul vandenbrink wrote:

> And since it has only 40 letters, it doesn't
> represent all the English sounds (i.e. J sound of Genre, and treasure)
> If Shavian wasn't available, I'd probably go with the Older Pitman
> Phonetic Alphabet. With 42 letters, It does a little better job of
> representing the English sound system.
> Still neither Pitman or UNIFON has a letter to for the Schwa sound.
> Shavian has Ado.

From: Joseph Spicer <wurdbendur@...>
Date: 2005-12-05 05:14:40 #
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Shavian Dictionary

Toggle Shavian
I wonder if someone here could write some kind of script or something
that would find a word, extract the pronunciation and then convert it
to Shavian. It seems like a simple thing to do, but I don't have the
knowledge of scripting/programming languages to write it or a place to
put it.

Regards,
Joseph Spicer
·𐑑𐑴𐑕𐑧𐑓 ·𐑕𐑐𐑲𐑕𐑼

On Dec 2, 2005, at 3:58 PM, Hugh Birkenhead wrote:

> We have something as close as possible to a Shavian English
> dictionary, if
> such a thing is desired: The American Heritage Dictionary.
>
> http://www.dictionary.com/
>
> As we know, it's an American dictionary, defaulting very much on
> General
> American for all words where RP would disagree, but its pronunciation
> guides
> use pretty much the same phonemic set as Shavian (unlike those of the
> OED or
> Merriam Webster). Plus, it's easily accessible and easy to query.
>
> If anybody wants to find out the *ideal* Shavian spelling, all they
> have to
> do is look up the word on the site, then translate the pronunciation
> guide
> given to Shavian characters. To make this easier for anyone who hasn't
> studied phonetics, I created a conversion chart:
>
> http://mixsynth.fearfulsilence.com/shavian/ahdpronshaw.htm
>
> People don't have to use those spellings, but if they want to write
> something that is pretty much "Atlanticly neutral", they're able to
> fall
> back on them.
>
> Hugh B

From: "paul vandenbrink" <pvandenbrink11@...>
Date: 2005-12-05 15:59:14 #
Subject: Re: Shavian Dictionary

Toggle Shavian
Hi Joseph
Sorry to make your life complicated, but it is not that simple.
It is quite do-able.
But, there are 5 steps to the problem.
1. Convert an Online Dictionary into a Database of English words
where the first field has the Standard Roman Spelling and the second
field has the Pronunciation Key Spelling.
2. Parse the Pronunciation Key Spelling into letters and relevant
Diagraphs to create an intermediate form.
for example:
especially -> e-spesh-ly -> e s p e sh l ee
3. Check word against a list of exceptions where parsing algorithm
doesn't work and give it a corrected intermediate form.
4. Convert all valid letters, capitals or otherwise and diagraphs into
Shavian characters.
5. Remove Apostrophes, but leave all other symbols within the word
unchanged. (i.e. hyphens, periods, etc.)

If you like I can provide a Parsing Algorithm (2) and post it to see if
it meets everyone criteria. The Conversion routine (4) should be pretty
simple and we could define that next. Hugh provided a table for the
conversion.

Regards, Paul V.
______________attached________________________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Joseph Spicer <wurdbendur@g...>
wrote:
>
> I wonder if someone here could write some kind of script or something
> that would find a word, extract the pronunciation and then convert it
> to Shavian. It seems like a simple thing to do, but I don't have the
> knowledge of scripting/programming languages to write it or a place
to put it.

From: stbetta@...
Date: 2005-12-05 20:22:26 #
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: Shavian Dictionary

Toggle Shavian
Building on-line dictionaries for phonemic scripts

Paul, Joseph, Scott, Alan, and others,

Check out the downloadable on-line pronunciation dicitonary at CMU-speech
dept.
_http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict_
(http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)

This is the one we used for Unifon.
Unifon converter at
_http://www.unifon.org/UFLookup/UNIFON_translator.htm_
(http://www.unifon.org/UFLookup/UNIFON_translator.htm)
Only works with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
We had other ones that worked with Foxfire, etc. but they would not
substitute the special font. With this technology, you enter text and
you can get back Shavian characters rather than the keyboard map.

The first task is to substitute the keyboard map for the special font for
the CMU notation.
array, ER0 EY1 replaced with array, DE or arE

herder, h ER1 D ER0 replace with hDdD or hDdar

I would like to have a common phonemic map for all phonemic scripts.
This way someone could type out the code and display the same code as
IPA, Shavian, Unifon, Tengwar, Webster, i/p/a, Jolly, or .....

The CMU dictionary has 125,000 words including about 25,000 surnames and
proper names.
I would like to see another dictionary with just the 10,000 most frequently
used words.
This would be easier to handle.

CMU will generate alternative (American) pronunciations. None of our
converters had this capability. We can't even provide alternative transcriptions of
read (rEd, red) or live (lIv, liv).

I would like to see converter that would give transcriptions in all the
major broadcast dialects of English. pour = (SAMPA: por, poUr, pOr, pUr, ...)
pour = (UNIFON: pOr, ..., pxr, pCr), pour = (SHAVIAN: pOr, ..., pYr,
pUr,....)


Those who developed the first codes for these digital fonts were interested
in a quick
solution. They certainly never tried to optimize the keyboard map for
maximum
readability and rapid entry. Everyone had a different keyboard code.

There was also rarely any concern for different dialects. Shavian was
rhotic. Unifon was strictly an American accent. Jolly had two completely
different codes depending on where the dictionary was sold. This was the practice
of most dicitonary publishers.

Herder array would be hcdc cA in Unifon.
without any indication of stress.

I think that most words in English ending with the A sound, are stressed on
the terminal
syllable. Can you think of any exceptions. obey = ObA, moire = mxrA
We do have Thursday with an unstressed ay. TczdA or Tczdi

--Steve
_www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett_ (http://www.foolswisdom.com/~sbett)


PAUL: Hi Joseph
Sorry to make your life complicated, but it is not that simple.

It is quite do-able.
But, there are 5 steps to the problem.

1. Convert an Online Dictionary into a Database of English words
where the first field has the Standard Roman Spelling and the second
field has the Pronunciation Key Spelling.

2. Parse the Pronunciation Key Spelling into letters and relevant
Diagraphs to create an intermediate form.
for example:
especially -> e-spesh-ly -> e s p e sh l ee EH0 S P EH1 SH AH0 IY0

3. Check word against a list of exceptions where parsing algorithm
doesn't work and give it a corrected intermediate form.

4. Convert all valid letters, capitals or otherwise and diagraphs into
Shavian characters.
5. Remove Apostrophes, but leave all other symbols within the word
unchanged. (i.e. hyphens, periods, etc.)

If you like I can provide a Parsing Algorithm (2) and post it to see if
it meets everyone criteria. The Conversion routine (4) should be pretty
simple and we could define that next. Hugh provided a table for the
conversion.

Regards, Paul V.

- - - - - -

JOE SPICER: I wonder if someone here could write some kind of script or
something that would find a word, extract the pronunciation and then convert it
to Shavian. It seems like a simple thing to do, but I don't have the
knowledge of scripting/programming languages to write it or a place
to put it.

STEVE: I think that Alan Beale _biljir@..._ (mailto:biljir@...)
(_http://www.wyrdplay.org/reform1.html_ (http://www.wyrdplay.org/reform1.html)
(http://www.wyrdplay) ) has developed a program with some of these
capabilities.

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For some background on phonemic and phonetic scripts, read
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From: stbetta@...
Date: 2005-12-05 22:18:20 #
Subject: Comparing dicitionary keys

Toggle Shavian
Comparing dictionary pronunciation guides
Mostly from: _http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxhowtor.html_
(http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxhowtor.html)
Kirsh Merriam-Webster American Heritage Random House Webster's New
World

[A] a umlaut Γ€ (ah) a umlaut Γ€ a umlaut Γ€ a umlaut
[A.] (merged with [A]) o breve Γ²* o (merged with
[A])
[a] a overdot (merged with [A]) A a overdot
/aI/ i macron i macron i macron i macron
/aU/ a u overdot ou ou ou
[C] (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) (merged with [x]) H
[D] th underlined th in italics th slashed th in italics
/dZ/ j j j j
[E] e e breve e e
/E@/ e schwa a circumflex a circumflex (merged with
[e])
/eI/ a macron a macron a macron a macron
[g] g g g g
[I] i i breve i i
[I.] ue ligature (merged with [y]) (merged with [y]) (merged with
[y])
[i] e macron e macron e macron e macron
[j] y y y y
[N] <eng> ng ng <eng>
[O] o overdot o circumflex o circumflex o circumflex
/OI/ o overdot i oi oi oi ligature
/oU/ o macron o macron o macron o macron
[S] sh sh sh sh ligature
[T] th th th th ligature
/tS/ ch ch ch ch ligature
[U] u overdot oo breve oo breve oo
[u] u umlaut oo macron oo macron oo macron
[V] (merged with [@]) u breve u u
[V"] (merged with [@]) u circumflex u circumflex u circumflex
[W] oe ligature oe ligature OE ligature o umlaut
[x] k underlined KH KH kh ligature
[Y] oe ligature macron (merged with [W]) (merged with [W]) (merged with
[W])
[y] ue ligature macron u umlaut Y u umlaut
[Z] zh zh zh zh ligature
[&] a as in at /Γ¦t/ a breve a a
[@] schwa schwa schwa schwa
- superscript schwa syllabicity mark unmarked '

Auditory files demonstrating speech sounds can be obtained by
anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.cmu.edu (or on the World Wide Web at [...]).
Look in "/user/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron" and
"/user/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron".

[That anonymous ftp source no longer seems to be available. The web
addresses are now

_http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron/0.html_
(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/pron/0.html) and

_http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron/0.html_
(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/speech/database/britpron/0.html) .]



[There are audio files made by speakers in various parts
of the world in the _AUE Audio Archive_
(http://alt-usage-english.org/audio_archive.shtml) .

On the _Links page_
(http://alt-usage-english.org/categorized_links.shtml#audiorefs) there's a list of links to several
places where audio files are available.]