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Yes, and now that you mention it, I can't think of where it would
appear in the middle of a word that is not part of a compound word,
while voiced /th/ does, such as in the word "heather"

--Star

--- paul vandenbrink <pvandenbrink11@...> wrote:

> Hi Star
> It's is much easier to be innovative in handwriting than in sending
> messages, where you and the receiver have to both use a common font.
> Say la vie.
> It is interesting that the unvoiced WH sound is most commonly found
> in the What,
> Which, Why, Where, When words and is more obvious when it starts a
> sentence. It reminds me of the voiced "Th" sound (Thou)
> Regards, Paul V.
> _____________________________attached______________________
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Hugh Birkenhead" <mixsynth@...>
>
> wrote:
> > I do like your 'hw' letter. It's very similar to the Quikscript
> equivalent,
> > and being an elegant combination of 'haha' and 'woe' makes perfect
> logical
> > sense. It's just a shame the Unicode points have been "set in
> stone"
> now.
>
>
>
>
>
>


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Hi Star
Hmmn.
I didn't think of Heather for the voiced Th-sound. Good one.

As for wh (unvoiced w-sound) in the middle of the word,
it would indeed be rare. First it would have to be right before the
vowel.
Because you can't end a word or syllable with a w-sound.
But a w-sound can be part of a consonant cluster immediately before
the vowel, and if the other consonant is unvoiced then the w-sound
would become un-voiced too (This rule about shared voicing
or shared unvoicing of consonsant clusters doesn't seem to hold
for the nasal sounds,
l-sounds or r-sounds (Maybe that's why they are all Short letters)).
So you should see the wh (unvoiced w-sound) in words such as
tweety-bird, twenty, quaint and a-cquainted. In fact the u,
after any "q", should be represented by a wh (unvoiced w-sound).

Regards, Paul V.

P.S. Nice to hear from you again. I also have been trying to practice
my own Shaw script handwriting
a little more regularly. It got a bit rusty lately. Been working on my
hebrew lately,
and using the Hebrew cursive script. It looks similar to Shavian, an in
order to avoid being confused, I was avoiding Shavian except on the
computer.
___________________attached_________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Star Raven
<celestraof12worlds@...> wrote:
>
> Yes, and now that you mention it, I can't think of where it would
> appear in the middle of a word that is not part of a compound word,
> while voiced /th/ does, such as in the word "heather"
>
> --Star
>
> --- paul vandenbrink <pvandenbrink11@...> wrote:
> > It is interesting that the unvoiced WH sound is most commonly found
> > in the What,
> > Which, Why, Where, When words and is more obvious when it starts a
> > sentence. It reminds me of the voiced "Th" sound (Thou)

I really like Star / Celestra / Erin Lowe's (hope I have all that right!)
digraph for /hw/, which is fully phonemic in my somewhat archaic speech (67 years
old, parents from the Pacific Northwest, maternal grandmother was a Scot). I
think I'll start using it myself. I note she uses it to spell "whose", and I
wonder what the phonemic status of /hw/ is in her idiolect. - /hw/, like /h/,
can only occur in utterance-initial position - there is no */ahwa/.

As for the contrast between th and dh (voiceless and voiced thigh and thy)
sounds - dh words are curiously restricted. There are two classes of dh words -
particles like the, this, that, then - and words like heather, most of which
have an intervocalic dh sound followed by er. Father, weather bother, other.
(Cotton Mather is a dh-er, I have learned in the last few years from two people
named Mather who descend from his family.)

The more or less archaic word "thither" has two dh sounds which belong to
each of these classes!

The preposition "with" seems to be evolving from one sound to the other. The
BRP (according to OED) has a voiced dh sound, which my idiolect has also; I
think my mother (a 1930's English teacher, of the old school even then) regarded
the voiceless th pronunciation as substandard. Androcles (see first line of
dialog, top of page 24) uses the voiced dh in "with". I note that Star uses the
voiceless form, and I wonder if this may be the norm for her generation (the
language does change, pace my mother).

Star, you could get better resolution on your very nice calligraphic pages by
scanning them rather than photographing them, and possibly tinkering a bit
with the contrast in Photoshop.

Star's pages take me back close to 45 years, when I learned to write the Shaw
Alphabet when it was first published. I think I still need to work on my
letter-forms!

Bob Richmond

"ether"?

Hugh B


> -----Original Message-----
> From: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com [mailto:shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com]
> On Behalf Of Star Raven
> Sent: 21 April 2006 19:58
> To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: New Photo Album
>
> Yes, and now that you mention it, I can't think of where it would
> appear in the middle of a word that is not part of a compound word,
> while voiced /th/ does, such as in the word "heather"
>
> --Star
>
> --- paul vandenbrink <pvandenbrink11@...> wrote:
>
> > Hi Star
> > It's is much easier to be innovative in handwriting than in sending
> > messages, where you and the receiver have to both use a common font.
> > Say la vie.
> > It is interesting that the unvoiced WH sound is most commonly found
> > in the What,
> > Which, Why, Where, When words and is more obvious when it starts a
> > sentence. It reminds me of the voiced "Th" sound (Thou)
> > Regards, Paul V.
> > _____________________________attached______________________
> > --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Hugh Birkenhead" <mixsynth@...>
> >
> > wrote:
> > > I do like your 'hw' letter. It's very similar to the Quikscript
> > equivalent,
> > > and being an elegant combination of 'haha' and 'woe' makes perfect
> > logical
> > > sense. It's just a shame the Unicode points have been "set in
> > stone"
> > now.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> =========>
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/wodentoad
>
> An idle duck is the devil's playground.
>
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Bob,

My give name is Erin, but most people call me Star. I was born and
raised in the sunny south, but my parents, who were both journalism
majors in college also took speech classes and taught us to speak
clearly with an almost mid-western national news style speech.

As for scanning, I will have to dig my scanner out of storage. It is
currently buried in the storage room we refer to as my office. I should
be able to track it down soon, at which point I will scan the images
and re-submit them.

--Star, from sunny and hot Mid-TN


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Here's how I write the Shaw Alphabet - done with a soft pencil on a yellow
legal pad with rulings a little too wide for my handwriting, but it was the only
lined paper I could find around the house. I scanned the paper, and sharpened
up the graphic some with Photoshop Elements.

http://user.icx.net/~richmond/rsr/omarshavian.html

Bob Richmond
Knoxville TN and Gastonia NC

Hugh notes:

>> "ether"?<<

A minimal pair for the voiced and unvoiced DH/TH sounds. This minimal pair
has a funny story attached to it. Two physicians, Crawford Long in Georgia and
Morton at the Massachusetts General Hospital, independently introduced ethyl
ether as an inhalation anesthetic in 1845. To this day it remains unclear which
of them has priority. Inhalation anesthesia was one of the three great
achievements in the history of medicine, of course - and ethyl ether wasn't abandoned
as an inhalation anesthetic (because of its explosive flammability) until my
early years in medical practice.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (the elder) proposed that a statue of Morton and
Crawford be erected, with the single caption

E(I)THER

(A better minimal pair - the noun wreath and the verb wreathe)

Bob Richmond

Well written, but I think writing smaller, closer to your natural TO
size may help. I simply imagined the midline on the Wide ruled
composition book that I used. It is, however, a wonderful example as to
how handwriting can evolve and personal touches and nuances can be seen
even in shavian. I have now done about 9-10 pages of Shavian
Shakespeare, and I've noticed that I still write at a college rule
size, even on the wide ruled paper. The addition here, is that the wide
rules give me room for decenders.

--Star

--- RSRICHMOND@... wrote:

> Here's how I write the Shaw Alphabet - done with a soft pencil on a
> yellow
> legal pad with rulings a little too wide for my handwriting, but it
> was the only
> lined paper I could find around the house. I scanned the paper, and
> sharpened
> up the graphic some with Photoshop Elements.
>
> http://user.icx.net/~richmond/rsr/omarshavian.html
>
> Bob Richmond
> Knoxville TN and Gastonia NC
>


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Star observes:

>> Well written, but I think writing smaller, closer to your natural TO size
may help. I simply imagined the midline on the Wide ruled composition book
that I used. It is, however, a wonderful example as to
how handwriting can evolve and personal touches and nuances can be seen even
in shavian. I have now done about 9-10 pages of Shavian Shakespeare, and I've
noticed that I still write at a college rule size, even on the wide ruled
paper. The addition here, is that the wide rules give me room for descenders.<<

I thought I needed to write smaller too - but that was the only ruled paper I
could find around the house - and I was seriously putting off writing an
important lecture I've got to give in a couple of days!

Your choice of an italic point (chisel point, book point) is probably not
what Kingsley Read had in mind, but I've found that a good metal italic point -
Speedball C series or a similar fountain pen - works extremely well.

A question I asked you earlier - do you have a phonemic /hw/ in your
idiolect?

Bob Richmond

I used a Manuscript brand Italic pen, which is moderately broad-nibbed,
and makes for strongly defined lines. As for the /hw/ sound, of course,
else I would neither have developed nor used it. *g*

--Star

> I thought I needed to write smaller too - but that was the only ruled
> paper I
> could find around the house - and I was seriously putting off writing
> an
> important lecture I've got to give in a couple of days!
>
> Your choice of an italic point (chisel point, book point) is probably
> not
> what Kingsley Read had in mind, but I've found that a good metal
> italic point -
> Speedball C series or a similar fountain pen - works extremely well.
>
> A question I asked you earlier - do you have a phonemic /hw/ in your
> idiolect?
>
> Bob Richmond
>


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