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I claim that I was taught to speak by journalists. Soooooo.... Should we concede to KR at this point and add in a /hw/ letter? again, I used KR's QS idea by putting a smaller version of /ha-ha/ attached to the leading edge of /woe/, which is easy to write and remember.

Yes, I called them letters.
--Star, whose gall is now unmitigated. :)

==========
"Oh, how awful. Did he at least die painlessly? To shreds, you say. Well, how is his wife holding up? To shreds, you say."
--Professor Hubert Farnsworth, Futurama

http://www.livejournal.com/users/wodentoad

----- Original Message ----
From: yahya_melb <yahya@....au>
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 11:01:34 AM
Subject: [shawalphabet] Re: Standard spelling with Shavian













--- In shawalphabet@ yahoogroups. com, dshep <dshep@...> wrote:



[snip]



> > But as always, he attempts to go with the

> > Majority opinion in these matters.

>

>

> I don't think that you should have to feel forced in this

> matter: if you don't hear it, you don't hear it — and

> should write accordingly. I only meant to bring the

> subject up for discussion as it is I think an interesting

> topic. Besides, Star and I may not represent the majority;

> for example we are I believe the only two who advocate

> the retention of an aspiration in words of the "what/when/

> where/why" category. This was once a majority opinion,

> I am certain, as the pronunciation "wot" was earlier

> regarded as something of a shibboleth. I can claim age,

> while Star will have to find another excuse. Incidentally,

> that series of words comprise the basic instruction for

> journalists and historians (follow the first three and be

> careful with the fourth).

>

> w(h)ishing everyone w(h)ell,

> dshep



;-)



FTR, I totally agree with keeping the aspiration. In formal

and careful speech, it would be totally inappropriate in most

places in Australia to use /w/ where the pronunciation

indicated by the (strangely reversed) spelling "wh" is /hw/.

True, amongst ourselves, informally, some of us get careless

and revert to /w/, but the "wh" spelling still reflects actual

usage for certain social situations and groups.



Regards,

YaHya (wHo lives in Melbourne, Australia)



PS - And yes, there's an "h" in my name, but very few Aussies can

pronounce it in a medial intervocalic position; funnily, tho,

they have no trouble saying "It's so hot!" - YA














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ekserpt from fFl 0/082k5

447. in /paris HE simpli stErd wen F spOk t Hem in /frenc; F never did
suksId in mEkiN HOz idiots understAnd Her On lANgwaJ. --/mork twEn

--- In shawalphabet@ yahoogroups. com
---Star wrote:

> I claim that I was taught to speak by journalists. Soooooo....
> Should we concede to KR at this point and add in a /hw/ letter?
> again, I used KR's QS idea by putting a smaller version of
> /ha-ha/ attached to the leading edge of /woe/, which is easy
> to write and remember.

> Yes, I called them letters.

I think we should too. Shaw thought so as well; see enclosure
below.

(Whoa, that didn't work. Too large. Shall try again sending it
as a separate posting.)

I also recall that you had devised a perfectly good way to do
it. However, as I persist in my obstinate assertion that the
aspirate (as well as any combination that may begin with an
aspirate) is unvoiced and therefore should be a tall rather
than a deep letter, I have found an alternative that I use in
my own handwriting. This is a letter, called "hwair", that is
used to indicate, as it happens, the \hw\ or \hv\ cluster in
archaic languages such as Gothic. It looks like a normal
lower-case "h" wed to a "u". Because of its curvilinear nature
it fits right in with the other Shavian letters and I've become
quite fond of it.

An example can be seen being used as described above at the
Wikipedia entry for "Gothic Alphabet"


as ever,
dshep







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I give up. Transferring images is clearly beyond my capabilities.

But, as these failures may have aroused some interest, or at
least curiosity, I shall type out what I could not send. This was
a printed post-card that Shaw had made up for him in quantity,
and with which he used to reply to enquiries (and criticisms)
about his proposals. He would sometimes add some pertinent
remarks. This particular example that I have come across, dated
6/12/1949, includes some tart remarks to a British educator and
Esperantist who had deigned to refer in an open letter to Shaw's
"amusing naivetes." I have previously posted some of the contents,
but here it is in its entirety.

From
Bernard Shaw

A FORTY LETTER BRITISH ALFABET

The number of letters in our Johnsonese alfabet, minus x, c,
and q (unnecessary)
is
23
The following consonants are missing: sh, zh, wh, ch, th, dh,
and
ng
7
Also missing are the vowels and diphthongs ah, aw, at, et, it,
ot, ut, oot, yoot, and the neutral second vowel in colour,
labour, honor,
&c.
10

---

40

A quite phonetic British alfabet is impossible because the vowels
of British speakers differ as their finger prints do; but the 40 sounds
listed above will make them as intelligible to one another in writing
as they are now in speech. Thus, though Oxford graduates and London
costermongers pronounce sun as san and Ireland as Awlnd, they
understand one another in conversation.
In Johnsonese the missing letters are indicated by using two or
three letters for a single sound. For instance, though has six letters
for two sounds. A 40 letter alfabet providing one unambiguous
symbol for each sound would save manual labor at the rate of 25 per
cent. per minute (131,400 per annum). Multiply this figure by the
millions at every moment busy writing English somewhere in the
world, and the total saving is so prodigious that the utmost cost of a
change is negligible.
Children, who now have to master the multiplication and pence
tables, could learn a 40 letter alfabet easily. Johnsonese is so full of
inconsistencies that the few who can spell it do so not by the sound
of the word but by the look of it.

Johnsonese is what Shaw referred to as spelling in conventional
orthography that was first given sanction by Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary of 1755. Shaw mixes labour and labor, honor and
colour, perhaps to point out inconsistencies. At the bottom of
the page of this printed material, Shaw added in his own hand,
which appears to be either a continuation of the reverse side
or an afterthought:

Esperanto is not unique. There were many before it and have been
many since. It is too inflected to have a chance of survival. You are
evidently an innocent nonce.
(scrawled signature)

On the reverse side (printed addresses omitted), Shaw wrote:

I heard all this about Volapük nearly 10 years ago. Where is
it now?
My own favorite was Novial; but its inventor Jespersen himself chucked
it
The inflections I mentioned are the grammatical ones. Norwegian
and English can give Zamenhof's native inflections the go-by (or kybosh)
on that point.
But what is the use of argybarging for the thousandth time about
philology when the labor saving possibilities are so overwhelming?
Sweet and Lecky set me on to phonetics more than half a century ago:
I was through the mill before you were born, and have come out with
the conviction that the gate to reform is the economic one – I was the
first to moot it; and the old stuff no longer interests me.
Toothpicks like
universal languages cannot move the world. So good luck to you; but
damn your Esperanto!

G.B.S.

So there! I imagine a lot of people got something similar to this.
(Otto) Jespersen was a Danish linguist, author of a popular English
Grammar and other works on the English language, and one of the
founders of the International Phonetic Association. (Henry) Sweet
and (James) Lecky were language scholars who both had been
associated with the spelling reform activities of Sir Isaac Pitman,
the shorthand inventor. Sweet in particular was one of the first to
takes phonetics seriously in Britain, and must have influenced Shaw.
L.L. Zamenhof was the inventor of Esperanto.

sorry for cluttering up the files with empties,
dshep

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, dshep <dshep@...> wrote:


What are all those weird signs?

wow! check it out! right at the beginning it states the need for a /wh/ or /hw/ sound... did KR forget?

--Evil Star

==========
"Oh, how awful. Did he at least die painlessly? To shreds, you say. Well, how is his wife holding up? To shreds, you say."
--Professor Hubert Farnsworth, Futurama

http://www.livejournal.com/users/wodentoad

----- Original Message ----
From: dshep <dshep@...>
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 12:25:39 AM
Subject: [shawalphabet] Re: Standard spelling with Shavian























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