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Hi DaShep
It occurs to me that Shavian could be a postcard alphabet, used to write short cryptic messages to the folks back home, for those too cheap in time and money to write a Letter.
Nowadays, it might get you in trouble with Homeland security,
Still eventually, the postal service and travel will get back to normal.
Regards, Paul V.
P.S.Shavian could be a Shorthand, if you dropped all the vowel letters, except where the Vowel begins the word. Try it!
Shorthand's generally skip or minimize writing Vowel sounds.

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, dshep <dshepx@...> wrote:
>
> Is Shavian a shorthand?
>
> Well--if it would encourage people to try it i would say yes, maybe;
> or perhaps, at least, a semi-shorthand. The mark of a true shorthand,
> i recall reading somewhere, is--in competent hands--an invention
> that allows speech to be accurately recorded verbatim, and as such
> was once a vital resource for newspaper reporters and the like.
>
> Shavian is rather an alternative alphabet, one based upon reason,
> rational organization (mostly), and visual appeal as opposed to an
> alphabet acquired through historical processes and maintained by
> tradition. A contest however between reason and tradition usually
> ends with tradition triumphant, and this is why i think Shaw, in sheer
> desperation, stressed the savings aspect (of time, paper, and ink)
> so strenuously in his argument for a new alphabet--his appeal to
> reason was generally ignored, but an economic argument might
> generate interest and support, or so he thought (or hoped). It didn't
> however.
>
> Effort is required to learn to learn to use an alphabet, any alphabet.
> A lot of us would still be illiterate if we had not been introduced to the
> magic of words and writing when we were too young to question its
> purpose and utility. The best hope for Shavian i believe is to make it
> fun, to appeal to Homo Ludens, and i applaud the current attempts
> to do just that.  
>
> …
>
> Reading some of the sample passages at  www.spellingsociety.org
> i noticed that there appeared to be a one-to-one correspondence of
> Shavian with the simplified text used. Whether they use a standard
> reformed spelling or each contributor writes in his own version i was
> unable to determine, but the particular sample i saw could be easily
> exchanged, almost letter for letter, for Shavian, and of course vice-versa.  
> Shaw refused despite appeals to consider the Simplified Spelling Society
> as beneficiary in his will with the view that such a form of writing would
> only strike the public as being the effort of an uneducated person, and
> therefore insisted upon a completely new, and different, alphabet. This
> was perhaps unfair--reading reformed spelling is easy enough, and
> makes more and more sense as one continues. But it may be a realistic
> view. On the other hand, i have seen Shavian described--the reading of
> it, that is--as trying to decipher an oriental carpet. Boo! Unfair!   
>
> …
>
> Incidentally, the domain name http://shavian.com/ is for sale. Asking price
> $3,150. I discovered this site by accident and have no idea what they do.
>
> dshep
>  
>

Hello Paul,

George V actually, George VI's father--though, from the few recordings I have heard they sounded pretty much alike, except that the latter did stutter a bit and his voice was less clear. They both came to the throne under somewhat similar situations which may, and i suspect it did, have had some influence upon their manner of speech. Both were second sons who were not groomed for the throne but expected to live some sort of normal, even middle-class life, and both, or so it seems to me, were at pains to be plain-spoken and unpretentious. I believe this is what appealed to Shaw, who was not known as a royalist--rather the opposite in fact. George V reigned from 1910 to 1936. During this time he began the custom of the Christmas Speech, which became very popular. This, Shaw would have noticed: that the King, in the early days of radio, speaking in a clear, unaffected, unexaggerated manner, was listened to with respect and admiration throughout the
country. Here was someone who, though at the very pinnacle of the social system in England, represented, ironically perhaps, a unifying presence that could, perhaps, overcome what Shaw considered to be the stultifying influence of class structure. Remember, one of the goals for a new alphabet, Shaw maintained, was to provide a means whereby everyone, and not just a select few, could participate (to a greater extent, anyway) in cultural life. This may sound utopian, but then Shaw was a (cheerful) utopianist.

You are right: what with computers, alphabet fonts, transliteration devices, etc., etc., an alternative alphabet is no longer such an outlandish concept. With the necessary technical innovations I don't see why one couldn't twitter in Shavian.

dshep

Follow-up

I suspect that the person in the internet reference i provided
had assumed that George V, as King, would necessarily have
spoken in an affected upper-class manner, especially that of
the thirties that can sometimes be heard in old movies--
drawled, slurred, swallowed, with great stress modulation and
a set of vowels exclusive to a select social class. However, it
seems to me, again attempting to judge from old recordings
not of the best quality, that George V attempted to avoid such
excesses in his public pronouncements--something which, if
accurate, Shaw would have found commendable, or so i believe.

In particular, George V's diphthongs (to my ear) were not drawn
out and exaggerated but short, almost monophthongs (not 'day-ee'
but a crisp 'day'; not ge-ow but a simple 'go') almost as Scots (or
American), and this and other things, clear vowels and a more
even tone for example, may be what Shaw meant by 'Northern
English'. Otherwise it is not really certain what that is supposed
to refer to exactly, as there is not to my knowledge one generally
recognized Northern English but rather several alternatives. In all
events however, I think he meant a speech form that would be
acceptable to a greater number of people than is what Shaw
derided as 'Oxford English.' 

dshep

After dshep's comments the other day about the use of Shavian online, I am considering creating a "Planet Shavian", which would be a webpage where blog posts in and about the Alphabet can be aggregated. (Possibly, also, tweets from Twitter and posts from this group could go on there as well.)

The conlang community has recently put something similar together for blog posts about conlangs: http://aggregator.conlang.org/

If you use Shavian in blogging, or you blog about Shavian sometimes, would you be interested?

If you don't, perhaps now is the time to consider starting a Shavian blog! Some blogging sites (such as WordPress) choke on Shavian text, but I can recommend dreamwidth.org as a site that doesn't:

https://www.dreamwidth.org/create

You need an invitation code; I have eight, which I'd be happy to give to people starting a Shavian blog.

Also, if you don't want to blog using the Unicode characters and would rather use the Latin mapping, I can probably arrange for the Planet software to transliterate them on the fly.

peace,

Thomas

From the bottom up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24FOB-onlanguage-t.html?th&emc=th

Here's a screenshot of the first draft of Shavian Firefox:

http://shavian.org.uk/mozilla/firefox-screenshot.png

This won't be ready for prime time for a few weeks, probably, but I thought you might like to see.

Thomas

Hi Dshep
Apologies for referring to the wrong George.
As a Canadian, I should know better.
It is good they had a similar speaking style. I wouldn't
wish a new standard on the English speaking world, everytime
a new monarch claims the throne
And as a plain spoken Britisher, King George V does provides a useful model, for English pronunciation, but it is hardly ideal in the 21st Century. And he hardly would be a unifying presence in the
United States.
I'd rather use the most popular Television Anchorman, if we could only have one standard pronunciation.

Still I'd like to consider, a better solution.

Nowadays, we could sample pronunciation from a wide variety of English
speakers and calculate the golden mean.
Bell seems to be building a database of all possible English pronunciations, in order to get speech recognition working for their
Automatic Directoy Assistance Service. I am quite sure they could identify a nice clear clean English pronounciation, that both the British and the Americans will understand.
Sadly, it is unlikely to be a Canadian, Scot, Indian or Australian.
Perhaps, a South African accent will do the trick.

Which English Accent other than your own, do you find easy to understand?

Regards, Paul V.
___________________________________________attached_______________

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, dshep <dshepx@...> wrote:
> George V actually, George VI's father--though, from the few recordings I have heard they sounded pretty much alike, except that the latter did stutter a bit and his voice was less clear. They both came to the throne under somewhat similar situations which may, and i suspect it did, have had some influence upon their manner of speech. Both were second sons who were not groomed for the throne but expected to live some sort of normal, even middle-class life, and both, or so it seems to me, were at pains to be plain-spoken and unpretentious. I believe this is what appealed to Shaw, who was not known as a royalist--rather the opposite in fact. George V reigned from 1910 to 1936. During this time he began the custom of the Christmas Speech, which became very popular. This, Shaw would have noticed: that the King, in the early days of radio, speaking in a clear, unaffected, unexaggerated manner, was listened to with respect and admiration throughout the
> country. Here was someone who, though at the very pinnacle of the social system in England, represented, ironically perhaps, a unifying presence that could, perhaps, overcome what Shaw considered to be the stultifying influence of class structure. Remember, one of the goals for a new alphabet, Shaw maintained, was to provide a means whereby everyone, and not just a select few, could participate (to a greater extent, anyway) in cultural life. This may sound utopian, but then Shaw was a (cheerful) utopianist.
>
> You are right: what with computers, alphabet fonts, transliteration devices, etc., etc., an alternative alphabet is no longer such an outlandish concept. With the necessary technical innovations I don't see why one couldn't twitter in Shavian.
>
> dshep
>

Hi there Thomas
Greetings Star

My favorite Conlang to speak is Loglan or its new incarnation Lojban.
It is too much trouble to create a Language from scratch, when there are so many interesting languages to learn, already.
Why re-invent the wheel? I'd rather learn Klingon or Vulcan.

Regards, Paul V

P.S. I suspect spoken English started developing even before the wheel.

P.P.S. English is one of the largest and most complete languages around. It deserves a Modern Alphabet.
Not this Greek Roman hodge-podge.
______________attached________________________________

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, phil@... wrote:
>
> "Conlang" just means "constructed language."
> Nimyad is a language that Thomas created.
>
>
> Star Raven writes:
> >
> > ...Conlang? Sorry, I'm a long time scifi fantasy fan, but I don't speak klingon.
> >
> > --Star
> >
> >>From: Thomas <tthurman@...>
> >>To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
> >>
> >> Nimyad is a conlang I've had since I was a teenager. (I go by "Marnanel" online; it's "dreamer" in Nimyad.)
>

Hi Dshep
In the United States, Northern or Yankee English is another accent altogeter.
The speech of these Yankee New Englanders is almost extinct and can can now only be heard regularly in the speech of some characters in a number of old Black & White Movies.
Regards, Paul V.

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, dshep <dshepx@...> wrote:
>
> Follow-up
>
> I suspect that the person in the internet reference i provided
> had assumed that George V, as King, would necessarily have
> spoken in an affected upper-class manner, especially that of
> the thirties that can sometimes be heard in old movies--
> drawled, slurred, swallowed, with great stress modulation and
> a set of vowels exclusive to a select social class. However, it
> seems to me, again attempting to judge from old recordings
> not of the best quality, that George V attempted to avoid such
> excesses in his public pronouncements--something which, if
> accurate, Shaw would have found commendable, or so i believe.
>
> In particular, George V's diphthongs (to my ear) were not drawn
> out and exaggerated but short, almost monophthongs (not 'day-ee'
> but a crisp 'day'; not ge-ow but a simple 'go') almost as Scots (or
> American), and this and other things, clear vowels and a more
> even tone for example, may be what Shaw meant by 'Northern
> English'. Otherwise it is not really certain what that is supposed
> to refer to exactly, as there is not to my knowledge one generally
> recognized Northern English but rather several alternatives. In all
> events however, I think he meant a speech form that would be
> acceptable to a greater number of people than is what Shaw
> derided as 'Oxford English.' 
>
> dshep
>

2010/2/1 pvandenbrink11 <vandenbrinkg@...>:
> My favorite Conlang to speak is Loglan or its new incarnation Lojban.
> It is too much trouble to create a Language from scratch, when there are so many interesting languages to learn, already.
> Why re-invent the wheel? I'd rather learn Klingon or Vulcan.

For people who consider conlangs works of art, your question is a bit
like saying, "There have been so many paintings made already - why
make any new ones? I'd rather just admire [insert a couple of
examples]."

For those who consider them tools, you're right, of course - we don't
need all that many differently-shaped wheels in the world.

So it depends on your viewpoint.

> P.S. I suspect spoken English started developing even before the wheel.

Surely -- at least, if you include the period before it was
recognisably "English" as distinct from, say, (the ancestors of)
German or French or Russian.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>