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After a long-time interest in language and the sounds and sound representations that are part of them, I have decided to support the Shavian alphabet.

I currently know how to use the Shavian alphabet in Esperanto, and I am preparing myself to jump into the English version. I'd like to get to know some other people who are also beginners, as well as experienced people who can tell me about good approaches to absorbing the many vowel sounds and about available learning materials. I'd also like to meet other Esperantists here. At this point, I'm hoping for pen-pals and exchanges of hand-written messages in Esperanto or English, since I think that actually forming the letters is a good way to learn them.

I hope to contribute to this group and to learn from it, and I'm happy to find a place to do both.

Erik Felker
California, USA

Hi Erik
Nice to see another person is getting involved with the Shavian Alphabet for Standard English. Originally, the Shavian Alphabet was designed to represent the 2 standard English pronunciations from the UK, but now we find it works fine with a General American Pronunciation as well. The Western American pronunciation is pretty close to a General Amercan pronunciation based on the American Midland and Midwest. A couple of Shaw letters are only very rarely in a General American accent. Because of the cot-caught vowel merger, only 1 of the Ah, On or Awe letters is commonly used in writing English with a Western American pronunciation. The other 2 are relatively rare.
Regards, Paul V.
P.S. Let me know if you have any questions about pronunciation. I am Mid-West Canadian which is also very close to the General American pronunciation. Too much American TV, I suppose.
________________attached_______________________________________

--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Erik" <ejfelker@...> wrote:
>
> After a long-time interest in language and the sounds and sound representations that are part of them, I have decided to support the Shavian alphabet.
>
> I currently know how to use the Shavian alphabet in Esperanto, and I am preparing myself to jump into the English version. I'd like to get to know some other people who are also beginners, as well as experienced people who can tell me about good approaches to absorbing the many vowel sounds and about available learning materials. I'd also like to meet other Esperantists here. At this point, I'm hoping for pen-pals and exchanges of hand-written messages in Esperanto or English, since I think that actually forming the letters is a good way to learn them.
>
> I hope to contribute to this group and to learn from it, and I'm happy to find a place to do both.
>
> Erik Felker
> California, USA
>

Please see http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n4xxx-shavian-additions.pdf and please comment as soon as possible. Thank you.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Le 19/04/13 23:31, Michael Everson a �crit :
> Please seehttp://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n4xxx-shavian-additions.pdf and please comment as soon as possible. Thank you.
>
> Michael Everson *http://www.evertype.com/
>
Hello

I thought I should send a message on the Shavian mailing list about the
possible future extension of Shavian. I see you did it yourself. That�s
great.

In your proposal, I don�t see any description of Senior Quikscript and
nothing about variation selectors.

If Shavian and Quikscript are not unified, two variation selectors
should be used: one to request the base form of a letter, the other one
for the half or alternate form.
For T (sorry, I forgot the keyword) which can be written either
downwards or upwards, the half form can be linked to a following letter
or, sometimes, to the previous one, as in the word �out�. In some cases,
there might be ambiguity for the rendering engine and the writer could
want to specify with which letter (the previous one or the next one)
half T should be linked. Therefore, a ZWJ or a ZWNJ could be useful.

If, halas, Shavian and Quikscript were unified, two additional variation
selectors should be used to choose between the Shavian or the Quikscript
form of some letters.
With a consistent use of variation selectors, a single font could handle
both scripts, even if they were unified.

JF

On 20 Apr 2013, at 01:20, Jean-François Colson <jf@...> wrote:

> In your proposal, I don’t see any description of Senior Quikscript

It's highly cursive. That's

> and nothing about variation selectors.

That's pseudo-coding and I will not be supporting it in any way.

> If Shavian and Quikscript are not unified, two variation selectors
> should be used: one to request the base form of a letter, the other one
> for the half or alternate form.

I would think that should be handled by OpenType. It is analogous to Arabic joining behaviour.

> For T (sorry, I forgot the keyword) which can be written either
> downwards or upwards, the half form can be linked to a following letter
> or, sometimes, to the previous one, as in the word “out”. In some cases,
> there might be ambiguity for the rendering engine and the writer could
> want to specify with which letter (the previous one or the next one)
> half T should be linked. Therefore, a ZWJ or a ZWNJ could be useful.

One can always use ZWJ and ZWNJ which are existing characters. At this point the real Rubicon is to see whether the committees want extensions or disunification.

> If, halas, Shavian and Quikscript were unified, two additional variation
> selectors should be used to choose between the Shavian or the Quikscript
> form of some letters.

Using VS next to every character in a run of text is really not what VSs are for.

> With a consistent use of variation selectors, a single font could handle
> both scripts, even if they were unified.

Perhaps. But if there had to be that much markup (if and only if OpenType failed) then I would argue for disunification.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

On 20 Apr 2013, at 05:08, Nathan Sharfi <bonusfrogs@...> wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2013, at 5:20 PM, Jean-François Colson <jf@...> wrote:
>
>> For T (sorry, I forgot the keyword) which can be written either downwards or upwards, the half form can be linked to a following letter or, sometimes, to the previous one, as in the word “out”. In some cases, there might be ambiguity for the rendering engine and the writer could want to specify with which letter (the previous one or the next one) half T should be linked. Therefore, a ZWJ or a ZWNJ could be useful.
>
> I'm not sure this needs to be something the UTC and friends bothers with. That said, ZWJ and ZWNJ could be useful, even if the only people who need to pay attention them are those who make keyboard layouts. For example, if I wanted to type "arrears" and spell it UTTER ROE EAT ROE ZOO, I'd be annoyed if UTTER ROE were smashed together in a ligature across a syllable boundary.

Shavian, in having explicitly-encoded -r characters, solves that problem. If QS and Shavian were unified, wouldn't you be better off using those -r characters?

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Le 20/04/13 06:08, Nathan Sharfi a écrit :

> I'm not sure this needs to be something the UTC and friends bothers with.

It’s true Unihan variation sequences are not handled in the same book,
but in a few cases the Unicode standard includes some variation sequences.
For example, inhttp://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf , you can read:

0023 # NUMBER SIGN
⁓ 0023 FE0E text style
⁓ 0023 FE0F emoji style

Why couldn’t there be

10450 𐑐 SHAVIAN LETTER PEEP
⁓ 10450 FE00 Shavian style
⁓ 10450 FE01 QuikScript style
⁓ 10450 FE02 QuikScript style, full form
⁓ 10450 FE03 QuikScript style, half form

?

Shavian users: Are you comfortable reading Quikscript? Are you happy that, if the two are unified, that you will sometimes see Shavian texts written with Junior or Senior cursive glyphs? Think about Latin cursive fonts, which you can and do read regularly.

Quikscript users: Are you comfortable reading Shavian? Are you happy that, if the two are unified, that you will sometimes see Quikscript texts written with non-cursive Shavian glyphs? Think about Latin blackletter fonts, which you can and do read more or less regularly.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Le 20/04/13 09:48, Michael Everson a �crit :
> On 20 Apr 2013, at 05:08, Nathan Sharfi <bonusfrogs@...> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 19, 2013, at 5:20 PM, Jean-Fran�ois Colson <jf@...> wrote:
>>
>>> For T (sorry, I forgot the keyword) which can be written either downwards or upwards, the half form can be linked to a following letter or, sometimes, to the previous one, as in the word �out�. In some cases, there might be ambiguity for the rendering engine and the writer could want to specify with which letter (the previous one or the next one) half T should be linked. Therefore, a ZWJ or a ZWNJ could be useful.
>> I'm not sure this needs to be something the UTC and friends bothers with. That said, ZWJ and ZWNJ could be useful, even if the only people who need to pay attention them are those who make keyboard layouts. For example, if I wanted to type "arrears" and spell it UTTER ROE EAT ROE ZOO, I'd be annoyed if UTTER ROE were smashed together in a ligature across a syllable boundary.
> Shavian, in having explicitly-encoded -r characters, solves that problem. If QS and Shavian were unified, wouldn't you be better off using those -r characters?
>

I think QS ligatures should be handled by the rendering engine. There
are many more ligatures in QS than the 8 Shavian ones, which are reduced
to 7 after the �unification� of ERR and ARRAY.
In �outnumber�, which letters would you use? Would you link a full t to
an alternate form of n or would you write �out� separately with a half t?
ZWJ, ZWNJ or variation selectors would be useful in such cases.
To use them consistently across different implementations of the
standard, such variation sequences should be defined precisely and not
left at the discretion of the font makers or rendering engine programmers.

On 20 Apr 2013, at 09:32, Jean-François Colson <jf@...> wrote:

>> Shavian, in having explicitly-encoded -r characters, solves that problem. If QS and Shavian were unified, wouldn't you be better off using those -r characters?
>
> I think QS ligatures should be handled by the rendering engine. There
> are many more ligatures in QS than the 8 Shavian ones, which are reduced
> to 7 after the “unification” of ERR and ARRAY.

Then you end up with multiple spellings that look alike.

> In “outnumber”, which letters would you use? Would you link a full t to
> an alternate form of n or would you write “out” separately with a half t?

I have no idea. You have to supply images.

> ZWJ, ZWNJ or variation selectors would be useful in such cases.

Yes, probably.

> To use them consistently across different implementations of the
> standard, such variation sequences should be defined precisely and not
> left at the discretion of the font makers or rendering engine programmers.

Probably some specification would be necessary, to handle cursivity as in other shorthands.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/