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> For example, in English, a candy can be called

> a Bon Bon. Pronounced and spelt byn byn in Shaw.

> And voyage is vqeJ.



I'd pronounce those two bon bon and vqaJ.



>

> I suppose we could add a letter to represent any unpronouncable or

> foreign sound. Say for example x for any odd non-english vowel

> and X for any odd non-english Consonant

> So you could say it is pronounced "lYX"

> or "vqxZ"

> But I wouldn't go beyond that. That's what IPA is for.

> Regards, PAul V.



Having one character for any one of hundreds of possible foreign sounds is a
lot worse than just using the nearest possible match.



Hugh B

> > > 1. If the "er" sound is part of a syllable that ends in a
> Consonant it is written with an Err/Urge with the exception of the
> words
> tav-ern, deliv-ers and broth-ers.

And 'considers', 'shivers', 'quivers', 'cavern', 'lantern'...

It's going to be tricky memorizing them all...

> > > 2. If the "er" sound is part of the first syllable of the word and
> > > that syllable has the primary accent, it is written with an
> Err/Urge.

If you can tell where the primary accent is, there's no need for any of
these rules. 'Err' is where the stress is, 'array' is where it aint.

> > > 3. If the "er" sound is part of the monosyllabic word
> then that syllable has the primary accent by default, so it is always
> written with an Err/Urge. (i.e. fur, fir, stir, cur, burr, spur, her)

Yes, I suppose this is right. But it's kinda stating the obvious that
monosyllabic words take primary stress!

> 4. In certain exceptional English words where the "er" sound is
> in a Primary accented syllable, even though that syllable is the last
> syllable of a multisyllabic word, the "Err/Urge" letter is used.
> These exceptions include Refer, Occur, Infer, Allure and concur.

Well... yes.

> > > 5. Otherwise the "er" sound can always be wriiten with
> > > an "Array".
>
> "Array" is a shorter sound than the "Err"/"Urge" and is much more
> commonly used than "Err"/"Urge".
> There is a maximum of one "Err"/"Urge" sound per word and if there is
> one it is usually in the first stressed syllable. It is very rare for
> it to be in last syllable.

What about "pervert" (noun)? Both are 'err'/'urge'.

> > > It is much easier to follow this rule than to try and figure
> > > out the intonation or stress of each "er" syllable in multiple
> > > syllable words, such as "wanderer" and "furniture".

By the looks of it, it involves remembering dozens of exceptions, with the
possibility of many more that we haven't yet thought of. Is this really
easier than learning how to recognise stress in your speech?

I still don't know why you find it difficult to detect in your own speech.
I'd be very interested to hear some wav files of you saying some of these
example words.

> Regards, Paul V.

Hugh B

Hugh wrote:
If you can tell where the primary accent is, there's no need for any of these
rules. 'Err' is where the stress is, 'array' is where it aint.

Hugh, What about secondary stress?
according to your rule, syllables with secondary stress get err/urge


Pervert noun
Pronunciation: Webster:'p&r-"v&rt Shavian: pxvxt or pxvDt?

PV wrote: What about "pervert" (noun)? Both are 'err'/'urge'.

The primary stress is on the first syllable on most nouns.
The issue is which err/urge option do you use when the syllable has secondary
stress.

If there is a verb form, then the primary stress moves to the 2nd syllable.

Pervert verb
Pronunciation: p&r-'v&rt
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French pervertir, from Latin
pervertere to overturn, corrupt, pervert, from per- thoroughly + vertere to turn --
more at PER-, WORTH
1 a : to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally
right :
corrupt, mislead

> > > It is much easier to follow this rule than to try and figure
> > > out the intonation or stress of each "er" syllable in multiple
> > > syllable words, such as "wanderer" and "furniture".

Hugh sez:

>> It may be important to distinguish the English word "llama", referring to
the animal, from the Spanish word with the same spelling, which translates as
"name".  But this sound is not found in English.<<

The great American comic poet Ogden Nash (appr. 1904-1972): wrote:

THE LAMA

The one-l lama, he's a priest.
The two-l llama, he's a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama,
There isn't any three-l lllama.
*The author's attention has been called to a type of conflagration called a
three-alarmer. Pooh.

Ogden Nash was a Baltimorean. In his later years he lived in Baltimore,
increasingly disabled by inflammatory bowel disease (regional ileitis, Crohn's
disease). About 1968 Jack Yardley, now the dean of American gastroenterologic
pathologists, signed out an intestinal biopsy from him with a verse in Nash's
style. As a senior resident in pathology, I chanced to see Nash's autopsy. I wish
I had had the chance to meet him in life.

Bob
P.S. The Linnean binomial name of the llama is Llama glama. The /palatalized
l/ phoneme is unique to Castilian; in Mexico the word is pronounced yama, in
Argentina zhama. In English, as far as I've ever heard it, the beast is
pronounced with an ordinary l.

SB: I think you are right. Altho many non-rhotics insist that u is not the
same as their pronunciation of x. They say there is a difference in the way
they pronounce surfer and suffer.

PN: Indeed; I also make this distinction in my speech. The sound of x is not
rhotic for me, but is like no other vowel sound
(neither a nor A nor u),
while D is indeed pronounced like a.

x is most similar, perhaps, to [œ] as in French "neuf" or German "können".

Cheers,
/filip
wurdbendur: I can also tell a difference in these sounds, though my accent
is rhotic. The sound represented by u is lower and usually farther back than
that represented by x.
There’s no Shavian letter for a non-rhotic x because that sound doesn’t
occur as a distinct phoneme. It doesn’t exist in non-rhotic accents, and in
rhotic ones both sounds are equivalent. So, a non-rhotic letter is not really
needed, but if we pair stressed and unstressed letters and line them up, we get
the following correspondences:

Unstressed Stressed
Rhotic a u
Non-rhotic D x

The actual pronunciation doesn’t fit this table exactly, which is probably
why x and u have distinct shapes. And I hope my table isn’t distorted too much
in transit since I simply used spaces.

Regards,
Joe
/JO

"Newton, Philip" wrote:



JW: Do you mean u? This is the stressed equivalent of a, which would
correspond to x, right? Or am I misunderstanding the non-rhotic accent here?

RSRICHMOND@... wrote:
> I think Cossyrosario is new on this list - if so, welcome - what's your
> name, where are you, what dialect area of English do you come from?
>
> Cossyrosario asks about the Shaw alphabetization of words like loch and
> bon voyage. In linguistics class a long time ago, I learned to call
> these odd sounds "marginal phonemes" - sounds that some speakers have
> and some don't.
>
> The loch or Bach sound is one an English speaker is likely to have only
> if he speaks Scots or German. I think it could be represented as kick-ha.

I would use kick alone, unless it was really necessary to differentiate
it, in which case I might use the trailing haha, but not in ordinary usage.

>
> The "bon voyage" vowel - see also lingerie, chaise longe, ahnvelope,
> sahntimeter, and I've even heard ahnchilida - abominations, all of them
> - is a very variable nasal vowel. English speakers who have the sound at
> all have only a single nasal vowel. (Some French speakers have three,
> some four - un bon vin blanc, on prend un bon bain.) I see no
> satisfactory way to represent it in the Shaw alphabet. We could invent
> an orthographic convention for it if we wanted to, such as awe-ha-nun.

I lived in Quebec for a while, and used four nasals (un bon vin blanc),
which I would never expect any English speaker to pronounce, unless they
also speak French, of course!

But what about our own nasal phoneme? How do you spell the common yes
and no "grunts", Uh-huh (yes) and Uh-uh (no)? And for that matter, how
do you do the glottal stop in the negative?

>
> And then there was once a country song that began "I wanted to write
> you, but I couldn't spell pffft" -- and I think we can do without a Shaw
> symbol for the marginal phoneme variously termed a razzberry, a Bronx
> cheer, or a bird.

Hee hee! You had me rolling on the floor with that one!

>
> Emoticons or Smileys in Shavian, anyone?
>
> Bob Richmond
> Knoxville TN and Gastonia NC
> P.S. - This group badly needs a speaker of Indian English - can anybody
> recruit one?


--
·𐑰𐑔𐑩𐑯 - Ethan

Hugh wrote:
If you can tell where the primary accent is, there's no need for any of
these rules. 'Err' is where the stress is, 'array' is where it aint.

Hugh, What about secondary stress?
according to your rule, syllables with secondary stress get err/urge



Yes, that's right.



Pervert noun

Pronunciation: Webster:'p&r-"v&rt Shavian: pxvxt or pxvDt?



pxvxt



PV wrote: What about "pervert" (noun)? Both are 'err'/'urge'.



The primary stress is on the first syllable on most nouns.

The issue is which err/urge option do you use when the syllable has
secondary stress.



It's still stress, so it still takes 'err'.



If there is a verb form, then the primary stress moves to the 2nd syllable.



Pervert verb

Pronunciation: p&r-'v&rt
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French pervertir, from Latin
pervertere to overturn, corrupt, pervert, from per- thoroughly + vertere to
turn -- more at PER-
<http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=per-> , WORTH
<http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=worth>
1 a : to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally
right :
corrupt, mislead


> > > It is much easier to follow this rule than to try and figure
> > > out the intonation or stress of each "er" syllable in multiple
> > > syllable words, such as "wanderer" and "furniture".



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French loan words are often difficult to transcribe because the Norman French
spelling is usually retained.... e.g., ch for sh.

bon-voyage - same as boe(n) voiaazh - unless there is some reason for a
narrow transcription Webster represents the word this way: accent on last syllable.
"bOn-"voi-'äzh, "bän-; "bOn-"vwI-'äzh, -"vwä-'yäzh

lingerie - "län-j&-'rA, lynJarE "län-zh&-, -'rE; 'lan-zh&-(")rE, 'län-j&-,
'län-zh&-, -"rA

chaise lounge SEs lQnJ shaes lounj cEs lQnZ
This is a good example of how Shavian uses similar shapes for similar sounds.
Z = Z or zh, J = compound of d+Z

loch/bach - same as <lock> unless there is some reason for a narrow
transcription

IPA-SAMPA: lAk, bAk, bo(n) voIZ, lAndZ&re, Ses laU(n)dZ
note the non-diphthongal pronunciation of o and e (not oU and eI)

--Steve
RSRICHMOND@... wrote:
> I think Cossyrosario is new on this list - if so, welcome - what's your
> name, where are you, what dialect area of English do you come from?
> Cossyrosario asks about the Shaw alphabetization of words like loch and
> bon voyage. In linguistics class a long time ago, I learned to call
> these odd sounds "marginal phonemes" - sounds that some speakers have
> and some don't.
>
> The loch or Bach sound is one an English speaker is likely to have only
> if he speaks Scots or German. I think it could be represented as kick-ha.

I would use kick k alone, unless it was really necessary to differentiate
it, in which case I might use the trailing haha, but not in ordinary usage.

> The "bon voyage" vowel - see also lingerie, chaise longe, ahnvelope,
> sahntimeter, and I've even heard ahnchilida - abominations, all of them
> - is a very variable nasal vowel. English speakers who have the sound at
> all have only a single nasal vowel. (Some French speakers have three,
> some four - un bon vin blanc, on prend un bon bain.) I see no
> satisfactory way to represent it in the Shaw alphabet. We could invent
> an orthographic convention for it if we wanted to, such as awe-ha-nun.

I lived in Quebec for a while, and used four nasals (un bon vin blanc),
which I would never expect any English speaker to pronounce, unless they
also speak French, of course!

But what about our own nasal phoneme? How do you spell the common yes
and no "grunts", Uh-huh (yes) and Uh-uh (no)? And for that matter, how
do you do the glottal stop in the negative?

> And then there was once a country song that began "I wanted to write
> you, but I couldn't spell pffft" -- and I think we can do without a Shaw
> symbol for the marginal phoneme variously termed a razzberry, a Bronx
> cheer, or a bird.

Ethan notes:

>>But what about our own nasal phoneme? How do you spell the common yes and
no "grunts", Uh-huh (yes) and Uh-uh (no)? And for that matter, how do you do
the glottal stop in the negative?<<

This "marginal phoneme" problem is a very odd one. My linguistics professor
(Charles A. Ferguson, whose most important later work was diglossia. Spoke
Bengali, Farsi, Arabic, Japanese, and I don't know what else) noted - and I've
never encountered this statement again - that uh-huh and uh-uh occurred in many
unrelated languages all over the world, and might well be language universals.
The sounds in them occur nowhere else in English, not even as marginal
phonemes. Ferguson analyzed huh-uh as a voiced h followed by a nasalized mid-central
vowel followed by a voiced nasalized glottal stop followed by another
nasalized mid-central vowel. (Three different marginal phonemes. What's the Shavian
for Whew!?)

I don't think these marginal phonemes require special symbols. I think they
require orthographic conventions, like the other marginal phonemes we've talked
about.

Bob Richmond
Knoxville TN and Gastonia NC

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:03:30 -0500, Joe <wurdbendur@...> wrote:
>
> I would simply write them in Roman, since these expressions are purely
> French, even if they have been assimilated.

On the other hand, you don't spell "tsunami" in Japanese kanji or
"perestroika" in Cyrillic, do you? You transcribe them into the
alphabet you use to write English.

I'd say that's an argument for writing them in Shavian when that's the
alphabet you use to write English. Unless you consider Roman to be a
"privileged" foreign alphabet -- in the sense that if a non-English
word is originally written in the Roman alphabet, you'll write it in
that alphabet, while if it's originally written in another writing
system, you'll write it in Shavian.

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