Toggle Shavian
hF /filap n /hV
F sI H mesaJaz Az /SYvIan letxz t.
n F Am rIdiN H mesaJaz yn /jAhM.
lUks gUd.
rigRdz, /pYl /vI.
_________________atAct_________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Hugh Birkenhead"
<mixsynth@f...> wrote:
> kumz Qt pxfekt fP mI. but F'm VziN /QtlUk, Just lFk V.
>
> /hV /b
_____
>
> From: Philip Newton [mailto:philip.newton@g...]
> Sent: 06 March 2005 13:53
> To: Shaw Alphabet Mailing List
> Subject: [shawalphabet] Another test
> anuHD test... duz His kum Qt in /SEvWn?
>
> wot abQt His?
>
> n HX SUd bI a Roman wxd in H midal v His.
>
> cCz,
> /filip
>
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@g...>
>
Toggle Shavian
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Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 05:37:33 UT
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Toggle Shavian
hF /filap
it iz gUd t nO wI kan pEst SY tekst intM QD mesaJaz,
VziN imbedad /Ec.tI.em.el.
rigRdz, /pYl /vI.
/pI.es. prOvFdad v kPs HAt yP I-mEal klFant kAn hAndal imbedad /Ec.tI.em.el.
F stil hAv t test /VdPa in His mAtD.
______________atAct____________________
At 12:37 AM 3/8/05, you wrote:
>On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 01:49:53 -0000,
><mailto:mixsynth@...>"Hugh Birkenhead"
><mixsynth@...> said:
>
>kumz Qt pxfekt fP mI. but F'm VziN /QtlUk, Just lFk V.
>
>HOz mesajiz wxnt tFpt wiH /QtlUk, HO, but wiH a muc mP labPias meTad in rY
>/html, n F wondDd wot F hAd t dM t mEk it kum Qt rFt fP evrIwun.
>
>sum of Hem wxkt fP vXias uHD membDz v H list but not fP mI. hQevD, His
>belt-n-brEsiz meTad SUd wxk fP evrIwun.
>
>cCz,
>/filip
>
>--
>Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
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Toggle Shavian
This is an article that will be included in a book that I am editing - The
Spelling Society's Guide to Better Spelling - that is to be published in 2007.
Comments welcomed. -SB
George Bernard Shaw
The Problem of a Common Language
Britain's distinguished dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, was born in Dublin in
July, 1856, captured London 20 years later; in 1881 he became the leading
spirit of the Fabian Society; and in 1927 he received the Nobel Prize for
literature. He died in 1950, at age 94.
Mr. Robert Birley, in his third Reith broadcast, culminating in a call for an
international language and selecting the French as the most probable choice
(Spanish used to be the favourite), has gone very faithfully and competently
all over all the ground that has been surveyed again and again for 100 years
past without making any effective impression on either the public or the
education authorities. It was all said by Alexander J. Ellis in his century-old book.
I am old enough to have heard him lecture, in his velvet skullcap, for which
he always apologised. After pleading his phonetic brief, he read Shakespear
with Shakespear's pronunciation just as Mr Coghill now reads Chaucer.
Since Ellis we have had Pitman and Sweet, Volapuk and Esperanto,
and no end of phonetic alphabets and shorthand systems; but we are still
entangled in Johnson's absurd etymological bad spelling, wasting years of our lives
in writing the single sounds of our language with two, three, four, five
letters or more, and turning our children out of our elementary schools after nine
years daily instruction unable to speak or write English well enough to
qualify them for clerical or professional appointments. All our phonetic
propaganda is sterilised by the dread that the cost of the change would be colossal.
As a matter of fact, it is the cost of Johnsonese spelling that is
colossal; so colossal that it is beyond the comprehension of our authorities. Mr
Birley may argue 'til Doomsday for an international language, and may plump for
French as the best; but no authority will pay any serious attention until he
puts the case into figures, and concentrates on labour saving as the only
consideration that will cut any ice. The choice between French and English may turn
on the fact that in French the very common word shall is spelt with eight
letters and in English with five, of which one is superflous. To appreciate this
difference, we must begin with the cost in time and labor of writing one
alphabetic letter.
Take the word debt. Spell it det; and write it over and over again for a
minute. Then do the same spelling it debt. The difference between the number
of times you have written det and debt gives you the difference in time and
labor between writing one letter of the alphabet and two.
If, like some of our spelling reformers and phoneticians, you are
mathematically silly enough to play the old trick of disguising this difference as a
percentage, you will get a figure too small to impress anybody. A percentage
may mean a halfpenny or a million pounds sterling, a fraction of a second or
1000 eons, a parish council or a world federation. Keep to the facts. The
first fact is that the difference you have counted is the difference per minute.
It will prove to be 12 seconds. Therefore, as there are 365 days in the year,
the difference is 73 days per individual scribe per year.
How many scribes are there? As the English language goes round the world,
the sun never setting on it, it is impossible to ascertain exactly how many
people are writing it, not for one minute as an experiment, but for all-time
incessantly and perpetually. No matter: a big cross section will be just as
conclusive. In the British Commonwealth and the United States of North America
there are more than 270,000,000 born writers and speakers of English. Of these
the proportion of authors, journalists, clerks, accountants, scholars,
private correspondents and others writing continually and simultaneously all round
the clock may safely be taken as one in every hundred, making 2,700,000.
Multiply this figure by the 73 days. The answer is that every year in that cross
section alone we are wasting 540,000 years of time and labor which we could
save by spelling English phonetically enough for all practical purposes, adding
to the Johnsonese alphabet 14 letters, all of which can be borrowed
provisionally from the stocks now held by our printers for setting up foreign and
classical grammars, algebras, and the like.
I have left India, Pakistan, and Ceylon out of the calculation with their
400,000,000, whose dozen dialects are giving way to English. They would make
the figures too enormous to be credible. One could only laugh. Enough to
note that there is no industrial company on earth that would not scrap and
replace its plant, at whatever cost, to save in the cost of production a fraction of
such magnitudes. In the face of them, it is folly to prattle vainly for the
thousandth time about universal languages, teaching children to read, standard
pronunciation, and the rest of the argy bargy our politicians keep
regurgitating.
It is Johnsonese that we cannot afford, not a forty-letter alphabet. For
more than 70 years I have written books, plays, articles, and private letters,
in legible phonetics, and thereby added at least two months every year to my
productive lifetime as compared to Shakespear and Dickens, who had to write
their works in long hand, though Dickens was adept at reporting shorthand, which
is unreadable by printers and typists.
I do not pretend to know what language will become the international,
though I agree with Mr. Birley that it will not be an artificial one. The fittest
will survive. My guess is Pidgin English, the lingua franca of the Chinese
coolie, the Australian black boy, and the traders and seafarers who employ them.
In commercial Johnsonese we write, "I regret to have to inform you that it
is not possible for me to entertain the proposal of your esteemed letter." In
Pidgin this is, "Sorry, no can do." Pidgin, spoken or phonetically spelt, is
a labor saving device which leads the harvester, the internal combustion
engine, and the telephone nowhere.
The case of children learning to read is an overworked bugbear. Children
learn to read and write by sight, not by sound. [1] Those who have deficient
visual memory spell phonetically and make spelling mistakes that are phonetic
attempts at spelling. Blind children read by touch, deaf ones lip read. I
cannot remember any time when a page of print was unintelligible to me; so I can
hardly have suffered much when learning.
Children should be taught to spell phonetically (as they speak) and
corrected only when their spelling betrays a mispronunciation, which for the present
may be taken to mean a departure from the usage of Mr. Hibberd, chief
announcer to the British Broadcasting Corp. His vowels are much more representative
and agreeable than those common to the University of Oxford and the Isle of
Dogs.
A Cockney who pronounces his French in the accent of Stratford-atte-Bowe
is actually more intelligible in France than the phonetic virtuoso who
pronounces all but perfectly, barely a hundredth of every vowel being off the mark.
The foreigner whose schooltaught English is excellent the day he arrives here
speaks broken English after a year's residence, finding it quite sufficient for
his purposes and an innocent amusement for his neighbors. All teachers
should bear in mind that better is the enemy of good enough, and perfection not
possible on any terms. Language need not and should not be taught beyond the
point at which the speaker is understood. Not five minutes should be wasted in
teaching a chauffeur who says, "Them hills is very deceiving" to say "These
mountain gorges are very deceptive." An English child who says, "I thinked" or
"I buyed" is just as intelligible as an adult who says, "I thought" or "I
bought."
We say that Time is Money. It is civilisation, art, literature, leisure,
pleasure; in short, life more abundant.
__________________________
[1} GBS meant that this is primarily the custom with our malfonetic spelling.
In learning to read in a fonetic spelling system, associative learning
(sound and symbol relationship) would aid the beginner until he had developed
sufficient practice to recognise words by their familiar faces.
And see Barbara Smoker. 1959. GBS and the ABC. The story of Bernard Shaw’s
Will. Modern Drama. 139-46. Previously posted.
Toggle Shavian
unfPcanatlI, wen V riplF, it kumz bAk lFk His:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: paul vandenbrink [mailto:pvandenbrink@...]
> Sent: 08 March 2005 04:54
> To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [shawalphabet] Re: Another test
>
>
>
> hF /filap n /hV
> F sI H mesaJaz Az /SYvIan letxz t.
> n F Am rIdiN H mesaJaz yn /jAhM.
> lUks gUd.
>
> rigRdz, /pYl /vI.
> _________________atAct_________________________
>
> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Hugh Birkenhead"
> <mixsynth@f...> wrote:
> > kumz Qt pxfekt fP mI. but F'm VziN /QtlUk, Just lFk V.
> >
> > /hV /b
> _____
> >
> > From: Philip Newton [mailto:philip.newton@g...]
> > Sent: 06 March 2005 13:53
> > To: Shaw Alphabet Mailing List
> > Subject: [shawalphabet] Another test
> > anuHD test... duz His kum Qt in /SEvWn?
> >
> > wot abQt His?
> >
> > n HX SUd bI a Roman wxd in H midal v His.
> >
> > cCz,
> > /filip
> >
> > --
> > Philip Newton <philip.newton@g...>
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shawalphabet/
>
> shawalphabet-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
> Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 04/03/2005
>
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.4 - Release Date: 07/03/2005
Toggle Shavian
F hAvnt got H fEntast FdW wot V Just rOt.
/hV /b
_____
From: Scott Harrison [mailto:nik@...]
Sent: 09 March 2005 16:24
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: Another test
On Mar 8, 2005, at 20:00, Hugh Birkenhead wrote:
unfPcanatlI, wen V riplF, it kumz bAk lFk His:
?????? ?????? ???? ??????.
--
·???????? ·???????????? Scott Harrison PGP Key ID: 0x0f0b5b86
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.4 - Release Date: 07/03/2005
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.4 - Release Date: 07/03/2005
Toggle Shavian
hyhy! :) TANks fP H /p/d/f. it’s a SEm HAt wI hAv t rizPt t suc meZDz, Just
t tFp in His Alfabet.
F nO fP a fAkt HAt fonts kAn bI imbedad intM web pEJaz VziN a VtilitI kYld
“/weft” (WEFT) -- F dOnt nO if enIwun hC hAz Vzd it bifP? mEbI wI kAn Hen
pOst TiNz in /SEvWn n hAv nO nId fP fonts t bI instYld on pIpal’z kampVtDz.
_____
From: Scott Harrison [mailto:nik@...]
Sent: 09 March 2005 18:00
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] Re: Another test
On Mar 9, 2005, at 18:24, Hugh Birkenhead wrote:
F hAvnt got H fEntast FdW wot V Just rOt.
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.4 - Release Date: 07/03/2005
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Toggle Shavian
hF /hV,
F Vz a publik kumpVtD, sO Fm not Ebal t dQnlOd fonts. sO F Just Vz H font kOdz, HO it mE not SO up on UHDz skrInz in /SyvWn. hwen V rFt in /SyvWn F OnlI sI H /rOmanJI font kOd.
sRI fP H inkonvInjans,
best v rIgRdz,
/kRal
Hugh Birkenhead <mixsynth@...> wrote:
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
/kRl
TANkV fP riplFiN in H best Alfabet evD inventad. :) unfPcanatlI it kEm Qt in /rOman mF end, Az V mFt bI Ebal t sI bilO. wic font wx V VziN? H difYlt font t Vz hC iz /SY /sAnz /2.
enIwun els?
/hV
---------------------------------
From: carl easton [mailto:shavintel16@...]
Sent: 03 March 2005 01:12
To: shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [shawalphabet] No more Roman please!
hF GhV,
F wil rFt in GSyvWn font kOd fP H grMp. in H GSyvWn fPum in H GSyvWn sekSan F v kPs rFt in font kOd. sO GhV Fl ekstend mF GSyvWn VsiJ t His grMp tM.
best v rIgRdz,
GkRal
Hugh Birkenhead <mixsynth@...> wrote:
grMp.
wuns agen, nOwun hC iz tYkiN in /SEvWn. wI�D Yl nAtDiN on abQt sOSOliNgwistiks, fanetiks, Yltxnativ speliN sistamz n Yl HAt, n in H mIntFm, pUD Old /SEvWn iz getiN nO atenSan wotsOevD. it�s nO wundD wI�D not getiN enI nV membDz.
hQ R wI evD gOiN t kanvins H wxld v /SEvIan�z benafits if QD Alfabet v cqs in His grMp iz not /SEvWn?
wI mFt Az wel rInEm His grMp �JenDal fanetiks|speliN rifPm diskuSan grMp�.
enI riplFz t His mesiJ not ritan in /SEvWn wil bI dalItad. :-)
/hV
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Toggle Shavian
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:17:22 +0100, Scott Harrison <nik@...> wrote:
>
> For Unicode it is simple enough to install a
> font that just works assuming your software handles it fine.
I think one additional hindrance here is that Shavian is encoded in
Plane 1 of Unicode, and not all software handles that properly (for
example, Windows NT could only handle the Basic Multilingual Plane and
not any of the additional planes, and I think Java was also restricted
like that -- not sure what the situation is now).
> Once we get to that point, things will be infinitely
> better since one can easily mix Shavian and Latin all in the same
> message and never specify a font or HTML tags or any of that clutter
> that should not be there.
That would be great.
> Did we ever poll to see how many people can handle Unicode (like in my
> signature), and how many people cannot?
I've got a vague idea that we did and that the response was very low.
I can handle Unicode Shavian via Gmail / Firefox, but if it's just
Scott and myself, it won't be a very active discussion :p
𐑗𐑽𐑟,
·𐑓𐑦𐑤𐑦𐑐
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Toggle Shavian
Scott Harrison wrote:
> Did we ever poll to see how many people can handle
> Unicode (like in my signature), and how many people
> cannot? Of those that cannot, are there issues with
> computer systems like being limited to public
> terminals or things like that?
Here at work with Outlook, I cannot read Unicode Shavian. Unfortunately.
I'm guessing that this is due to the fact that Outlook uses MSIE internally,
and MSIE is not very good at font switching -- if a character is not in the
default font, it simply won't display it. Unfortunately, I don't have any
fonts that both (a) contain Shavian and (b) have good-looking Latin
characters as well as a wide complement of other characters (e.g. Greek and
Cyrillic).
Cheers,
Philip