Peter T. Daniels <
grammatim@...> wrote:
> ... However, your characters are far, far too similar in appearance
> to each other to constitute a practical script. (That's the other
> main objection to the winning entry for Shaw Alphabet, too.)
What was the *first* main objection to Shaw?
To be honest, I thought the similarity between certain Shaw letters
was a problem I had successfully avoided. For example, the attached
GIF shows three Shavian letters which represent (respectively) the 'a'
sounds in 'ash' and 'ado' and the consonant 'm'. These letters are
extremely similar to one another and it would take a great deal of
handwriting practice to distinguish them consistently.
I designed the Ewellic letters specifically to avoid this type of
problem (though I don't remember if I had actually seen the Shaw
alphabet in 1980). Only with ridiculously sloppy penmanship can one
character be mistaken for another. Perhaps the most hazardous case
involves the three vowels shown at EE28, EE29, and EE2A in my original
chart -- the only difference is the choice of an upward-oblique,
horizontal, or downward-oblique stroke.
Of course, solving the Shaw problem of individual characters that can
easily be mistaken for each other did not address the (somewhat
different) problem that Peter found with my script -- overall
uniformity of letterforms that makes reading difficult.
-Doug Ewell
doug_ewell@... or
dewell@...