Re: Shaw alphabet

Doug_Ewell@... wrote:

>
> 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?

Glad you noticed that ...

Shaw's avowed purpose in advocating phonetic spelling!

He thought the Lower Classes wouldn't be able to read something written
in phonetic RP, so they'd all have to be Eliza Doolittle, or they'd die
out. Needless to say, Henry Higgins bears little resemblance to Henry
Sweet! (Nor, for the revisionists, to Daniel Jones.)

> 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.

Rotations and reflections are a Bad Thing. We've got p b d q , which are
problematic enough for learners and dyslexics. You (and Shaw) have lots
more sets like that. (I shudder to think of the amount of dyxlexia in
Cree-script societies!)

> 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.

I wonder what happens in Cherokee, where lots of the letters look like
variants on roman capitals -- but that's because there's so much
latitude in roman lettering due to a couple millennia of scribes and
calligraphers having at them.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...