Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:

>> 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.

If Shaw was advocating phonetic spelling for the purpose of creating
(or widening) class distinctions, then that's hardly a noble goal.
But I think this is quite a different issue from the merits or
demerits of Kingsley Read's implementation.

> Needless to say, Henry Higgins bears little resemblance to Henry
> Sweet! (Nor, for the revisionists, to Daniel Jones.)

I had to look up the reference to Sweet and discovered this passage by
Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of
Pennsylvania:

"After Melville Bell's invention, notations like Visible Speech were
widely used in teaching students (from the provinces or from foreign
countries) how to speak with a standard accent. This was one of the
key goals of early phoneticians like Henry Sweet (said to have been
the model for Henry Higgins, who teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak
'properly' in Shaw's Pygmalion and its musical adaptation My Fair
Lady)."

So I guess what you are saying is that Shaw's mapping of Sweet onto
the Higgins character was a gross distortion.

> 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!)

Well, um, my script is based *entirely* on rotations and reflections.
You will not find a single character (except for EE2F, which is a
schwa and deliberately designed to be different) that is not a
rotation or reflection of some other character. So if those things
are inherently Bad, then that is a much greater defect in the script
than the mere similarity of glyphs.

But let's take a look at learners, dyslexics, and the p/b/d/q example.
Suppose the Latin script only had one closed-loop-and-stick letter,
say 'b'. This would presumably be a Good Thing because learners and
dyslexics would not have to distinguish between four different letters
when reading.

But when writing, you still cannot say that 'd' or 'p' or 'q' is an
acceptable alternative form of 'b'. We have that situation today,
with letters that have no reflected or rotated form. A child who
writes a backwards 'r' or 's' is still wrong (although perhaps cute)
and must eventually learn to write the letter correctly.

The Cree (Nunavik, Inuktitut) script is certainly an extreme example
of rotation and reflection as the guiding principle of a script.

So I guess we have identified another factor or two that may make a
script successful or "practical": ease of learning and resistance to
errors in reading and writing.

-Doug Ewell doug_ewell@... or dewell@...