John Jenkins wrote:

>
> On Wednesday, November 14, 2001, at 10:15 AM, william bright wrote:
>
> > i'm surprised how often the present correspondence refers to tolkien
> > scripts and other scripts invented by philologers (which tolkien was) or
> > linguists or hobbyists, for fun or for experimental purposes rather than
> > for practical use. surely there is very little limit to the typological
> > characteristics of scripts invented by imaginative people. but what is
> > interesting *to me* at least is: what characteristics of scripts WORK for
> > communication in human societies?
> >
>
> I've spent the last couple of years actually using both Deseret and
> Shavian and it's been an interesting experience. Both are seriously
> flawed IMHO as reading scripts, but for different reasons.

> Strangely, Shavian was worse. It has ascenders and descenders galore,
> true, but on the whole I tended to find the letter shapes, particularly
> for the vowels, so similar that it was hard to learn them. In fact, I
> tended to read it almost as if it were an abjad, just getting the
> consonants and then adding the vowels that best made sense in the context.

Thank you! That's exactly what I maintained would be the case from the
moment I first saw it.

Also that the consonants are too similar to be readable.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...