Re: What works

John Jenkins wrote:

> 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.

I had even more trouble trying to write Shavian than trying to read it. The
letters MIME, ASH, ADO (and likewise NUN, EGG, and ON) are similar in a way that
thumbs its nose at human penmanship. I tried repeatedly to write these letters
at something resembling normal speed, but could not distinguish them AND make
them look like the prototypes -- one or the other. This is much less of a
problem with Deseret, which is sometimes criticized on this basis (apart from
the ascender/descender problem).

-Doug