Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

On 6/8/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
> On the vowel front,
> however, the distinctions native to (classical) Arabic
> and to Malay were far too few to encompass the
> English vowel phonemes.
That's one of the problems I come across when writing English in
Arabic script, as well.

In fact, I'd say that the Arabic script as it's usually used is badly
suited to languages with more than three vowels. (Some languages
(Kurdish? Uyghur?) use letters with diacritics to make more vowel
distinctions, but I'm not familiar with the conventions they use.)

> Finally, on what basis should I create
> symbols for things like English /wh/ and the lovely
> sound [Z]?
[Z] seems straight-forward enough to me; I would have used the Persian
letter representing that sound -- za (is that the name?) with three
dots instead of one.

Similarly, I'd use jim-with-three-dots for [tS], again on the model of
Persian, and ba-with-three-dots for [p]. And, presumably, gaf
(kaf-with-line-above) for [g] -- also the Persian way.

> A decade or so ago, I flirted with Shavian script, as
> once before in my youth, at the time Shaw's bequest
> was won.  But the winning solution seemed so remote
> from everything that went before (moreover, I thought
> it not particularly well designed) that it was unlikely
> ever to gain acceptance, even by an army of loyal fans.
> Perhaps I was wrong?
It's hard to know how many friends the Shaw alphabet has. Some of them
are on the shawalphabet Yahoo Groups mailing list, but even there,
attitudes are diverse, and there aren't that many regulars (less than
a dozen, I'd say). Come and join us, though! (Don't join the 'shavian'
Y!G, though -- its moderator is AWOL and so it's become somewhat
spam-infested. Nearly everyone who used to read it moved to
'shawalphabet'.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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