USAGE: Shavian: was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

--- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:


<snip>
>
> It's hard to know how many friends the Shaw alphabet
> has. Some of them
> are on the Shaw alphabet 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@...>
>
I first learned Shavian around 1962 or 1963 and became
quite fluent in it. The biggest problem I had with the
various Shavian groups on the Internet is what I came
to see as the biggest flaw in Shavian itself. I could
clearly discern the accent or dialect in which the
writer spoke. I found it annoying to read Poe written
with a British accent. He is, after all, an American
author, and his stuff should be written in an American
accent.

Ultimately, the reason I lost interest in Shavian is
that it doesn't record "the language", but records a
particular spoken dialect of the language. Spelling
can be either standardized OR phonetic, but it can
never be both, and given that choice I think I would
opt for standardized non-phonetic over phonetic but
non-standardized every time. It's just so much easier
to read, fluently, a standardized spelling than to get
bogged down puzzling over what some word might be
because the writer, a native German living in Boston
spelled it with his own idiosyncratic blend of German
and Bostonian accents.

A pox on phonetic spelling!

--gary

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