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

lol..reminds me of the time in secondary school where i had to read a
section of the Grapes of Wrath.  it came out as an amalgam of Canadian
and 1930s Oklahoman.

On 6/9/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> --- 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
>