Re: Speedwords hare (was: Some new Brithenig words? Narbonosc

Raymond Brown wrote:
>His _zovrap_ (hare) highlight two problems thrown up by his insistence on
>having a small basic vocabulary (about 500 morphemes) on which to build
>everything else:
>1. You have to use compounds to express all other ideas & forming
>satisfactory compounds, which are not too unwieldy - as we see with this
>one - is not always easy.  Rick Harrison in his critique on Speedwords
>(which can be found on Richard Kennaway's conlang site) points out some of
>the unsatisfactory ones.
>2. By using compounds you soon produce words which are longer than the
>ordinary English word, which rather runs counter to the concept of an
>alphabetic shorthand!  I guess an advocate of Speedwords would argue that
>the commonly used words are much shorter and that, therefore, the odd word
>like _zovrap_ for hare won't matter; but it does seem a little
>unsatisfactory to me that English & Swedish _hare_, Danish _Hare_, German
>_Hase_, Dutch _haas_ is represented by a six-letter word in a briefscript.
Hm, you capitalize Danish nouns? That's been obsolete since shortly after
WWII. At the time, the reform was seen as having the dual benefits of making
written Danish more similar to the other Nordic langs and less similar to
German. I hope the later isn't seen as a benefit nowadays ...

                                                Andreas
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