Re: þe_getisbyrg_adres

--- Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@...> wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 06:08, Gary Shannon wrote:
> > As my eyes get older I really hate decorated
> letters.
> > I can't always make out which decoration I'm
> looking
> > at.  But since we read by scanning the general
> shape
> > of the word as a whole, I suppose it doesn't
> matter
> > which decoration a given letter has.  But if
> that's
> > the case, then the decorations are superfluous and
> can
> > be left off with no loss of legibility.
> >
> > e.g.:
> >
> > e getisbyrg adres
> > getisbyrg, pensilvania
> > novembr 19, 1863
> >
> > for skor and seven jers ago ur fars brat for on is
> > kontinent, a ny nasyn, konsevd in libyrti, and
> > dedikatid to e proposisyn at al men ar kre-atid
> > ekwal.
>
> Well, no. Firstly, the difference between accented
> and unaccented is
> still going to be significant.
Mostly I can't read the decorated letters in your
reply since they come out as garbbled multi-letter
nonsense on my screen.  However, the real debate seems
to be the meaning of the word "significant".  How
significant are the vowels anyway?

F-r sk-r N s-vn y-rz -g- R f-drz br-t fr-t -n d-s
k-nt-n-nt, - n-- n-shn, k-ns-vd -n l-b-rt- ...

Once one learns to recognize those words on sight it
reads just as fluently as any other spelling. A second
vowel symbol might need to be introduced to
differentiate between "in" and "on", "so" and "see",
"hat" and "hut", but in general, for words of five or
more letters the consonant patterns are unique enough
that the vowels can be dispensed with. (A few
exceptions exist like "picket, packet, pocket",
"paper, pepper, pooper, popper", but these are
relatively rare, and such words could eventually be
dropped from the language to be replaced with more
unique synonyms.)

There's no doubt at all what the words "kl-s-c-l",
"n-t-v", and "s-gn-t-r" are.

--gary