Hi there & Blitherings

Hi All ;-)

Barbara Babbles;
I've just re-joined after a few years away and I thought I'd
re-introduce myself. I'm 48, unwed, Irish, an ex typographer, and I live
in Reading, England, with my disabled adopted son. Main hobbies are
Forteana and Ancient Egypt, and restoring a "classic" (ie over 20 years
old) RV. Fav music is listening and playing celtic/rock fusion /fjuZ@n/
<g>,
and fav reading is SF/Fantasy.

I'm mostly interested in scripts and their creation. Partly this was
fuelled by my being dyslexic - Know thy Enemy! Last time around I
devised an ASCII/IPA transcription system called "Coutts-Barrett", which
alas I lost all details of when my last computer crashed fatally :-(.

I've smatterings of several languages (2nd best two are Irish &
Japanese) but mainly Ancient Egyptian. I know a lot more about dialects
of English; 4 North American, and 13 British Isles. My fav' scripts are;
Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform(s), the old arabics, Devengari, Korean,
The japanese syllabaries, and Anglo Saxon Runes. I like studying
phonetics too ;-).

I use an old Wordpro/DTP dedicated cpm computer for my script work
because the programmes are way more versatile than anything available on
the PC or mac who's scripting systems are rather clunky and restricted
by comparison.
I could go on about their advantages (each font has integrated
Latin/Greek/ Cyrillic/Scandavian/Maths characters and about 20-odd
accents that can be placed over ANY character! The DTP prog each font
has 96 used defined characters and 12 accents that can be placed
over/under any character!), but I won't bore thee ;-) except to say the
wordpro program is available for the PC, it's called Locoscript
Professional, but only a chopped down version of the DTP prog
(Microdesign PC) is available for the PC which alas saves in it's own
format, and only has 36 user defined letters and no accents ;-[.
Neither is compatible with any application except each other :-(.

RE: Irish.
Yep, Irish is *very* political back home. And speakers of the native
dialects consider "government Irish" to be an artificial language and
resent the way it's thrust at them. Ironically while the gov' see the
promotion of "irish" as reinforcing cultural identity, the speakers of
native dialects see it as striping them of cultural identity. The
government backed organizers of folk festivals have been ruthlessly
stamping out regional variations too; trying to create a "flat" but
unified all-ireland "culture" - those of us who do work within a
regional culture (in my case it's Ulster) say they're forcing us to have
culture with a capitol "K" ;-).
The government incentives to learn Irish are somewhat silly. As an
example, if you do your exams (any subject) in Irish you get an
automatic 10% added to your grade - so it's not unheard of for fluent
speakers to get grades OVER 100%! The situation is very different in
Northern Ireland - but that's another tale ;-).

> Steg Stuttered;
> Now, a lot of times |u| is pronounced as a diphthong whose first part is
> [j].
You'd think that wouldn't you? I know I did. But apparently phoneticians
say rather that the consonant has been palletized. Place a vowel after Z
S St) or Zd) and the /j/ glide to the vowel has to be formed first, for
which the tongue etc have to be in the "ready" position while saying the
consonant.

Other consonants like t and d are palletized in British English who say
for tune and dune /tjun/ and /djun/ rather than /tu:n/ /du:n/.
Palletized
dj and tj are a feature of ancient egyptian, separate consonants from t
and d which are transcribed (in ASCII) as T D and t d respectively.

>Barry Blathered;
>It seems though that like Brahmi, Devanagari was always written left to
>right. With brahmi, there are a few examples of it running right to left,
>but the vast majority are left to right. WIth things like direction, it
>seems to me scripts are conservative, so it's no surprise to me Devanagari
>kept the left to right orientation.
Could you elucidate a bit more on this please. It would only make sense
to me if at one time there had been pressure to reverse the direction,
but I don't know of any evidence of that. After the Mogul conquest a
sort of lingual franca was devised. The british raj called it
hindustani, but today it's know by which writing system it uses; Hindi
(uses a devengari script: which was how the Hindu people wrote it) and
Urdu (uses a variant of arabic, which was how the Muslim conquerors
wrote it). There *was* some pressure to adopt Urdu script, but as far as
I know there was never any pressure for hindus to reverse the direction
of theirs.

And, for a final blither from barbara, does anyone know how to get
individual posts? Yahoo only offers digests or read-on-web. I chose
digest as the lesser of two evils, but I'd real prefer individual
mails, so if anyone knows how to set that I'd be very grateful for
finding out ;-). Unfortunately the "Welcome" came via Yahoo - which
strips all non-ascii text - so I got a blank mail :-( Any chance of a
plain text version please?

Bye bye.

Barbara  Barrett
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\\|/   \|//   |// \\|/   \|//   |//  \|//
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The above has to be set in a non proportional font
to work properly. It's twig runes and oaghm.

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