Re: USAGE: front vowel tensing [was: English notation]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2001 16:07:24 -0700, Frank George Valoczy
<valoczy@...> wrote:

>Has anyone ever thought, it might be simpler to scrap the Latin-based
>English script and used instead Cyrillic or Glagolitic or Devanagari or
>whatever?
The problem with adapting Cyrillic or some other natlang script is that
English has some pretty rare sounds, like /D/ and /r=/, that would need to
be written with modifications of existing characters or arbitrary
substitutions. The Shaw alphabet or Visible Speech might be suitable. But
the guidelines for using the Shaw alphabet are vague (given the differences
in phoneme inventories between dialects) and the Visible Speech characters
are too similar in appearance to read easily. My Ljoerr alphabet would be
suitable for the consonants, but you'd need diacritics on some of the
vowels.

I actually played around with doing Visible Speech and Shaw alphabet
versions of my home page. I eventually decided against it, but you can see
what it might have looked like:

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/index-vs.html
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/index-shaw.html

You'll need the Ghoti font to read the Shaw alphabet page (I don't remember
where I got it, but a search for "Ghoti font" turns up a number of links
including http://www.simonbarne.com/shavian/fonts.html).

The Visible Speech page uses my Teamouse VS font
(ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/fonts/tmousevs.ttf).

--
languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>---
hmiller (Herman Miller)   "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
@io.com  email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
\ "Subject: teamouse" /  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

Reply