Re: A PUBLIC APOLOGY to Ray Brown.

At 6:02 pm -0700 14/10/98, Robert J. Petry wrote:
[snip]

I was going to trash all Bob's posts unread.  But when he writes on the
list 'A PUBLIC APOLOGY to Ray Brown'  it seemed churlish of me not to read
it. In some ways I wish I hadn't.

>However, there are two
>sides to every story. If one will reread his first post, and consider some of
>his comments about Speedwords in the past........
Looked a bit like less than an apology & some other points I could comment
on.  But it's probably unhelpful to do so - and indeed there are at least
two sides to most stories.

I'm sorry that I don't think Speedwords is the fine tool Bob considers it
to be.  It may be because Bob & I seem to have come to Speedwords for
different reasons.  I came because it claimed to be an IAL & it seemed a
pretty unusual IAL.  I personally found it unsatisfactory as such & all my
criticism have been regarding that aspect of Speedwords.

The fact that Bob is actively promoting Occidental makes little sense to me
if he does consider Speedwords as a satisfactory IAL in its own right.
Therefore we might even agree to some extent here.

But - and I think it's an important 'but' - it seems to me that Bob was
principally attracted by Speedwords claim to be a rapid writing system or
alphabetic shorthand.  Indeed both his nickname for the language -
Raplinrie - and his espousal of Occidental as his preferred IAL seem to me
to corroborate this.

Now the shorthand aspect was not one that principally interested me. If Bob
& others want to use Speedwords/Raplinrie for this purpose and they find it
works, I have no problem with that.  All my observations about Speedwords
have been from liguistic point of view, particularly with regard to the IAL
question.

I'm NOT trying to be contentious, but to make sense of our different
positions which, hopefully, we can respect.

>So, Ray, I apologize to you personally, and do not wish either of
>us to harbor any harsh feelings towards each other.
Apology accepted.

Ray.