Re: txt msgs & BrSc

At 8:21 pm -0400 15/6/01, David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 6/15/01 1:30:25 PM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:
>
><< E v lau a ri-infmz? >>
>
>    This is supposed to be "Are you great at text messages"!?  On what
>parallel plain of existence?
Not quite sure what you mean.  I wouldn't normally call another language a
parallel plain of existence (unless you consider IALs generally to be 'on a
parallel plain of existence').

I did say immediately before writing the sentence quoted:
"In Speedwords the above question might be written:"

....and I wrote earlier in my email:
"That [a briefscript] is exactly what Dutton had in mind when he invented
Speedwords (as well, of course, intending Speedwords to be an IAL)."

The sentence is written in an IAL, namely Speedwords, as I said, and is
this no more like English than the equivalent sentence would be in
Esperanto, Volapük, SolReSol or any other IAL.
--------------------------------------------

At 10:28 pm -0400 15/6/01, D Tse wrote:
>Briefscript (ie BrSc), I am led to believe.
>
>Imperative
>
>>
>><< E v lau a ri-infmz? >>
>>
>>    This is supposed to be "Are you great at text messages"!?  On what
>>parallel plain of existence?
>>
>>-David
No - "BrSc" has not, alas, been invented yet nor, indeed, has it got a name
("BrSc" is convention some coined on another list for my still unborn &
unnamed conlang).  The quote is, as I said, in _Speedwords_, a conlang
devised by one Reginal Dutton.

Dutton began work on the latter in the 1930s as a universal pasigraphy,
which could also act as an alphabet (or 'briefscript' as he termed it),
called "International Symbolic Script".  In 1936, it underwent a
significant revision when the Reverend Foat* suggested to Dutton that his
conlang would receive greater acceptance if one could _speak_ it as well as
write it.  The result was the first version of Speedwords: an IAL which
could be spoken, and was written as a briefscript. Dutton revised the
language 10 years later and carried out his final revision in 1951.

*I know nothing more about this reverend other than that he was, like
Dutton, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

The sentence quoted is pronounced /e:v@ la:ju a: ri:InfQmz/ and written as
I gave it.

If anyone wants to find out more about Speedwords, then probably the best
place to look is Richard Kennaway's conlang web-site.  It has also been
recently revived by Bob Petrie who calls it RapLinRie (Speddwords for
"rapid language shorthand").  I'm afraid I don't have the URLs to hand, but
any half-decent search engine ought to be able to find these.

Ray.





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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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