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Shavian alphabet
- lintuxvi 8y agoInteresting! I journal a ton, and love the act of putting pen to paper, but daily wish I could write as fast as I think.
- themodelplumber 8y agoI can highly recommend shorthand. I had the same desire. It's only been 2 years and some change for me, but I can write at about 80% of my typing speed last I measured it. It's wayyyy faster than my normal writing and my hand "switches gears" automatically when I start to write fast. Here's a blog post that's unrelated, but you can see a little bit of my shorthand writing in the first photo. https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/modeling-and-detecting https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/modeling-and-detecting I started with Ford Shorthand (.com) and then added onto it from there. Anyway, can definitely recommend.
- pmoriarty 8y agoThere's a huge difference in the effort required to learn shorthand vs something like Shavian or Quikscript. I learned Quikscript in less than a week. From what I've heard, most shorthands take months or years to learn.
- themodelplumber 8y agoAh, I believe I'm familiar with this thinking. I have discussed it with other writers of shorthand. Were you aware that you can extend Quikscript into a shorthand system with some simple steps? In my case, I have added my own extensions to Ford, such as representations of words and phrases, and have added on some conventions from Gregg as well. IMO the distinction some draw between "shorthand" and "script" for example can make it needlessly difficult for beginners to get started.
- tomcam 8y agoGeorge Bernard Shaw often railed against the inconsistencies of English. Its grammar and spelling are unbelievably inconsistent and a constant headache even to native speakers. I love English and think it’s a very expressive language. I used to be an incredibly good speller (AutoCorrect has made that less important). I have a superb grasp of its grammar as both a speaker and a writer. But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little return for all the heartache.
- sjf 8y agoAgreed, I read a report that children learning English have to devote far more time to learning spelling than speakers of other languages, but this comes at the cost of time spent studying other subjects. I have never seen an argument against standardizing spelling, but I guess there is no political will and academic support to do it.
- salutonmundo 8y agoOne problem is the the sheer number of countries that use English, and the lack (in any of those countries) of a standards organization for the language (take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators)
- Smaug123 8y agoNote that standards organisations for natural language are routinely ignored. How many French people use "couriel" and how many use "e-mail"?
- seszett 8y agoThere are several levels at which these organisations make standards, though. Sure, the new words they propose often get ignored, though "couriel" was proposed by the Québec organisation, not the French one, and it is absolutely used in Québec. But the orthography changes that they propose are much more accepted, because they usually match phonetics instead of trying to change the course of the language. In the latest reforms in France quite a few accents got "corrected" (from é to è, like événement -> évènement), displaced (aiguë -> aigüe) and silent letters dropped (clef -> clé) and these changes have been widely accepted almost immediately. Quite a few were already in use before that anyway, although incorrectly. A few changes that are more controversial are not much used, and if they don't see actual use the Académie will drop them eventually. They just try to standardise the language, not turn it into something wholly different.
- sjf 8y agoIt's not immediately obvious what the benefit is over Pitman script, which is mentioned in the article. It seems like Pitman is faster to write because the characters are simpler, and afaik Pitman had a wider adoption, I've never heard of the Shavian alphabet before.
- pmoriarty 8y agoAs I mentioned in another post in this thread, an advantage of Shavian (and Quikscript) is the speed with which one learns it -- less than a week for me, vs months or years with Pitman (or Gregg). Also, the wider adoption of Pitman (and Gregg) is an advantage only if you want others to be able to read what you wrote. If you prefer privacy (for, say, your personal journal), then the rarer Shavian or Quikscript are better choices -- though, of course, for more security you should use a code or cipher.
- xenadu02 8y agoIt would be far easier to make existing English spelling more phonetic using the existing alphabet. Such efforts wud hav the benefit of beeng immeedeeatly obveeus to existeeng speekurs
- iafisher 8y agoThe problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.
- pmoriarty 8y ago"A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers." Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word. If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically. Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.
- alangpierce 8y agoThere's even plenty of precedent for the same word having different spellings based on region, like with color/colour. I imagine it would be similarly normal to learn that "tomahto" is the British spelling of "tomato" (or whatever it would end up being).
- dsego 8y agoWe have that in south slavic languages. For example this word meaning time (or weather) spoken and written differently based on dialect/language: vreme, vrime, vrijeme. [1] Maybe a regional spelling reform could lead to English starting to break apart into several different languages? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- glibgil 8y agoDeseret Alphabet attempt from the 19th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
- badrabbit 8y agoReminds me of logban and esperanza. Nice ideas,but ultimately a complete waste of time(outside of enjoyment).
- tmh79 8y ago*esperanto
- galaxyLogic 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban Lojban baseline was completed in 1997 so I think it's too early to tell whether that effort was completely wasted. Esperanto has had its chance but never really reached its goals I assume. But Lojban or something it might evolve into could be the language of the future.
- mkl 8y agoI learned the Shavian alphabet a few years ago, and gradually built up a list of transliterations as I read a few ebooks partially converted over (read a bit, add some more words, repeat). I had to make the font characters too (for Deja Vu, but I didn't contribute them back as mine seemed a bit amateurish). What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly. Unfortunately that would likely be the case for any English spelling reform effort. I subsequently lost most of my (NZ English) transliterations too, if I remember correctly.
- pmoriarty 8y ago"What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets you read quickly." Losing the ability to read quickly is its big Achilles heel of Shavian and Quikscript. This can be mitigated somewhat as you get used to spelling things mostly the same way and reading your own spellings, but when you have to read someone else's writing it's back to sounding out the words in your head, which will slow down reading speed to a crawl compared to reading traditional English orthography.
- andai 8y agoI have been using Quikscript in my journals, it saves time and strain when writing by hand. Still getting the hang of reading it, but that's to be expected with any new writing system. What did really impress me is that when you read poetry in Shavian / Quikscript, you can SEE the rhymes as repeating visual patterns, because what sounds the same, looks the same.
- pmoriarty 8y agoI prefer Quikscript: "To provide field testing of the new alphabet [Shavian], Read organized a lengthy public testing phase of Shavian by some 500 users from around the world who spoke different dialects of English. Once he had analyzed the results of those tests, Read decided to revise Shavian to incorporate a number of changes to improve the alphabet and make it both easier and faster to write. He called the revised alphabet "Quikscript"..."[1] The main advantage of Shavian is that it is part of unicode while Quikscript isn't. I'm not sure why that's the case. I'd have expected it to be the other way around. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript [2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/
- TuGuQuKu 8y agoWow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 others.
- KirinDave 8y agoYou think? I've spent a few days memorizing the script to the point where I can read roughly like a grade schooler (I don't see words yet, just letters). Slowly working through Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" [1] and I'm surprised. It's not a substantial problem. The only place where I struggle with this is a few of the vowels, particularly around A sounds. That's because they're all short glyphs. A much bigger obstacle is that I don't actually know how to spell most words phonetically. I've always had an excellent memory for characters, so I pretty much learned to read by memorizing whole words. So when I go to write a word like "today" and I struggle to choose between "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑱" and something silly like "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑧𐑘" (because there is supposed to be a Y there dangit!). [1]: https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_christmas_carol_-_shavian.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_chris...
- userbinator 8y agoThe fact that many of them are rotations/reflections of others also makes it much harder to recognise when text is in its correct orientation. Not really a problem if you're reading a book, but for things like signage and labeling I could see it being a source of ambiguity. Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional, "evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important layer of error-resistance.
- KirinDave 8y agoSo after seeing this story I decided to learn basic Shavian and, about 4 days in, I can read like a 3rd grader. I thought this might be a problem for Shavian, as well, but after experiencing it; it's really not. Go check out something like a copy of Dune (https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_first_draft_excerpt.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_fir...) and turn it on its side (or even flip it over). It's not really an issue to immediately recognize what the right way up is. If nothing else, a single proper noun will give the entire game up. It's not like Shavian is unique in that different orientations of the text can resemble proper letterforms. Many scripts have that and they're just fine.
- _nalply 8y agoI'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I suspect that English will fossilise its current orthography and turn words into logograms composed of Latin letters, similar to Chinese. [1]: https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678 https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678
- yborg 8y agoExcept English pronunciation, just like the pronunciation of every other human language hasn't been stable for centuries and English has so far failed to "fossilize its current orthography". And there are plenty of other languages with local variants and unstable pronunciation with phonetic alphabets. Japanese has two.
- BerislavLopac 8y agoEvery single living language out there has unstable pronunciation and a lot of local variants. A language is a living thing and is constantly in the flux, both through time and space. One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by Norman scribes. English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language, French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose decisions might be accepted by all of them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_numbe...
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThe biggest drawback of a new alphabet is that we burn word shapes into our brain (we don’t read words by letter unless they are unfamiliar), so we would have to get used to a bunch of new shapes (a major disadvantage) even if pronouncing unfamiliar words was easier (a minor benefit). Sunk cost.
- divanvisagie 8y agoAre there any examples of people trying to make a change to the English language and being successful? It seems to me that most of the changes occur naturally rather than by directed effort.
- geowwy 8y agoThere are some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
- goodcanadian 8y agoMost American (mis)spellings were a deliberate attempt to simplify spelling by people such as Benjamin Franklin. Some of them took, like dropping the u from colour, honour, valour, et cetera. Others, while not necessarily considered correct, are widely used and widely understood. "Tonite," comes to mind . . . it was even in my phone's autocorrect.
- bloak 8y agoI don't believe it's possible to make a clear distinction between "naturally" and "by directed effort" in the case of language. The degree to which a person is conscious of the change they are making might be a theoretical criterion, but it would usually be impossible to apply it in practice as in most cases we don't know who the person was, let alone what their mental state was at the time. Even if we know who made a change and they are still living they usually wouldn't be able to tell us reliably what they were thinking. There are plenty of individual English words whose spellings were deliberately changed by some person for one reason or another. Perhaps the only major change affecting a large number of words promulgated by a single person was Noah Webster's reform of American English that created most of the differences between American English and British English. There's a book called Does spelling matter? which has a lot of information about English spelling and historical reform proposals (though the book is perhaps not entirely reliable: there are some weird non-sequiturs in it that made me suspicious).
- skrebbel 8y agoThis is cool, and I agree that English urgently needs a better script. However, design goal #3 (distinct from the Latin alphabet) makes it clear that this is just a toy, or a proof of concept if you may. If you consciously design a script to be as alien as possible to the target audience (English speakers), then you simply don't want adoption. I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian languages. Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two "th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin", can't we write "ðis" and "þin"? Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as "restaurang" and "stasjon". It could be done. Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.
- singularity2001 8y ago> I agree that English urgently needs a better script. Why? Some ortografic adjustments wud do.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ahje 8y agoFråm a Nårdik pørspæktiv its nåt riily ænyÞing batt än ædjustment. I assume the same could be applied for German speakers, although their range of local additions to the Latin alphabet differs somewhat from ours. That's really just using slight modifications, using our own perception of what English sounds to us though. I expect it would look quite alien to the rest of the World, if the Brits started doing it based on their own sense of what written english should look like. While spoken and written English differ quite a lot, I suspect that to be one of the reasons as to why English has been so successful as a a Global trade language (I'm deliberately ignoring the Brittish Empire here). If English hadn't been standardized, and all English-speaking countries had their own separate written English based on their local dialects, the situation would be quite different.
- Smaug123 8y agoTo go in completely the opposite direction, Ithkuil (ithkuil.net) is a constructed language whose script encodes semantic meaning rather than phonetic. A written word may be pronounced in several qualitatively different ways, as long as they have the same meaning.
- singularity2001 8y agoTry chinese signs in japan
- egjerlow 8y agoSeems a strange criteria that it should be at least 40 letters - to me it seems like the goal should be to use as few letters as possible while still achieving its other goals?
- geowwy 8y agoEnglish has around 40 phonemes so 40 letters makes sense
- bloak 8y agoThe point has been made that different people pronounce English differently. I don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle: if you made a sort of union of RP and standard American pronunciation, probably the rest of the English-speaking world would be happy to use a spelling system based on that, if they were willing to accept any change at all, that is. A more serious problem, I think, is how the pronunciation of a single word element varies between words even for a single speaker of the standard language. How would a reformed English spelling cope with the vowels in "photograph" and "photography", for example? Perhaps there's a neat solution, but I don't know what it is. At least I'm fairly sure that phonemic transcript isn't it.
- seszett 8y agoHonestly I'm not sure what difference there is between "photograph" and "photography" (now I looked it up and I would never have guessed) but most languages that have sound changes like that just change the letters between variants of a word, instead of keeping the same letters and changing their pronunciation. In Dutch, long vowels that turn into short vowels make things like meer/meren (single/plural). In German, you would have Land/Länder (single/plural as well). French also does it with say, régler/règlement (verb/substantive). English does it too in some cases, with say wife/wives. So it could very well be something like photögraph/phötagröphy. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
- Smaug123 8y agoIf we only added the schwa (ə) to the script, then in my Received Pronunciation accent, it would be "photəgraph" versus "photogrəphy". On the other hand, English has an astonishing ability to replace vowels with schwas; pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable spoken as "ə".
- psergeant 8y ago> pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable spoken as "ə" Making learning a language where the vowel sounds are the important one a freakin’ nightmare for Anglophones.
- danieltillett 8y agoSince we are talking about the lost cause of English spelling reform here is my contribution to the long list [0]. 0. https://www.cutspel.com https://www.cutspel.com
- G4BB3R 8y agoThat's why I love Esperanto, for the 1:1 correspondence to phonemes and sounds
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gfiorav 8y agoSpanish is already mostly like this. What you read is what you pronounce. Any other languages like this anybody knows of?
- dwdz 8y agoPolish, for the most part: https://youtu.be/UUA1qrx6QB4?t=1m35s https://youtu.be/UUA1qrx6QB4?t=1m35s
- maze-le 8y agoReally? Interesting... whenever I am in Poland I stand in awe and bewilderment before a (seemingly) never ending successions of consonants (mainly c,s,z,r,l,w and k) -- and I am never able to tell how a word is pronounced. Its probably a bit like in german, where a group of consonants can form exactly one phoneme ('sch' -- [∫]).
- anewone 8y agoYes, digraphs involving z are quite common in Polish so it's not as bad as it looks. Still, English would never have a string of them like "szcz" ("shch" in English orthography).
- psergeant 8y agoThai largely is, although memorising the tone rules makes this rather more challenging.
- maze-le 8y agoGerman, or like mark twain said: "The only virtue of the language: After one short lesson in the alphabet, the student can tell how any German word is pronounced without having to ask;"
- enriquto 8y ago> Spanish is already mostly like this. The word mostly in here is easily an overstatement... have you ever seen how semi-illiterate write Spanish? If you do, you will understand that there are lots of ambiguities in Spanish orthography. Almost any word can be written in many different ways and be read nearly the same. Moreover, the same symbol is often used for different sounds (but not for different phonemes). For example, the "n" in "cangrejo" and "no", or the two "d" in "dado".
- cmroanirgo 8y agoIt reminds me of this joke [0]: "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas. If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl." [0] https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-german/ https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-be... (I'm sure I saw this as an email well before 2006 though).
- Gravityloss 8y agoThere exist languages with proper good writing <-> pronunciation mapping, so it's doable. There wouldn't be any spelling bees.
- russellsprouts 8y agoA version of that joke has been attributed to Mark Twain, though this source[0] says it was more probably M.J. Yilz, in this[1] 1971 letter to the Economist. [0]: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm [1]: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....
- lolc 8y agoAs spoken language evolves we have to eventually adapt the written language. The alternative is written English. That beast managed to incorporate a whole body of words from another language without adapting the spelling of those words. It ended in the tears you get every year afresh when you try to teach kids the broken state that is English orthography. The Shavian alphabet is attacking this from the wrong end though. For one thing, we already have a phonetic alphabet. There is no point in inventing another. The main issue though is that you want your alphabet be stable against vowel pronounciation changes. Vowel pronounciation changes quickly and carries little semantic meaning. If you try and encode that in your alphabet it's going to need an update as you move from city to city. The abjad (consonant alphabet) approach of just leaving the vowels as an exercise to the reader may seem a little extreme. It has the distinct advantage of staying stable over centuries though.
- rootbear 8y agoAs much as I think English needs spelling reform, I don't think a brand new alphabet is the answer. In particular, the Shavian alphabet would be a nightmare for people like me who had trouble with reversed letters as a child. (My mother was particularly amused when I once wrote "rubberband" as rudderdanb.) Symmetry between the voiced and unvoiced letters is cool in theory but a disaster for dyslexics like me.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoI'm not dyslexic at all, and I think that alphabet would be a nightmare to use for the same reason.