Re: [shavian] Why is Shavian a better scheme than IPA?

[stbetta]

Philip,   Thanks for your analysis.  --Steve > STEVE: I am going to post an article extoling Shavian but for now I would like for > the group to attempt to explain why Shavian notation is superior to Unifon > and the IPA. PN: Superior for what purpose?   SB: A dictionary key or whatever.  You can state your purpose in your argument. PN: I don't know Unifon, but my opinion is that the Shaw alphabet is better than the IPA _for representing the phonemes of English_. PN: Firstly, IPA is the International _Phonetic_ Alphabet and is designed to represent phones, not phonemes; secondly, even though it can be -- and is -- used to represent a language's phonemes, it's not tailored to any particular language, and some sounds (particularly dipthongs and affricates) which are phonemes in a language have to be represented by sequences of IPA characters.   SB: Abercrombie, Sweet, Jones, and John Wells have used an IPA based script for representing BBC English and related dialects.  The Association has never endorsed a particular mapping of the symbols.  There are at least a dozen in use and while there may be a 90% overlap, they are all different in some respect. PN: For this reason, I believe schemes that are tailored to a particular language can do a better job of representing that language's phonemes; the Shaw alphabet is one such scheme which happens to have been created to represent English phonemes. (Or the phonemes of a particular dialect of English; for example, it distinguishes between the vowels of "cot" and "caught" but not between the beginnings of "which" and "witch", or "horse" and "hoarse" -- the last two pairs sound identical for me but I know that there are speakers who distinguish between them.)   SB: An IPA based phonemic alphabet has all of these capabilities. The example is not ideal since there is considerable variation in the pronunciation of *cot. cat-cot-caught = kæt- kAt/kOt/kQt - kO:t   where O represents the mirrored c symbol. Shavian:  kAt - kot kYt - kyt PN: On the other hand, I believe the Shaw alphabet is ill-suited to represent arbitrary sounds; for example, it's not a good fit to represent, say, German or French. The IPA would be better for this purpose; a language-specific phonemic transcription even better. SB: The IPA represents phonemes when the symbols are used as a dictionary key. PN: Another advantage of the Shaw alphabet is that since it represents phonemes, not phones, it doesn't tie you down to a particular realisation of those phonemes. So, for example, people from Australia, New Zealand, Michigan, London, and other places, who have different phonetic vowel inventories, nevertheless have similar phoneme inventories. So while the vowel sound of "day" and "play" may vary from place to place, I believe all speakers rhyme those words, so they can use the same symbol _age_ for both.   SB: Pitman did something similar with the i/t/a.  He insisted that it was not a pronunciation guide, only a reading guide.  The sounds associated with particular letters were dialect specific.   PN: Strictly speaking, IPA should represent how each particular person pronounces a phoneme, so someone whose _age_ phoneme sounds more like the way I pronounce _ice_ (Australians?) should write not /EI/ but /aI/ (or something like that) in ASCII IPA. This masks the fact that the phonemes are the same.   SB: So all of those dictionaries that use IPA for their key are wrong;-) > Shavian has an IPA inspired keyboard map but it also has arbitrary > symbols for some diphthongs. PN: That's not part of the Shaw alphabet, though, merely an arbitrary convention used by certain fonts which map Shaw alphabet letters to ASCII symbols so that they can be keyed in from a regular keyboard on systems which do not support Unicode fonts or changeable keyboard schemes.   SB: I have argued that the keyboard map could be more user friendly. The keyboard map is not completely arbitrary but more readable options could have been used.  Reforming the keyboard map is relatively simple. PN: "Proper" Unicode fonts -- which already exist -- do not need to map Shaw alphabet letters to English letters at all, but can place them in the Unicode Shavian block U+10450 - U+1047F. PN: I wouldn't place too much attention to the keyboard mapping. PN: (If you wanted, you could also create a font which maps Shaw alphabet letters to ASCII symbols in another way, for example -- say, 'c' to _array_ rather than to _church_. The important thing is the resulting shapes; it's they which represent the sound.) Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS  Visit your group "shavian" on the web.    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.