From: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > It was never intended to compete with IPA. It was an idle-brain > activity from when I was 17. Some people write poetry or learn the > ocarina; I invented an alphabet.
Sorry, I did not want to be polemic about your work. You have perfectly the right to use it and even advertize it as you own artistic work. In fact I appreciate the fact that you were focused soon with the representation of your language with an alternate writing form addressing other needs than just reproduction of texts written by others. You're not alone to have had this idea: what you did is to create your own stenography, and I think that most skilled people invent their own conventions to note speech rapidly, in one form or another of stenography. You were skilled enough to create an orthograph based on phonology, with its rules, so that you could not only reread yourself, but also give your notes to read to somebody else, by using a consistant model. Your system is then really a good stenography. Many people have learned to write and read stenographic systems, in addition to the conventional alphabets. This was (and may be is still now, a recognized professional skill. I will certainly never blame against your work, that you have tuned to address new needs. Whever your phonemic alphabet constitutes a script or not is however not in you hands: a script gains its status when it gets used by others to communicate. It is usable as such, even if it may not have a definitive orthograph (many languages are written with some wellknown script, without having a definitive orthograph, so the absence or presence of an orthograph with your script is not a problem for me).
