Peter Cyrus, On 28/10/2011 18:02:
> (reposted after being rejected with an image)
>
> On your first point, it's true that exporting dialectical variation from
> spoken language to written language brings all the attendant difficulties
> along with it.

all the attendant difficulties plus extra ones -- see below.

> Imagine that you and I speak different dialects, and let's assign them
> metaphorically to bread and cake : you speak "bread" and I speak "cake".
>   Now we want to converse.  I could insist that "cake" is the standard
> dialect, and that it's up to you to learn it, and of course you could insist
> on "bread".  We could agree on a compromise and converse in "muffin"
> (assuming muffins are halfway between bread and cake), or we could even
> agree to converse in "pie", quite different from both bread and cake.

There are indeed these possibilities in principle, but in practice everybody speaks either (a) always bread, (b) always cake, or (c) bread or cake depending on the occasion. Since the privileged status of cake is a consequence of snobbery and class hegemony, our utopian linguistic schemes should cater only to a world in which everybody speaks their own bread.

> But this situation arises without regard to whether our conversation is
> spoken or written - the same problems arise.

If speech had a truly analogous written form, it would be the narrowest of narrow phonetic representations. But Shwa is instead a quasiphonemic broad phonetic, including only as much phonetic detail as is relevant and necessary for the particular dialect, and choosing symbol--phone correspondences that are most fitting for the particular dialect.

In speech, the entire signal is laden with clues to the identity of the dialect, so for example if you pronounce _stare_ as [stE] and hear somebody from Middlesborough saying _stir_ [stE] or somebody from Chorley saying _star_ [stE], you have abundant evidence that they're not speaking your dialect, and so are far far less likely to mistake them to be saying _stare_ than you would if you lacked such evidence (as you would in broad phonetic writing).

>My proposition is that Shwa
> can write any of the four : bread, cake, muffin or pie.

In practice this reduces to them writing in bread (since muffin and pie don't exist, and cake is socially unacceptable). This was indeed what I was assuming in my previous reply.

It must be remembered that whereas all normal humans learn to speak perfectly, learning to read comes much less naturally, and learning a writing system that doesn't straightforwardly follow the pronunciation of one's own dialect is extraordinarily difficult. By far the greatest problem with writing is the time it takes to learn, so if one is ranking writing systems by their efficacy, the overriding criterion is how easy they are to learn to read. We can agree that something written in the reader's own dialect broad-phonetically/shallow-phonemically is approximately the easiest to read. So what writing system can most closely approximate this ideal circumstance?

> If it were possible to come up with a written version of English that,
> miraculously, simultaneously represented all English dialects without any
> standardization, for example with one signatum that an American would read
> as "truck" and a Brit would read as "lorry", then your alternative makes
> sense : it might be better to write in that script than in a phonetic one.

No, that system would be logographic, and therefore horrendously difficult to learn.

A single pandialectal orthography that is relatively easy to learn to read would be diaphonemic. For a diaphonemic orthography, a featural phonetic script would be a positive hindrance, i think, and the script would have to be language-specific.

In your rebuttal section, or in the section where you advertise the pros of Shwa, I'd advise you to explicitly treat it simply as an axiom of the scheme that it is intended to be a single script that can be applied to all languages, and is easy to learn to write. I.e., that's the intent of the scheme, but you're not necessarily arguing that having a single script that can be applied to all languages is better than each language having its own diaphonemic script (which is easier for readers, but much harder to learn to write).

> I don't believe that kind of writing is systematically possible, but even if
> it is, Shwa is designed to represent spoken language, in all its variety.
>   When you write in bread, I may have as much difficulty in reading it as I
> would if you spoke to me in bread, and that's something you might consider
> as you write or speak.  But I don't see it as a general argument against
> phonetic/phonemic orthographies.

When you write in bread, i will not only have as much difficulty in reading it as I would if you spoke to me in bread, I will have far more difficulty in reading it. Furthermore, with an appropriate orthography, it could be easier for me to understand you when you write than when you speak, since whereas you have no choice but to speak in an accent that you know, an orthography could allow you to write mostly accentlessly.

> On the subject of gaits, I think you are overestimating the difficulty of
> reading a different gait,

No, I was not making any sort of estimation of the difficulty of reading gaits.

> I believe that what the gaits are showing *is* phonology, not syntagmology,

Maybe you didn't understand me: the syntagmatic structures are part of deep phonology, whereas the rest of Shwa is broad phonetic. So the gaits are incongruous. And they make only a vague nod to the phonological syntagmatics.So is the extra graphical complexity worth it?

> and that the resulting display is worth the additional complexity.  For
> example, why is Hangul written in block form?
>
> As a smaller example, I believe that writing stressed English vowels high in
> Shwa is a big improvement, despite the additional complexity : that showing
> stress helps us read, and that vowel height is a neat way to show it.  The
> gaits simply expand on that principle.

I agree.

> But the gaits can be evaluated separately from the rest of Shwa.

Yes. More generally, I would advise you to separate consideration/presentation of the script itself, including the gaits, from consideration of schemes for applying it to particular languages, with the latter being presented merely as illustrative suggestions about its possible implementations/applications. You want to present the script to the world in fully specified form, but not to issue prescriptions about it would be applied to any particular language.

--And.