Comment on ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯: Come and learn the Shavian alphabet
hallettj@leminal.space 5 days agoI’m not an organizer for this community. But I also find the Quikscript literature compelling. Although an advantage of Shavian is that it has an established Unicode assignment, and corresponding fonts are in circulation. For example Shavian text renders correctly for me running the Thunder Lemmy client on Android without any special setup.
The main criticism I’ve read of Shavian comes down to accommodating dialect differences. How you write "R"s and vowels is particularly issuous. You kinda have to pick a dialect as the one to canonicalize in spelling. But I think that applies to all phonetic alphabets - unless someone has come up with some very clever system of per-dialect glyph interpretation rules that I’m not aware of.
_Nico198X_@europe.pub 5 days ago
right, i think the intent is to simply write it like you say it, even if it is different dialect. so the spellings won’t match, but they aren’t meant to. in this way they will more accurately convey what is being said.
i hear you on the unicode support, and communities online seem good. there’s also an Esperanto variant of Shavian which is cool.
i may start with Shavian, and maybe do some quikscript for more artistic fun since it’s also geared for writing cursive.
_Nico198X_@europe.pub 2 days ago
i wanted to revisit this after spending more time with Shavian and Quikscript.
while i was initially more favorable to Quikscript as the “latest improved revision,” i’ve actually come to prefer Shavian overall in the end. this is due to the following:
I find an elegance to the way the Shavian alphabet uses mirroring for similar sounds. At first I was concerned it would be confusing, but with more practice I find it helpful because it narrows down the sound range I should be thinking of. Much of this is lost in Quikscript due to prioritizing different goals for handwriting flow.
Quikscript indeed is primarily about handwriting flow. This is not an issue in an age of computers, and even when writing i’m perfectly happy with Shavian “print” as opposed to a cursive Quikscript.
Quikscript has many more unique characters and alt-characters to facilitate cursive flow. That means many more unique symbols and rules to memorize.
At the end, it’s the elegant simplicity of Shavian that i’ve come to value the most.