>>Why Invent a New Form of Writing?
>
> What you're attempting has been attempted before in different
> variations.... some of the history and of some of the successes and
failures.
There have been many attempts and in particular Bell's Visible Writing and
Shavian refer to similar principles as CC, BUT they (like the alphabet,
Pitman's shorthand, and the IPA) use 'kabbalistic', inherently
'meaningless' symbols (the top tips to the left, or right...) to distingush
between sounds, whereas CC is 'decipherable' - each part of its visual code
refers to the composite of how the sound is formed: vowel or consonant,
('schematic') place of articulation, voiced or not, plosive or fricative,
or 'stretched' or 'rounded' (if vowel). It's true that these terms and
their 'meanings' must be learned (more difficult if one has already
learned that the 'sign': 'A', or 'a' or'@' (cursive...) represents the
vowel sound in the word 'at', or 'law, or 'date' or 'above'...).
And as for 'semantic cues' in similarly spelled words between languages
(brought up by Adam), I was thinking today how trying to 'assimilate' (is
that the word?) a meaning between "derive" in English and French - one
would be led astray!
But again, thanks for the reference.
JoAnne Marie, jmarie@filnet.fr
CV, Phonetics and Poetry on:
http://www.filnet.fr/perso/jmarie
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