From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Nov 12 2003 - 16:49:55 EST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> 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).
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