Majuscules and minuscules

[Mark Mandel]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> Mark, questions, the first few serious:
>
> When you say you "know of one", does that mean you know of no more than one?

Only that one as far I can remember offhand.

AFAIK, the conventions of Shavian, apart from the alphabet itself,
are basically those of standard British English, with the "namer dot",
as it's called, to provide the information lost by not having upper
and lower case.

> Does "name" mean place or thing as well as person?

Yes, the namer dot is used for all proper names. If I can find my copy
of _Androcles and the Lion_ I'll check for non-personal names, but the
descriptions in Omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm)
and Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian) both say "proper
names".

> How does one know when a multi-word "name" ends, or is each word of
> it preceded by the centered dot? Â (And including words of a name,
> such as of a book, that would otherwise not be capitalized -- e.g.
> House of the Seven Gables?)

One doesn't know. You put a namer dot immediately (no space) before
the first letter of the name, but there's no indication of the end.
Example in transliteration (made up; "SPC" = space):

 p r @ f E s @ SPC NAMER-DOT h E n r I SPC h I g I n z SPC I z SPC @
SPC p r I g PERIOD

I.e., "Professor Henry Higgins is a prig." (With proper R-less
pronunciation of "Professor", of course.)

> Are book titles, etc. italicized?

I don't know, but I suspect so. IIRC, _Androcles_ uses italics for emphasis.

>             What is the equivalent of CMS or MLA for Shavian?

I don't know of any. I should add that I learned Shavian in my teens
and have never been heavily involved with it.

Mark

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