Majuscules and minuscules

[Joel S. Berson]

Thanks, Mark, and especially for replying to my facetious
questions.  And forgive me for feeble humor below.  It's my way of
relieving the tension arising from reading second proofs of a journal
article of mine.

At 11/18/2009 08:53 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > Mark, questions, the first few serious:
>...
> > 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".

I wasn't sure whether "proper names" in Wikipedia = "proper nouns".


> > How does one know when a multi-word "name" ends, or is each word of
> > it preceded by the centered dot?  (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.

A deficiency that requires fixing.  I propose using a second namer
dot to end the proper noun word/phrase.  (This can be syntactically
processed in the same way that COBOL understands character strings
that are enclosed with the old, 7-bit ASCII double-quote mark.  That
character set did not have both opening double quote and closing
double quote.)  What ISO standardization committee for Shavian script
should I submit my proposal to?

>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 would italic for, for example, an already-slanted letter
like  /w/  or  /m/  look like?!


> >             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

Joel

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