Language and Linguistics - Shaw

[Patrick, Peter L]

I think Barbara is right - GBS was, certainly for his day,
linguistically sophisticated.
 
He campaigned for a phonemic alphabet and even attempted to devise his
own - the Shavian alphabet (which however was actually implemented by
Kingsley Read, with a bequest from Shaw's will) has been incorporated
into Unicode, though I've never seen it used online except as a
curiosity. 
            http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/shavian.html 
Each symbol has a  name - some of them are wonderful - my favourites are
"Whoops", "Tsadey" and "Dep".
This was perhaps less of a crank project in his day than it now appears,
after many more spelling reformers have come and gone without affecting
common practice at all. The principle behind Shaw's approach (a phonetic
orthography which is visually distinct from the Roman alphabet) has
survived into some attempts to create standard orthographies for
newly-written languages, though I think they mostly now go the other
way. An obvious flaw of Shaw's system is that different spellings are
required for each accent of English...
 
Tolkien was another linguistically sophisticated writer...
            -peter-
 
Peter L Patrick
Dept. of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
UK
patrickp at essex.ac.uk
 
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu
[mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Lawless
Sent: 10 March 2008 14:09
To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
Subject: RE: [Linganth] Language and Linguistics
 
In the preface to Pygmalion Shaw states, "Higgins is not a portrait of 
Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been
impossible; 
still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play." At any 
rate, I'm not sure that writing about a linguist makes one a linguist.
Robert.
 
At 08:59 AM 3/10/2008, Barbara Johnstone wrote:
>G.B. Shaw?  Pygmalion, remember?  The Henry Higgins character was based
on
>Henry Sweet.
>
>
>_________________
>Barbara Johnstone
>Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics;
>Director of Graduate Studies
>Editor, Language in Society
>Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University
>Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 USA
>
>bj4 at andrew.cmu.edu
>412.268.6447 office phone/voicemail, 412.268.7989 fax
>http://english.cmu.edu/people/faculty/homepages/johnstone/default.html
>Pittsburgh Speech and Society: http://pittsburghspeech.com
>__________________________
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu [mailto:owner-
> > linganth at ats.rochester.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Lawless
> > Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 9:39 AM
> > To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
> > Subject: [Linganth] Language and Linguistics
> >
> > Were any of the great (or even not-so-great) literary giants of
English
> > linguistically sophisticated? Is it of any benefit to a writer to be
able
> > to articulate the structure and history of the language? Robert.
> >
> >
 
 
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