I have mentioned before that there are a few dozen people in this world whose hobby is transliterating public-domain documents like The Wizard of Oz into the Shavian alphabet. It occurred to me about a week ago that they are performing the transliteration of most of the words many times, and it ought to be possible for some kind of tool to automate this. It would further mean the creation of something useful which doesn’t currently exist: a free electronic pronouncing lexicon of British English.
So I present the Shavian Wiki. It’s an ordinary MediaWiki installation, but with the added quirk that any page whose name begins with “Document:” is transliterated on the fly by looking each word up in the wiki itself— so this turns into this. This is done with a custom extension which was trivial to write; I am much impressed at the flexibility of MediaWiki. (If you can’t see Shavian writing there, you will need to install a suitable font.)
And then of course you can dump the lexicon any time you like and you’ll have your own wiki-powered pronouncing dictionary.
I spent a few hours setting this up about a week ago, plus the occasional lunchbreak hacking here and there, and the members of the Shaw Alphabet Yahoo group descended on it and did the rest of the work: wiki power is an amazing thing.
There are now nearly 4,000 words in the lexicon and it’s growing fast. We’d welcome anyone who wants to join in, but you have to create an account to edit.
Also, here’s a relevant comic.
Gehh, it’s limited to english. I’m disappointed by the j and ch characters, those are obviously two different sounds, d-zh and t-sh, respectively.
Shaw missed that R, L, W, and Y are the long vowels while a, e, i, o, u, and oo (as in book) are the short ones, making ten in total. Even the people that try to think these things through miss the obvious. *sigh*
Note that a good language doesn’t have an alphabet. It has a chart.
I can’t type them in WordPress, but if you look at the shape of the letters for j and ch they’re actually ligatures of d-zh and t-sh.
Cool! I was thinking about doing something like this, but tagging each transliteration with the geographical location of the accent of the transliterator, so that people can read in their own accent (or a nearby one).
@ethana2
– Shavian was deliberately designed specifically for English. It’s not intended to be like the IPA.
– “church” and “judge”: different sounds, different characters.
– Shaw didn’t design the alphabet, but left money to support the idea.
– I don’t really understand your vowel complaint. Shavian can represent the short vowels, liquids and glides you mention just fine, along with several other vowel sounds and diphthongs present in English (as evidenced by their letter names).
Wouldn’t it make sense to download a suitable font directly into browsers that support it?
http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#feat=fontface
@dave:
Oo, that’s useful. It’ll be a bit of a nuisance to test, though, because it looks like the only browser that currently supports it is Safari, and the Mac can do Shavian out of the box anyway. I suppose I could switch it to an alternative Shavian font to test.