Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

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EchoesOfTheHorizon
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Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

I recently recalled a old book called Knyghthode and Bataile, a Tudor translation of a older text be Vegetius, who like many of the English here at the end times of their society, lived towards the end of the Western Roman Empire. He wrote a manual on revitalizing the Roman Army, based on older sources. It was a dry military manual, but by the times it reached a clever priest in the Turpdor era, it was changed into a poem to be sung, with all sorts of bizarre additions to it that Vegetius would of been absolutely confused about, including a scene of knights flying around on dragons.

When I first opened that book about ten years ago, I was in trouble, as I was overseas, and the only dictionary I had was a old Latin language primer (Wheelock 6th edition or something like that) and a glossary in the back of the old text.

I eventually found that while I couldn't read it, I could copy it for the most part, as the as the word wasn't too French or Latin, by merely trying to say it out loud, stretched out.... and I usually recognized the word, and wrote it down, and waited till the sentence came out to see if it was coherent or not.

End result.... I was able to read the stupid, impossible text.

Now.... fast foreward a decade, and I learned the Shaw Alphabet, can handle some Greek, certainly am not a linguist. I can't pronounce a single French word, I get nervous and upset when I hear someone switch from English to French.... it is a inhumane language, does brutal things to constants and vowels, the sort of stuff any decent person who believes in God wouldn't dare do. I don't like French, in the same way Anakin doesn't like sand. I can't begin to predict how to read it, or spell it. So screw French.

With the Shaw Alphabet.... it comes easily for me. Only good idea that George Bernard Shaw had, and it gives me the unique format to trash talk him and his Nazis/Nietzschean beliefs. He didn't develop it himself, wrote in his will he wanted English Language reform. I have two books written in this format, still adding content.

So my question is this:

If the English of Knyghthode and Bataile is fairly modern English, just spelled phonetically (I've played around with much earlier English works, and this method of sounding it out doesn't work in early cases) and I can now spell fairly accurately (I know I do, when I run it across a internet program, comes up the same for the most part, outside of differences in accent, which is expected and accepted) why can't I just as easily write in this Tudor style?

It is two phonetic styles of writing the same English. It is still around. My state has the oldest dialect of English still spoken (from Queen Elizabeth's reign) so it isn't that I am hopeless in hearing the special twang long since lost, I've heard that horrifying accent before, can largely understand it. I should be able to spell just like a Tudor.

How can spelling conventions be so different in phonetic spelling? I prefer phonetic English because my brain doesn't process the rules for Their, There, They're..... I've learned the rule about some, 5000 times, and it never sunk in. I tend to make a lot of mistakes, but the mistakes are phonetically correct. I know Plotinus and Wittgenstein couldn't spell to save their lives, and in Japan, men adopted the Kanji so they wouldn't have to write in either Alphabet script, was viewed as more masculine, which is whatever. Basically I just prefer writing in a fresh specialist language I can make many for the founding rules for. I consider Ampersand, &, a letter in the script for example, as it fulfills a requirement for the script.... just was the case prior to the Alphabet being established. I like it, even though only about like, 100 people will be able to read it.... but read it they certainly will. It be really great if I could write in Tudor era script as well, but the stuff still looks absolutely alien to me. I don't get how you can have two separate phonetic scripts for the same language, they produce the same sounds, but I can't use the one, but excel at the other. That is bizarre to me. Absolutely bizarre.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Right. Let's just stupid everything down for idiots. As a matter of fact English is phonetic. It's how children learn to read. As for words that are a bit 'difficult', that's what we have education for. And why we read books, and study history, and geography, and have ears. It's simply not possible to 'phoneticise' English to suit everyone, which is why Noah Webster's bigoted McDictionary was a miserable failure, and why Americans are such morons, and insist on butchering a beautiful language at every chance they get. Btw, why do American women all have permanently blocked nasal passages? I would really hate to see what a written language based on THEIR pronunciation would look like.
Last edited by vegetariantaxidermy on Tue Nov 28, 2017 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Eodnhoj7
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by Eodnhoj7 »

A very short and over simplified explanation would be that:

Language is perspective, all perspectives have their minute differences which separate them, and in turn it can be difficult to change perspective because of the minute differences.

A speck of dust can cause someone to go blind temporarily, and I believe language has this same problem of minuteness causing blindness.

The devil is in the details.
EchoesOfTheHorizon
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

Okay, VegetarianTaxidermy, English is clearly NOT phonetic, you clearly do not understand what phonetic means, or why so many attempted reforms of the English language have occurred.

A phonetic language is one that is spelled out exactly how it is written, and furthermore will usually have a Alphabet that exactly represents the sounds of the language.

In the Shaw Alphabet, especially the reformed Alphabet (they added some six additional letters to it after the first Shaw Alphabet was approved), most words are SHORTER or Equal than in the English we use on this forum, despite being the exact same language. Anything that sounds the same is spelled exactly the same way. You absolutely do not spell phonetically. You have proved you are too stupid to grasp what I said. In a truely phonetic Alphabet, spelling goes off of accent as well. My accent, being closer to proper English, would be spelled differently than how you would write it, and if you read something I wrote, it would be pronounced a bit differently.

It doesn't work the way you want it to work, it works the way it fucking does. I know, it is a bizarre concept, with shit not going your way, but that is the way of the general way of the universe, and perhaps someday you'll be wise enough to accept it. You don't have a say in what a phonetic language is, or how you know better, and can do it better, when you clearly don't know about it. You have a exceptional expertise in one area, staring at the wall while breathing out of your mouth.... just stick to what works, and let the other people who know things tackle the tougher issues of life.
EchoesOfTheHorizon
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

Eod,

I'm not sure how to apply the idea you expressed here to this. I don't believe the range of expressing English is infinite, and the sign system for each would have to overlap eventually. You can say there are many ways to pronounce a word, but not infinite, as eventually you are going to go so far off course that nobody will recognize the word you are pronouncing as belonging to it. You can make most any sign up you want, but if those signs say the same sound, then they are the same, just scribbled differently.

Shaw English isn't written in the same pattern as this English. It is similar to the older English text (I know it was originally by pseudo-Dionysius) of The Cloud Of Unknowing, but a bit older. That can be found floating around on the net. Very old fashioned spelling, but when pronounced, it comes out as modern English, for the most part. Might be better to call it modern English, and what we write today as something fossilized and antiquated, because a lot of the accepted spelling doesn't begin to match up with what is said. If it has a objective basis, it isn't jubjective, based in perspective. It is a methodology.

We have essentially two separate approaches to saying the same word, both equally valid, but focuses on different expression of what constitutes a sound, but the spoken result is largely the same. Obviously you can poke through the older spelling, and find absurdities that stand out when spoken out loud, but you can generally get by speaking it out loud.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

EchoesOfTheHorizon wrote: Tue Nov 28, 2017 8:28 pm Okay, VegetarianTaxidermy, English is clearly NOT phonetic, you clearly do not understand what phonetic means, or why so many attempted reforms of the English language have occurred.

A phonetic language is one that is spelled out exactly how it is written, and furthermore will usually have a Alphabet that exactly represents the sounds of the language.

In the Shaw Alphabet, especially the reformed Alphabet (they added some six additional letters to it after the first Shaw Alphabet was approved), most words are SHORTER or Equal than in the English we use on this forum, despite being the exact same language. Anything that sounds the same is spelled exactly the same way. You absolutely do not spell phonetically. You have proved you are too stupid to grasp what I said. In a truely phonetic Alphabet, spelling goes off of accent as well. My accent, being closer to proper English, would be spelled differently than how you would write it, and if you read something I wrote, it would be pronounced a bit differently.

It doesn't work the way you want it to work, it works the way it fucking does. I know, it is a bizarre concept, with shit not going your way, but that is the way of the general way of the universe, and perhaps someday you'll be wise enough to accept it. You don't have a say in what a phonetic language is, or how you know better, and can do it better, when you clearly don't know about it. You have a exceptional expertise in one area, staring at the wall while breathing out of your mouth.... just stick to what works, and let the other people who know things tackle the tougher issues of life.
Umm yes, it is. And you need to learn to read, dumb-fuck. You are nowhere near as clever as you think you are. I'm really not interested in reading your googled shit. I'm also not interested in giving an illiterate a lesson on English evolution and history. You are a fool, and that's about all there is to say about this.
Plato's Rock
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by Plato's Rock »

Man, I remember when I took British Lit. in college, and the prof. read a ye olde' English poem (I'm talking pre-Chaucer, and some Chaucer). Things got confusing, but really interesting fast. Being that it covered a little bit of the history in the class where the prof. talked about the angle-saxons..., and the jutes.... The language looked nothing like modern english (given), and the phonetics were/and are a bit different. The Great Vowel Shift, ring a bell?

It looked, and was closer to German back then. The fun part is a person (at least me) couldn't quite understand the verbal content, but the emotive content...wow. Got to remember the transition from Latin for the Educated, to the Vulgarite ...er, vulgar tongues of the common English, French, German...etc. And wasn't the King's English actually French during some of those eras?

If you're really interested in languages, and the like you should look up conlanging. And regarding conventions, they're really just fuzzy rules anyways. That and there's personal quirks that become homogenized/spread because of "memes". Think the Fonze, and "Eh...". From Happy Days. Cultural trends.
EchoesOfTheHorizon
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

I've looked into Middle and old English in the past, and I simply don't recognize the words being said in Old English. Enough books exist in the US translating it side by side text, if you really wanted to you could learn it, but I don't really want to.

I didn't learn to read until late, and had speech problems, due to a bad mother who didn't bother to teach me how to speak. When I did learn to read, it came in one massive instant burst (literally seconds) because I refused to believe swiggles on a piece of paper could be sound. Once it hit me, I was able to read at a advanced level instantly..... but never could spell correctly.... I failed every spelling test I had, and then a month or two later, I would spell the words correctly. I couldn't figure out what was going on, but the forced memorization that the State of California decided I needed did absolutely nothing for me, and I stopped looking at my special language books after a while, tired of them, being forced to take several extra classes a week.

End result as a adult looking back was, completely worthless. Never learned a damn thing, cause they didn't account for Ideo-Kenetic Apraxia. Just saying "talk like this" does nothing for a late learner, as they don't have the slightest idea how to do this. I didn't know anything about airflow and positioning the tongue. If you have problems with hearing it, a video of the tongue inside the mouth and throat is a better approach, I found a YouTube channel that does this:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCMk_WSPy3EE16aK5HLzCJzw

They do a silhouette of the tounge, throat, and lips in many videos. It be awesome if a app came out that would embed this mathematically in any online video so you can see the how behind what was being said. That would of worked far better as a kid for me to catch on.

When I uncharacteristically embraced Shaw Alphabet (was a idea by a genocidal Nietzschean) I did so as a method for figuring out how all words in English was spoken, by being able to read entire books by this method. Unfortunately, many older books appear to have a British accent, and I worry I might of adopted it in writing by accident, but I'll deal with the angry responses from Linguists trying to figure out how someone can have both a British and Pittsburg accent at the same time. It hasn't fully occurred to me yet how the accent in all cases differ in a written form.

I found Japanese very easy to grasp, way easier than French, as I could far more easily nail the sounds. Kanji does some crazy stuff though, and can't quite figure out what is going on. I had a much harder time learning Latin over Greek, which comes easier to me. I'm not trying to learn to speak either Latin or Koine, just want to read it. Can't still pull off a sentence with ease, but I've built up my vocabulary over the years, and the emphasis on copying texts down works better. Big difference between my copying techniques and what I was made to copy as a kid, the conscious focus is less on making a sound, and more on the fine printing, and concentration on the idea. It sits in my memory better. You can't print sound the same way.

I'm just always uncomfortable with the spoken language. I got rid of my speech impediment years ago, and can talk normal, and quite forcefully in a debate, but when it comes to foreign words, I get nervous. Very, very nervous. When I finally see a term spoken, I repeat it a few times. It doesn't come naturally at all. As a result, I'm a great consumer of media, and if I have to talk on any subject, I watch a bunch of videos on it.... not because I'm studying last second the topic, but for the speech pattern, the sounds. I'm always nervous it won't come out right. Other people have to stress out on notes and writing speeches, I never have to, comes out fairly good on my end, it is the pronunciation that matters for me.

It is so bad, ai used to go to small theater, just to see how people pronounced ideas.... sometimes the same play multiple times.... they think I'm a big fan of a play, and in the after party I get invited to, I'm thrown off by the sudden change of accents everyone has suddenly. I get a shocked and embarrassed expression on my face. Part of my brain is unwilling to accept this about actors, I get unnerved when I hear someone like Nicole Kidman switch her accent.

Had I had a better mother, perhaps this wouldn't of been a issue. Something early stage in development governs this, if you are late to nurture it, it remains retarded in growth years later. I can't even stand to hear my own voice. Thought about becoming a monk just so I could take a vow of silence. This area is the worst aspect of my thinking, where I am the weakest in. No amount of effort overturns it.
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

''I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,...................................................................''
EchoesOfTheHorizon
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

It isn't that hard to say Sorry to me Vegetarian, stop acting like it is so difficult.
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by Seleucus »

I'm not sure I totally get what this discussion is actually asking? There are no phonetically written natural languages, despite what some might say, because there are dialects and also ideolects which mean there is actually no true correct pronunciation or spelling possible of any word, instead there are allophones that pass, to at least some, for a sound, and standardized spellings. Hate to say it if someone was in love with the Shaw Alphabet but it's non-sense and useless: Western Canadians use only 14 vowel sounds, East Coast Americans 15 typically, UK Received Pronunciation uses 20, and some speakers of English dialects are into the mid-20s. You can add in trithongs too, stops and stuff like ambisyllabification and you're getting into the zone of 30 vowel sounds, all of which are allophones, but Shavian seems from a quick glance to use only 24. You'd be better off with the IPA, but still that is not reverse transcribable so at the end of the day language is not ultimately codable, although a digital recording might be said to be, but then it isn't writable or really readable either.
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

Naw, Shaw works great on a pragmatic level. In concrete applications, terrific. In attempts to make it albsolutely perfect, no, you'll have to switch over to some computer generated wavelength program. But it is certainly great for what I use it for.

My big difficulty is getting Koine words translated over into English for now, I know it can be done because I've seen it done with a Asian language, believe he went off the IPA.

It is also much easier than IPA for my other task, and that is preserving my dialect on written scrolls. It is a very uncomplicated script, quite shorter than standard English, allows me to write faster as a result. The scrolls I use in my final draft are near indestructible, compared to paper.... flame retardant, doesn't decay in moisture. By default, they will someday become amongst the oldest books humanity will have, I have set out with every intention of making them last that long.

This being said, I have no reason to believe Shaw Alphabet will become the new script of the English language. I'm afraid it will become so spall checked by computers, that normal English, especially the mainstream version, American English, will become the dominant spelling, and the language will fossilize. Ancient languages didn't have media on the scale like the Video broadcast or lyrics sung on radio, or electronic libraries, this will drag out a push for orthodoxy in speaking and writing. It runs the risk of surviving even in parts during future dark ages. The English language can in it's current form last a very, very long time.
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Re: Transliterating English Phonetically (a paradox)

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Funny. People used to manage the language really well. There was this thing called 'education'. I wonder what happened? Oh yes. The US became obsessed with stupiding everything down, turning its population into junk-food sodden, illiterate retards.
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