But Shaw not only wanted spelling reform, he wanted to replace the "ugly" Roman alphabet with a far more attractive one of his own invention, what's now termed the Shavian Alphabet with its very own Unicode glyph space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

and providing even more work for typewriter makers, except they don't actually make typewriters any more, do they?

It was also designed to be quicker to write, forming a type of shorthand, and the man who actually created it went on to turn it into a fullfledged shorthand he called Quickscript.

Cheers,

Puddin'

>> And if one is going to do it then I think it should be done properly. A sprinkling of 'nobbuts'...

My own original recommendation was to describe a speaker and comment accurately on their accent, not with a "sprinkling" of anything, but no *more* than one or two indications (if one had an itch that just *had* to be scratched), and then stop, full stop.

But "properly" narrows the field down to native speakers and intimate associates, which is perfectly reasonable.

In that sense, Twain's use of "slave" dialect was moderately sensible, for his times, since he was familiar with it, had grown up hearing it spoken, and had the great advantage of referring to a powerless and oppressed group of people, but he couldn't possibly get away with it now.

The people his audience thought were "funny," or "quaint," have considerable power now, and can be dangerous when mocked, or when they feel they're being mocked. Like all groups of people, some are belligerent, some are violent, when "disrespected," and some stop buying the products of sponsors or enablers of this sort of speech, all of which are powerful disincentives to avoid it.

I rather like Twain, myself; many of his political opinions agree with mine, especially his views on warfare, which were quite enlightened for his time, but know well that "white" speakers can't use his dialectal "humour" around "persons of colour" in the USA without risking general condemnation -- perhaps even physical danger -- even if one tries to excuse it as "authentic," or "historical accuracy."

In some areas, this is not a matter of "artistic license," or a "mere quotation," but life and death, and poison if found in any manuscript submitted to an editor not intimately associated with StormFront or one of the many Christian Identity Movements in the USA.

If anyone has seen the charming Hal Holbrook monologue, Mark Twain Tonight!, one might notice that his dialectical stories are absent from it, unless they lampoon Western white men. There's a good reason for that.

The usages I object to, really, are those layered on like stucco over a botched job of carpentry, as in the Charlie Chan movies I mentioned earlier, where a faux "Chinesey" (to rhyme with "cheesey") accent is slapped over bad dialogue to make him sound "exotic."

If you grew up in Edinburgh, though, or have spent considerable time there and have a very good ear, more power to you if you want to write a novel such as Trainspotting:

>>>> It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth.

If you're familar enough with the accent that you can fill in the *music* of it, the *flavour* of the vowels, so much the better, but not completely necessary in this particular case; you can always see the film on DVD.

That novel couldn't have been written, wouldn't have the same raw power, would have, in fact, been profoundly silly, if it were written in Standard English.

But if you grew up in Edinburgh, and want to write a novel about the Texas Rangers, you'd best go to Texas and listen very carefully to how they *really* talk before setting pen to paper, or fingers to keys. A few "Howdy, pardners" is not enough, and probably too many, although one can usually capture the "mid-Atlantic" speech of many executives who spend time in both the USA (or Canada) and the UK well enough to pass as real. What one *can* do, and get away with it, is to describe characters as "speaking with an East Texas accent," and then toss in what might be an ironic "Howdy" on the part of a character who knows well enough how to talk in "proper" English but might still "show the Texas flag" from time to time.

In my own experience, I've seen rather more works making a vile hash of "dialect" than using it with what seemed like affectionate engagement, at least in my opinion, and it's dangerous in the hands of writers who aren't yet completely familiar with their *own* voice, and the voices of their immediate neighbours, yet want to stray off into the woods on a search for magic mushrooms.

Cheers,

Puddin'
-----------------
The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.
--- Martin Henderson, on "losing" his New Zealand accent when he moved to Los Angeles.

We arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with big name stars, but I had to drop the idea. I wanted to film in the local Soweto dialect that only Soweto youth can speak and believed that shooting in any other language would dilute the impact of the film.
--- Gavin Hood, on his film, Soweto, many of whose characters spoke tsotsitaal (the "street" language of Soweto).

>> astounding comment: 'We don't learn to read as adults by puzzling out letters, but by the overall shape of the words',

Perhaps the shape of that sentence was confusing. As presumably literate adults, we read most words as gestalts, and the order of the interior letters is relatively unimportant. While this may be astonishing when you see it happen, it's a commonplace of human perception.

And a lucky thing, too, or no one would *ever* be able to learn to read Chinese, or to decipher badly-formed Chinese glyphs, which have a complex structure and must be grasped as gestalts, although they can also be stepwise deconstructed if one wants to look up a particular character in a dictionary, or arrange them in particular orders.

Children learn the characters by rote, and are taught any of several systems of deconstruction so as to make them capable of learning new characters on their own through dictionary access, or to enable typing a character on a keyboard through a stepwise process which eventually resolves into a pick list.

With exceptions, since some characters contain glyphs that *may*, but sometimes don't, give a hint as to pronunciation, there is no way to "sound out" a Chinese character, as one can most English words, by examining individual parts. One looks them up, learns them by rote based on various forms of sound representation, which may include the use of rhyming chracters so simple that one is presumed to know them already, or phonetic bits, more or less like English letters, and in some circles any of various "romanisations" that make life easier for Western students.

I *did* offer a hint to what that troublesome sentence meant when I referred to being reduced to puzzling out words like children sometime later, but I probably assumed too much, since this has been a study of mine for many years, and forget sometimes how strange it all is when one stumbles across it out of any context or connection to one's own life and experience. I apologise.

But you can see the phenomenon in operation when you try to "proofread" a text. We have to slow down drastically, half our normal reading speed or less, and even then *many* errors will be utterly invisible until someone else points them out. On old-fashioned newspapers, proofreaders often "proofed" with the page placed upside down, a practice precisely designed to destroy the "normal" shape of words and make it easier to see their component parts.

>> Could i ask if replacing the horse and cart with a car...

Well, yes, in a way. There are many who deeply regret the frantic pace of modern life, the crowding, the lack of intimate community, first made possible by automobiles and then forced upon us by huge cities. Hardly any of us today have a "neighbourhood" in the same sense we might have had two hundred years ago, when an adult might spend their entire lives in the space of a very few square miles, within which boundary one knew everyone, every rock and tree, and one's permanent place in the world.

One can hardly argue that that *small* sort of world, that stone's-throw culture, hasn't been utterly destroyed for most of us, who may know people all around the Earth, who may be modestly fluent in two or more languages, whose "immediate neighbourhood" might be a hundred miles in diameter, whose family ties might stretch over thousands of miles, and who cannot readily grasp the immensity within casual reach.

Socrates was horrified by literacy, because he thought that it would lead to the degeneration of human powers of memory and reasoning, would make people lazy, since they could simply write things down and never take the trouble to actually *learn* anything, or puzzle out difficult problems -- thereby anticipating Cliffnotes and flashcards -- and eventually destroy civilisation.

Of course, it didn't, but he was right to be worried, since literacy has made us qualitatively *different* to the humanity Socrates was familar with, creating -- during childhood learning of reading skills -- brand new structures within our brains that enable us to grasp written words in mere milliseconds, far more quickly than we can hear or say them, and through these new brain structures to form associations and spark new thoughts at a rate Socrates could never dream of. We *perceive* the world differently these days, assuming we are literate, so we literally *know* things that Socrates could never imagine, not due to trivial things like science and technology, but through the development of the most revolutionary technology in human history, the written word.

Socrates lived in what to us would be slow motion, limited by the speed at which humans could articulate sounds in a strict one-dimensional and linear stream, able to grasp easily only those puzzles which could be described step by step. The syllogism is the quintessential oral paradigm, a linear list of things put in strict order, leading to a single conclusion.

Relational databases, object databases, multidimensional by their very nature, were first made possible by literacy, from which sprang immense complexity. The simplest example of an extended multidimensional paradigm is probably the crossword puzzle, completely different words and concepts sparking ideas that dart off in new directions, creating the possibility of many meaningful patterns within what looks at first glance like chaos. Crossword puzzles are impossible to contemplate in an illiterate society, and most of what passes for modern science and technology as well.

We're all of us *faster* than Socrates could ever be. In English, we can reliably understand words at up to 150–160 words per minute, but most of us, unless very fluent indeed, can't speak reliably at half that rate, and must pause, stammer, introduce "ums" and other stalling sounds to allow us time to gather our thoughts, or at least put them into coherent form. But looking at words makes multiple connections in our brains, and those connections can spark new thoughts that connect to other words, using new "hardware" that allows us to manipulate these words as quick as our new tools of thought, the internal mirrors of external words, a sort of mental "sliderule" which allows us to create new solutions by aligning, twisting, rearranging words to form new non-linear patterns. Most of us can read, or learn to read, much more quickly than we can speak or hear, 400-800 words per minute is fairly common, and we can "scan" for information much faster than that, running rapidly through many thousands of words per minute looking for clues or ideas.

In Socrates time, a human being with sufficient leisure might expect to be able to learn everything there was to know, because the processing speed of oral transmission limited the accumulation of knowledge beyond what a reasonably-sized group of scholars could hear and commit to memory in a single lifetime. When people died, *someone* had to start over again or that knowledge went into the bit bucket, lost in entropy.

These days, we can carry Socrates around in our cellphone memory store, and with an added chip might add a modest library. With access to the net, we add the possibility of having access to almost *everything* in something we can hold within one hand. We can access this huge compendium of knowledge, moderately close to the sum total of human experience, at random, or with a particular strategy, because we know how to read.

Cheers,

Puddin'