Unicode Marches On
It is always good to keep up with Unicode so I found this post on Ken Arnold's blog of interest.
He refers to the newly encoded Shavian alphabet which is a system for writing English invented in memory of George Bernard Shaw. I have just bought an old copy of The Miraculous Birth of Language by R. A. Wilson of the University of Saskatchewan, (yes I have to put in this little plug for Canada) with a preface by G. B. Shaw, where he proposes the invention of a new script for English.
Since Shaw wrote this preface in 1941, it is understandable that he included this comment which I rather like,
More about Shaw and the Shavian alphabet later.
He refers to the newly encoded Shavian alphabet which is a system for writing English invented in memory of George Bernard Shaw. I have just bought an old copy of The Miraculous Birth of Language by R. A. Wilson of the University of Saskatchewan, (yes I have to put in this little plug for Canada) with a preface by G. B. Shaw, where he proposes the invention of a new script for English.
Since Shaw wrote this preface in 1941, it is understandable that he included this comment which I rather like,
I found myself considering seriously, especially when
the German airmen dropped a bomb near enough to
shake my house, whether I had better not end my
days in Vancouver, if not Saskatoon.
More about Shaw and the Shavian alphabet later.
posted by Suzanne McCarthy at 1:57 PM
2 Comments:
I actually have a copy of The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Androcles and the Lion (Penguin, 1962), whose publication was required by the terms of Shaw's will. It's always amazed me that extremely intelligent men such as Shaw could be stupid enough to think their invented alphabets had a chance of replacing the one English is written in. Ah, humanity!
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,—
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
Suzanne, you may already be familiar with SIL's NRSI (Non-Roman Script Initiative) and its collaborative efforts with the Unicode consortium (or whatever it is call). Just in case you are not, here is a url from which you can do some rooting around:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=TypeDesignResources
BTW, thanks for answering my question on my blog about how you have gotten Greek characters to display within standard English plain text.
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