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Joining letters via "steps" + question about example passage

Peter
 

Hi all,

Just found out about QS about a week ago and I've been diving in enthusiastically ever since. Also excited to be using an email group for the first time. For now I have two questions:

1) In the manual, page 14, Read described "steps" joining half-letters to other letters. I have "invented" some particular step combinations that I didn't see in the manual and I wonder if they would be confusing to readers – image below. I know there will be some amount of handwriting variation in QS like in Orthodox script, but wanted to run these by the group anyway. (The "till" and "win" examples are from that same page in the manual. I wrote these with my mouse to avoid a poorly-lit photo of paper.)


2) The example paragraph "gown shop" on page 23 of the manual has a couple words which I'm struggling with. I've called them out in the below image. I presume from context that the first, They-May, is "them" but abbreviated in a way that I didn't see in the standard contractions (page 17). Similarly I presume that the second, Why-Et-Vie-Utter-Roe, is "whatever" abbreviated differently than the manual's Why-Vie. The third one, though, has me stumped. I read it as Out-Zoo but can't figure out what word that's supposed to be.



For the record, here's my attempt to transcribe the entire paragraph:
It is a pity that she wasn't with them(?) that time. She would have seen which styles were on show here as well, and whatever(?) (Out-Zoo?) were any good. She has had one gown from us before. There will be many more new things in soon. She's such an old friend: shall you be bringing her along to see me and my little show?

Thanks,
Peter

Brad Neil
 
Edited

Hi Peter and welcome!

It's pleasing to see your enthusiasm. You seem to be getting into Senior QS pretty quickly; it took me longer than a week to start reading it if I remember correctly!

1) I, find those steps quite readable; I even do the same thing with Way+Eat myself. The Manual does contain at least one half-Tea written upwards, in the words 'about' (eg. p16; p25 in the Travels with a Donkey paragraph) and 'out' (eg. p25, in the On Drake excerpt).

2) I agree that They-May is an unlisted contraction for 'them'. It makes the most sense to me that your second mystery word is 'whether', and the writer accidentally wrote Vie instead of They. The third word is 'ours', with the Roe accidentally omitted (I never even thought twice about that one, probably because that's exactly how I pronounce 'ours' in my accent). Otherwise, I completely agree with that transliteration.

Do check out these materials, if you haven't already, when you feel like additional reading practice:
Quikscript Outpost - Projects - Library (neocities.org)
adiabatic/qs-literature: Classic literature adapted into Quikscript. (github.com) 
Resources | FriedOrange’s Quikscript Pages

At this rate, you will be as much of a Quikscript expert as anyone by next week :-)

Peter
 

Thanks Brad for the welcome and the responses! There are people who have been practicing QS for longer than I've been alive, so it would take a lot of effort for me to catch up, but I'm excited to try. :)

I recently learned Hangeul (the Korean writing system) but without learning the Korean language itself, meaning that I've only been using it to write "Hangeulized English" and reckoning with all the associated phonetic difficulties. So it's nice to be learning a writing system for a language I actually know – although I, with my US West Coast accent, am still reckoning with the Ah-Awe-Ox distinctions!

Thanks for the links, I look forward to checking them out.

Nathan Galt
 

Hello and welcome!

For (1), I'd caution against ligating between ·it and ·pea. I generally think of the top tip (pointed downwards) of ·pea as well above the Quikscript equivalent of the x-height (where consecutive ·no letters join), and Read cautions against ligating across these boundaries and recommends a pen lift instead.

Flip the two, and ·pea·it ligation is well attested to: see "Epping" near the bottom of page 18 in The Manual.

Pace Brad Neil, the "out" (·out·tea) ligature seems like a unique design that I wouldn't generalize from.

For ·pea·tea…

What you've written looks like a fine detail that could be difficult to read back clearly if you've been writing it in haste, or at least if I were writing it in haste. If you ditch the small horizontal line, you might miss the ·tea part.

When learning Senior it's very tempting to ligate wherever possible. I'm still not 100% myself, and there are places where I read back and think "oh, if I'd have just flipped this ·no around, I could've saved two penlifts". It takes a bit of a mental inversion to step back from this impulse.

At any rate, I'd write "script" in four chunks (with three penlifts):
  • ·see·key·roe
  • ·it
  • ·pea
  • ·tea

Hope this helps,
    Nathan


On Tue, Sep 6, 2022, at 9:59 PM, Peter wrote:
Hi all,

Just found out about QS about a week ago and I've been diving in enthusiastically ever since. Also excited to be using an email group for the first time. For now I have two questions:

1) In the manual, page 14, Read described "steps" joining half-letters to other letters. I have "invented" some particular step combinations that I didn't see in the manual and I wonder if they would be confusing to readers – image below. I know there will be some amount of handwriting variation in QS like in Orthodox script, but wanted to run these by the group anyway. (The "till" and "win" examples are from that same page in the manual. I wrote these with my mouse to avoid a poorly-lit photo of paper.)


2) The example paragraph "gown shop" on page 23 of the manual has a couple words which I'm struggling with. I've called them out in the below image. I presume from context that the first, They-May, is "them" but abbreviated in a way that I didn't see in the standard contractions (page 17). Similarly I presume that the second, Why-Et-Vie-Utter-Roe, is "whatever" abbreviated differently than the manual's Why-Vie. The third one, though, has me stumped. I read it as Out-Zoo but can't figure out what word that's supposed to be.



For the record, here's my attempt to transcribe the entire paragraph:
It is a pity that she wasn't with them(?) that time. She would have seen which styles were on show here as well, and whatever(?) (Out-Zoo?) were any good. She has had one gown from us before. There will be many more new things in soon. She's such an old friend: shall you be bringing her along to see me and my little show?

Thanks,
Peter

Nathan Galt
 

Brother!

Here's what I've noticed, having the same handicap:

  • It's most likely ·ox.
  • If it's right before a ·low, it's probably ·awe.
  • Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2022, at 10:10 AM, Peter wrote:
although I, with my US West Coast accent, am still reckoning with the Ah-Awe-Ox distinctions!

Peter
 

Nathan, thanks for your responses!

I appreciate you calling it the "x-height" – I'm a designer and type lover, so I call it that internally too. Having said that, the Pea letters that I see in the manual and in a couple fonts all seem to have the hook reaching the x-height. In that case, joining It-Pea seems to make as much sense as joining Pea-It.

However, I do agree that my Pea-Tea could get lost if written quickly. So far I'm still writing quite slowly, but it makes sense for me to not make a habit out of that particular join, to maintain better legibility moving forward.

Here's what I've noticed, having the same handicap:
 
  • It's most likely ·ox.
  • If it's right before a ·low, it's probably ·awe.
  • Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.

Could you elaborate on your reasonings for the above? I've seen conflicting advice and it might help me to hear more about your perspective.

For one: Awe before Low makes sense in my mind for "bowl," "toll," "goal," and "role" – but for words like "ball" and "crawl," a preceding Ah or Ox seems to make more sense. (Maybe "Ox" if I'm to believe the IPA equivalents shown by the Configuratronic Quikscript Cheat Sheet – but then, I don't know whose authority that cheat sheet is based on.)

For another: "after" beginning with Ah is just completely unlike my pronunciation. I realize there's a middle ground between writing as one speaks and writing in a standardized way – the manual itself seems to argue for both at different points, and I've seen a fair share of back-and-forth in this group when I looked at older posts – but writing "after" with Ah instead of my pronounced At seems like an unnecessary concession.

At the end of the day it's all moot if I'm only writing for myself – although sharing with others, and having it be easily read, would be nice. But my natural tendency is to want to get everything correct out of the gate, and the more I study QS, the more complications and ambiguities seem to appear! Just a small frustration from an otherwise very exciting and fun pursuit.

Again, thanks for your help and the welcome.

Benjamin Bruce
 

Just thought I'd chime in here as a fellow American English speaker. Whenever I have a doubt about how to spell a word in QS, I check it on the online Shavian dictionary at https://iykury.xyz/webtoys/readlex/

There are a couple of minor differences between the sets of phonemes that Shavian and QS represent, but as far as the Ox/Awe/Ah distinctions, it's the same.

Benjamin Bruce

On 9/7/22 21:28, Peter wrote:
Nathan, thanks for your responses!
I appreciate you calling it the "x-height" – I'm a designer and type lover, so I call it that internally too. Having said that, the Pea letters that I see in the manual and in a couple fonts all seem to have the hook reaching the x-height. In that case, joining It-Pea seems to make as much sense as joining Pea-It.
However, I do agree that my Pea-Tea could get lost if written quickly. So far I'm still writing quite slowly, but it makes sense for me to not make a habit out of that particular join, to maintain better legibility moving forward.
Here's what I've noticed, having the same handicap:
* It's most likely ·ox.
* If it's right before a ·low, it's probably ·awe.
* Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.
Could you elaborate on your reasonings for the above? I've seen conflicting advice and it might help me to hear more about your perspective.
For one: Awe before Low makes sense in my mind for "bowl," "toll," "goal," and "role" – but for words like "ball" and "crawl," a preceding Ah or Ox seems to make more sense. (Maybe "Ox" if I'm to believe the IPA equivalents shown by the Configuratronic Quikscript Cheat Sheet – but then, I don't know whose authority that cheat sheet is based on.)
For another: "after" beginning with Ah is just completely unlike my pronunciation. I realize there's a middle ground between writing as one speaks and writing in a standardized way – the manual itself seems to argue for both at different points, and I've seen a fair share of back-and-forth in this group when I looked at older posts – but writing "after" with Ah instead of my pronounced At seems like an unnecessary concession.
At the end of the day it's all moot if I'm only writing for myself – although sharing with others, and having it be easily read, would be nice. But my natural tendency is to want to get everything correct out of the gate, and the more I study QS, the more complications and ambiguities seem to appear! Just a small frustration from an otherwise very exciting and fun pursuit.
Again, thanks for your help and the welcome.

Brad Neil
 

the "out" (·out·tea) ligature seems like a unique design that I wouldn't generalize from
This is true. I was really just trying to draw a parallel or suggest that a Pea-Tea join might not be totally insane. I do agree that it's probably not the best idea to write it that way, though, and I'm inclined to think writing Pea+Tea in full is quicker anyway since those two 90-degree turns are quite slow and difficult to achieve in practice. (Peter: the Manual touches on that last idea, near the bottom of page 13)
At any rate, I'd write "script" in four chunks (with three penlifts):
Same here.

Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.
Why? The manual itself spells "after" with ·At (p25, line 6 of the On Drake paragraph). I can't remember where I read it, but I could swear I saw advice somewhere that said to use ·At in words like past, class, after, photograph, etc. This is what I have been doing, even though I pronounce such words with the long "ah" vowel. The long-ah sound in words like that is really unique to southern England and dialects originating there.

Along the same lines is using ·Roe everywhere R occurs in conventional spelling, which is another thing that actually disagrees with my pronunciation, but makes for a much better 'standard' spelling that makes sense to as many people as possible. The idea is to iron out local or individual quirks which might throw off others, especially the majority. 

With that said, variant Quikscript spellings for some words are inevitable. Just a couple of examples I can think of: America has sug-JEST for suggest and lab-ra-TOR-y for laboratory, compared to su-JEST and la-BOH-ra-t'ry elsewhere. Even within the same country, people have different pronunciations for azure, controversy, scenic, and so on. I think this kind of one-off discrepancy just needs to be accepted in Quikscript spellings -- there's no one right way to speak, after all.
Awe before Low makes sense in my mind for "bowl," "toll," "goal," and "role" – but for words like "ball" and "crawl," a preceding Ah or Ox seems to make more sense.
As an Australian, my speech contains neither the cot-caught merger nor the father-bother merger (or balm-bomb, to pick two words that might become identical for those who have it). It might be a double-edged sword, as it also means I don't know what it's like to have those mergers -- so it is hard to come up with useful advice. But in any case, ·Ah, ·Awe and ·Ox represent clearly distinct sounds for me, so I might be able to provide some insight here:
  • Bowl, toll, goal and role are spelt with ·Oak, not ·Awe.
  • ·Awe would be correctly used in ball, tall, crawl and gall; definitely don't use ·Ox for those.
  • ·Awe also appears in words like author, caught, jaw, broad, floor, pour, ought, or and extraordinary. Notice the patterns here: au, aw, ough*, or**. Yes, those words all have exactly the same vowel sound for folks like me. Maybe you can think of the sound of this letter changing when followed by ·Roe, as is already the case for ·Eight and ·Utter.
  • ·Ox usually corresponds with the letter O in conventional spelling (when not followed by a single R**), as well as the letter A when preceded by a W-sound (as in wand, what, quash, etc.). 
  • As Nathan kind of implied, the letter ·Ah itself actually isn't used very often in theory, but I recommend it for anyone in doubt here as it is actually closest to the sound of all three in America. Phonemic spelling is supposed to be easier and make more sense, after all.
*The "ough" rule is not perfect, though, as cough uses ·Ox instead of ·Awe.... it's all too complicated!
**The combination orr usually corresponds with ·Ox+·Roe, as in sorry (although a Canadian pronunciation of sorry would use ·Awe+·Roe). This is in keeping with the general rule in English that doubled consonants follow short vowels and single consonants follow long vowels. But again, perhaps this is all complicating things a bit too much.
Finally, I provide a cheat-sheet with Quikscript-conventional spelling correspondences which contains those examples along with all the other letters: http://friedorange.xyz/quikscript/files/QSAlphabetExamples.pdf

Here is the (attempt at) advice on these three problem letters that I have on my website: Many North American speakers have trouble distinguishing ·Ah, ·Awe, and ·Ox. If this applies to you, just remember to use ·Awe+·Roe in words like or, court, board, war and ·Ah in are, palm, father, heart. Strictly speaking, ·Awe is used for awe, all, caught, bought, and ·Ox for the “short o” sound in cot, wand, ensemble; but don’t worry if you can’t hear the difference. If in doubt, use ·Ah, as it is the vowel usually spoken in America. ·Ox and ·Awe are jarring to read when used incorrectly.

At the end of the day it's all moot if I'm only writing for myself – although sharing with others, and having it be easily read, would be nice.
100%. Obviously, Quikscript is not in general use and what we write in it will most likely not be read by anyone else. Indeed, I have yet to actually correspond with anyone using it beyond a couple of sentences. But it's a good idea to follow all the best practices in case that should ever happen!
the more I study QS, the more complications and ambiguities seem to appear! Just a small frustration from an otherwise very exciting and fun pursuit.
That perfectly describes my first few weeks learning QS, too. And that's coming from someone whose accent has a very similar distribution of sounds to RP, the British prestige dialect, which is often assumed to be an advantage. The fact is, we all have differences in our speech which we usually don't notice until times like this. Not to mention, cultivating a sense of phonological awareness in the first place; I had never even considered the difference between the voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds (i.e. ·Thaw and ·They) before properly diving down the phonemic spelling rabbit hole, which led to me discovering QS.

Whenever I have a doubt about how to spell a word in QS, I check it on the online Shavian dictionary at https://iykury.xyz/webtoys/readlex/
That is a fantastic resource, thanks for the link! I never knew that existed. When I'm unsure, I have been looking it up in a dictionary since the pronunciation is given there in the IPA. If you Google "define [word]" that will also give a dictionary definition, complete with pronunciation guide.

Peter
 

Benjamin: Thanks for the link to that Shavian dictionary – I've already found it useful today. (Like for the word "endure" – I don't think I even have a consistent pronunciation of it in my own speech!)

Brad: I appreciate your thorough response. I'll do my best to learn the nuances of those vowels so I can honor the American end of the compromise – until somebody makes an offshoot of Quikscript specifically for my accent. ;) By the way, I find it interesting that you arrived at Quikscript via the phonemic spelling train of thought, because it seems much more natural than how I got here. Checking my browser history from last week, it turns out I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the interpunct (just out of general typographic curiosity), saw a mention of Shavian script using it as a "name dot," and eventually found my way here!

Nathan Galt
 



On Wed, Sep 7, 2022, at 7:28 PM, Peter wrote:

Here's what I've noticed, having the same handicap:
 
  • It's most likely ·ox.
  • If it's right before a ·low, it's probably ·awe.
  • Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.

Could you elaborate on your reasonings for the above? I've seen conflicting advice and it might help me to hear more about your perspective.

For one: Awe before Low makes sense in my mind for "bowl," "toll," "goal," and "role" – but for words like "ball" and "crawl," a preceding Ah or Ox seems to make more sense. (Maybe "Ox" if I'm to believe the IPA equivalents shown by the Configuratronic Quikscript Cheat Sheet – but then, I don't know whose authority that cheat sheet is based on.)

My go-to dictionary is https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/british/sure_1 (in the tiny text at the bottom there's an option to make it default to British English). I used to haul out Longman's Pronunciation Dictionary, but someone here whom I trust said this was just as good, and so I opted for the electronic version.

For another: "after" beginning with Ah is just completely unlike my pronunciation. I realize there's a middle ground between writing as one speaks and writing in a standardized way – the manual itself seems to argue for both at different points, and I've seen a fair share of back-and-forth in this group when I looked at older posts – but writing "after" with Ah instead of my pronounced At seems like an unnecessary concession.

Ditto.

Since I'm a medium-sized deal in the Quikscript world, I do what I can to make sure that I'm accurately recreating midcentury Received Pronunciation with the Rs all spelled out. Not having to untangle someone else's pronunciation before you can understand him is a boon to communication, and "everyone approximate midcentury RP with the Rs spelled out" is a much more tractable solution than "everyone learn everyone else's accent". This discussion has been hashed out quite a bit previously on this list, if you're willing to do some archive diving.

That said, my advice to you is this: While approximating RP will make your writing flow better (·awe·low has no penlifts;  ·ah·low has one), trying to copy the speech of the The Stanley Parable narrator is more trouble than it's worth.

At the end of the day it's all moot if I'm only writing for myself – although sharing with others, and having it be easily read, would be nice. But my natural tendency is to want to get everything correct out of the gate, and the more I study QS, the more complications and ambiguities seem to appear! Just a small frustration from an otherwise very exciting and fun pursuit.

Yup, totally agreed. I do not enjoy having to keep a pronunciation dictionary handy in order to scribble in my diary.

— Nathan

Nathan Galt
 

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022, at 1:54 AM, Brad Neil via groups.io wrote:
Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.
Why? The manual itself spells "after" with ·At (p25, line 6 of the On Drake paragraph). I can't remember where I read it, but I could swear I saw advice somewhere that said to use ·At in words like past, class, after, photograph, etc. This is what I have been doing, even though I pronounce such words with the long "ah" vowel. The long-ah sound in words like that is really unique to southern England and dialects originating there.

Because https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/british/after_1 has /ˈɑːftə(r)/ as its only listed pronunciation and Macmillan came highly recommended for this sort of thing.

Macmillan might be imperfect for this sort of thing, or worse.

At any rate, Macmillan says to use /ɑ/ (·ah) for all of these, whereas I say them as /æ/ (·at) in my idiolect of Californian English.

Along the same lines is using ·Roe everywhere R occurs in conventional spelling, which is another thing that actually disagrees with my pronunciation, but makes for a much better 'standard' spelling that makes sense to as many people as possible. The idea is to iron out local or individual quirks which might throw off others, especially the majority. 

Right. The "spell all Rs" rule is very obviously a concession to people like me who'd be lost at sea with nonrhotic spellings.

With that said, variant Quikscript spellings for some words are inevitable. Just a couple of examples I can think of: America has sug-JEST for suggest and lab-ra-TOR-y for laboratory, compared to su-JEST and la-BOH-ra-t'ry elsewhere. Even within the same country, people have different pronunciations for azure, controversy, scenic, and so on. I think this kind of one-off discrepancy just needs to be accepted in Quikscript spellings -- there's no one right way to speak, after all.

This appears to assume that Quikscript spelling variation ought to mirror pronunciation variation. There is definitely a good case for this. However, elsewhere in this thread and previously on this list, I've disagreed on mutual-intelligibility-across-time-and-space grounds. While I'm unconvinced all spelling variation can be eliminated, I think it ought to be minimized where possible.

Nathan Galt
 



On Wed, Sep 7, 2022, at 7:28 PM, Peter wrote:
Nathan, thanks for your responses!

I appreciate you calling it the "x-height" – I'm a designer and type lover, so I call it that internally too. Having said that, the Pea letters that I see in the manual and in a couple fonts all seem to have the hook reaching the x-height. In that case, joining It-Pea seems to make as much sense as joining Pea-It.

However, I do agree that my Pea-Tea could get lost if written quickly. So far I'm still writing quite slowly, but it makes sense for me to not make a habit out of that particular join, to maintain better legibility moving forward.


Here's what I've noticed, having the same handicap:
 
  • It's most likely ·ox.
  • If it's right before a ·low, it's probably ·awe.
  • Get used to spelling "after" with a leading ·ah.

Could you elaborate on your reasonings for the above? I've seen conflicting advice and it might help me to hear more about your perspective.

I remember looking at a frequency chart for Shavian letters and the ·ox equivalent was the most common letter of the three.

·awe seems to be the second most common of the three, especially before a ·low.

·ah seems to be the least common of the three.


For one: Awe before Low makes sense in my mind for "bowl," "toll," "goal," and "role" – but for words like "ball" and "crawl," a preceding Ah or Ox seems to make more sense. (Maybe "Ox" if I'm to believe the IPA equivalents shown by the Configuratronic Quikscript Cheat Sheet – but then, I don't know whose authority that cheat sheet is based on.)

I made it. John Cowan, who is rightfully a bigger deal around here than I am, said I should add the "~ /əʊ/" to the chart. If I screwed anything else up about it, he would've let me know.

(Apologies for making this a separate reply; I must've gotten a little too trigger-happy with the backspace key and removed this section from the other part of my reply.)

Brad Neil
 

On Sat, Sep 10, 2022 at 01:52 AM, Nathan Galt wrote:
While I'm unconvinced all spelling variation can be eliminated, I think it ought to be minimized where possible.

I agree that this is a very sound idea, making communication as smooth as possible for everyone. It just seems that, a few isolated cases like those I mentioned*, there is no heuristic that can be applied to determine which spelling should become the 'standard', so I would hesitate suggest any hard-and-fast rules for them. I'm personally of the opinion that these things are not sacred and I certainly don't wish to impose on anyone.
(*The different ways to say "azure" result from yod-coalescence, which we probably ought to pick a side on when writing QS.)

I managed to find the source that talked about short-a in "after", "class" etc. in case anyone was interested -- it's one of the writing-circle letters (from Kingsley Read himself, for what it's worth, although I don't necessarily believe in taking any particular source as gospel even if it's the primary inventor) that was uploaded to this group:



Transliteration for anyone who needs it: 
·KR (?) again: I'm glad you feel able to write /pæst/, /cæst/, /fæst/ etc. though David, I guess, is the only one in this circle of southerners who might by instinct say short-A in these words. The point southerners often fail to accept is that Davids are in the vast majority in this matter -- the world over, and even in Britain alone, I fancy. No one is committed to pronounce as he writes: I hope that is understood. You will note however that I don't press this point to the logical conclusion: I break down when I feel my own limit reached in non-standardised non-listed words e.g. "half" and "draughts": the one essential is to be understood without trouble.

So that's why, when it comes to picking a standard dialect for QS spelling, I agree that RP-plus-rhoticity (and by extension, these Macmillan pronunciation guides) is probably the best choice; except for its anomaly of the long-ah sound in "past", "graph", etc. where it is the odd one out in the world. But perhaps it is a bit of a waste of time to quibble this point when RP is such a widely-understood and respected prestige dialect. It will certainly make for clear communication, which is the entire point, like you said.

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