New book in Quikscript: Animal Farm by George Orwell
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Brad Neil
Greetings, everyone, and a happy New Year! Here is a new book for you to read in Quikscript: Animal Farm, by George Orwell (published 1945, approx. 30,000 words). It is provided in three formats: EPUB for e-readers, HTML for web browsers, and plain text. The EPUB and HTML versions contain an embedded copy of the Thoth font, so they should easily work on all (reasonably modern) devices -- let me know if there are any difficulties with viewing it! The original Orthodox version is also provided, for reference. With just a couple of exceptions, I have followed for the spelling conventions used in the Quikscript Manual as closely as possible. I used Shavian.info's Kingsley Read Lexicon, my copy of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Wiktionary for a sanity check when I was less than 100% confident with a word. |
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Paige
Thank you for this. I do have a quibble however. When I opened
the HTML file one of the first things I noticed was that the word
"transliteration" underneath the author's name on the first page
is spelt with "ch" rather than "tr." Wiktionary does not show this pronunciation. So I am wondering
if everywhere "tr" appears it has been rendered as "ch"? I have run into this before on a QS site. Do others here
pronounce words beginning with "tr" with "ch"? I certainly don't
so it seems a peculiarity to me. Paige On 1/7/2023 4:11 AM, Brad Neil via
groups.io wrote:
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Brad Neil
This is a widespread sound change in all prominent varieties of
English, as far as I know (British, American, Australian,
Canadian, etc...). In fact, my own speech takes this further: I
use the /tʃ/ sound in words like battery, literally,
factory, beetroot and so on. I don't use 𐑗𐑮
across syllable boundaries like that in my Quikscript spelling,
however, as I suspect that would be taking things a bit too far
for most American readers. Here is a video, from phonetician Geoff Lindsey, which explains
the phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2X1pKEHIYw.
Many of his other videos are well-worth a watch for curious
Quikscript writers. This was one of my many early misgivings when I was learning
Quikscript. I found this
advice on the Quikscript Outpost (along with its counterpart
for the "dr" words) very helpful; since then, I have always spelt
the "tr" and "dr" sounds with 𐑗𐑮 and 𐑡𐑮. (So to answer your
other question: yes, all such instances of "tr" in have been spelt
that way) With all of that in mind, I was under the impression that most of
the English-speaking world was already past the tipping point on
this matter, and by now it would be uncontroversial for me to use
these spellings for transliterated books. I'm of the opinion that
QS spelling must move with the times -- at least for trends that
become the norm on both sides of the Atlantic -- lest it end up
just as bad as Orthodox spelling. It's entirely possible that my
judgement was off as I'm certainly no expert, but I do try as best
I can. Having said all that, I completely understand how off-putting unfamiliar QS spellings can be, so I have attached an alternate version of the book with the traditional l𐑮 and 𐑛𐑮, which some folks might find more comfortable to read. Apart from this, all of my other spelling decisions were quite conservative, so hopefully nothing else presents too many issues. Brad (FriedOrange) On 8/01/2023 3:42 am, Paige wrote:
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Trelligan
I am an admirer with Geoff Lindsey's work, and agree that this is a dialect change. But it is not yet a complete change for me, and would have been distracting—thank you for the alternate version. And thank you for the book translation at all; there are too few good QS books around. |
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BP Jonsson
You will notice that Geoff Lindsay points out that _train_ and _chain_ do not become identical: the [ɹ] “r” is still there in [tʃɹeɪn] “chrain”. What he fails to mention, no doubt in a desire not to complicate things and detract from the main message, is that [ɹ] “r” has a slightly different tongue shape from and less “noise at the teeth” than [ʃ] “sh” and [ʒ] “zh” so that it still sounds different from the latter — in phoneticians’ parlance it is not a sibilant[^1]. After [ʃ] “sh” and [t(ʃ)] “t/ch” the [ɹ] “r” may even become voiceless [ɹ̊], which may perhaps be written “rh” in fauxnetics, giving [tʃɹ̊ein] “chrhein” where the difference from [tʃ] “ch” is even more subtle but it is still there nonetheless. For some speakers — e.g. from Ireland but also some from Great Britain and North America — /r/ is actually retroflex [ɻ] rather than postalveolar [ɹ],[^2] i.e. it is articulated with the _bottom_ of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge. For these speakers “train” is rather [ʈɻ̊eɪn] with a retroflex “t” and a voiceless retroflex “rh”, but probably no sibilant [ʂ] retroflex “sh” element, but almost indistinguishable from [tʃ] “ch” for speakers who don’t have this “r” sound, and “shrimp” may start with a pure retroflex fricative which is either sibilant [ʂ] or non-sibilant voiceless [ɻ̊] “rh” and may sound like “shimp” to those who don’t themselves have this “r” sound, which might cause further confusion. However the takeaway from all this is that “tr” never contrasts with “chr”, nor “dr” with “jr” (nor “shr” with “sr”) — the meaning of a word never changes if you substitute one for the other in these pairs — if you say “chrain” and “jrum” then “train” and “drum” either don’t exist in your speech or at least “chrain”/“train” and “jrum”/“drum” are not and can not be different words. I certainly understand where you come from when you want to spell ‹chr› and ‹jr› in QS, but the fact is that there is (usually) no information loss in spelling ‹tr› and ‹dr›, and to deviate from Orthodox in this detail may cause unnecessary confusion without actually gaining anything. One way of looking at it may be that for some speakers the sounds at the start of “train”, “drum” and “shrimp” are not clusters at all but their own unitary sounds which are not only distinct from “ch”, “j” and “sh” but also _potentially_ if not in practice distinct from “tr”, “dr” (and “sr”) which would mean that a phonemic script now needs distinct letters for them, although I dare not suggest what those letters should look like as QS is concerned! Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker but my accent of Swedish happens to have this retroflex “r” sound (at least the beginning of words and after consonants; it may be a tap [ɾ] elsewhere) so what I say here happens to apply to my xenolect of English.
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Nathan Galt
I didn't have any trouble viewing the ePub. Evidently Apple actually noticed that macOS Ventura 13.0 broke Private Use Area code points, and, much to my surprise, fixed it in 13.1. I saw similar breakage in iOS and iPadOS 16.0 that was also probably fixed in 16.1. On Sat, Jan 7, 2023, at 1:11 AM, Brad Neil via groups.io wrote:
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Nathan Galt
Might've been https://www.frogorbits.com/blog/. "‘translate’ starts with a ch-sound, right?" is right at the top of the page, and links to https://www.frogorbits.com/blog-spelling-disclaimer/. I was weirded out when I noticed that I don't start off "translate" with [tɹ]. On Sat, Jan 7, 2023, at 8:42 AM, Paige wrote:
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Benjamin Bruce
I don't know how widespread this change is, but it is not present in my American accent, and I was unaware of it until this thread popped up. Maybe it will become universal at some point, but until it shows up in pronunciations in the mainline orthodox dictionaries, I will continue writing "tr" in Quikscript and Shavian.
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One thing I would mention is that the /t/ in these words is realized as an aspirated [tʰ], which could give the illusion of a following [ʃ] sound--not denying that it actually is [ʃ] in many people's idiolects, but just something to keep in mind: [tʰɹ] sounds quite similar to [tʃɹ]. Benjamin 𐑪𐑯 2023-01-07 𐑨𐑑 23:41, Brad Neil via groups.io <friedorange79@...> 𐑮𐑴𐑑: This is a widespread sound change in all prominent varieties of |
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I was not able to open ePub either in my iPad Air Books app (iOS 15.6.1) or on my 2017 iMac running Monterey (OS 12.6). I just get a load of ????'s. The only way I can read is the html version and then on the ipad only in preview mode - for some reason I do not get the option to open in a browser. Most annoying!
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Also, I find the use of "ch+r" for "tr" difficult to read as I, being a southern UK English speaker, most definitely visualise (auralise?? - is that a word?) the "t" as a "t" and not as a "ch", though I can fully understand people who don't. Listening to myself speak, I have to agree that the sound is very close to "ch+r" though...... I will continue writing tr and dr traditionally methinks
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Nathan Galt
Well, that's awful. Would you have a look at https://github.com/adiabatic/qs-literature and let me know if you can view the ePubs there? I would assume that if you can see one, you can see the other, but I might be wrong. I suspect that the only option going forward is to upgrade both your iPad and Mac if it all possible, but I can totally understand if you don't want to upgrade your Mac to the latest operating system yet. On Mon, Jan 9, 2023, at 6:52 AM, Moira O'Brien wrote:
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Brad Neil
Moira - that might be the issue with Unicode PUA characters that
Nathan mentioned, or perhaps it doesn't like the embedded font for
some reason. If his EPUBs have the same problem, then I don't know
what can be done about it. Either way, I've made the HTML version of Animal Farm accessible
as a normal webpage, available from here.
This should make viewing on the iPad easier, and I should probably
have done it from the start anyway so people can see it before
committing to the download! And, the people have spoken: it now contains the traditional (not chraditional!) spellings of 'tr' and 'dr' clusters :-) Brad PS Paige and Trelligan - you're most welcome! I plan on converting more books while I have time in the next few weeks.
On 10/01/2023 12:18 pm, Nathan Galt
wrote:
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Paige
That sounds great, Brad. Having new resources to exercise out QS reading ability and improve reading speed is welcome. And thanks for making the change back to traditional "TR" and "DR." Paige On 1/9/2023 11:01 PM, Brad Neil via
groups.io wrote:
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Chanticrow
Brad,
Thanks for sharing the book. It's exciting to get new reading material. Animal Farm is a great selection. I added the epub to my Calibre collection. The title and author imported as Chinese characters, but that was easily fixed. The book contents render correctly in the Calibre viewer. I uploaded it to my Google Play collection as well. The title and author do not render there, and I did not expect Google to show those correctly. Google's web based epub reader correctly renders the book. Google's book reader on Android does not render the embedded fonts. All I get are the punctuation. (image included) :( Time to look for a better Android e-reader. Thanks also for making the "tr/dr" version available. I am in this camp as well. Perhaps it is because my brain is still trying to translate QS glyphs into traditional letter shapes instead of reading the sounds. I am still early in my QS learning, and I find that I think about the QS letters in terms of the traditional alphabet first. Then if I cannot determine the word I find myself sounding it out loud. I am trying to move more into the reading as sounds and word forms rather than trying to guess based on literal letter translation. Chanticrow 
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