Friday, January 1, 2010

setting up IPA keyboard as segue to HIOXian




http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/images/phonetic_alphabet.gif

http://www.rejc2.co.uk/ipakeyboard/

D: The Roman alphabet has 26 letters.
English has about 40 sounds.
So you immediately see the problem.
IPA solves this by using 'shift' on the keyboard to denote all the unusual symbols.
I'm not sure if this matches rare sounds, or is fairly random.
My point is that starting from scratch for keyboard layout would ultimately yield a faster typing speed. That is, we would need to reinvent the QWERTY keyboard for a phonetic basis.
Of course, this would be specific to any particular language.

I need to learn to use the IPA keyboard layout.
From there, it is an easy transition to HIOXian - should the script every be finished, LOL!
I'm still exploring variations. The most recent what-if involves only indicating lip movement for either the top or bottom lip.
The additional bar segment is redundant.
I need more bar segments to express somewhat abstract aspects of 'air quality'.
Plosive, fricative, aspirated, et al.

I am unsure if IPA or HIOXian would result in less characters than standard English spelling, particularly American.
Sure, there are many sounds that require 2 letters - TH or SH or CH, for example.
Conversely, some letters are essentially compound consonants.
1) Q - kw.
2) X - ks.
I don't think the argument of 'less letters' is one that will bear up under scrutiny.

Well, a best case scenario puts me in my grad thesis program next September.
I hoped to have a viable HIOXian cursive script worked out by then.
Obviously, I'll need to hash it out this winter and spring, and then try it out this summer.

Re: blog entry #100. I printed out the 1000 most common English words.
Made notes on them... and then lost the notes. Ack!
They'll turn up. Likely. Eventually.

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