[Spellyans] Introduction

[Michael Everson]

Wolcùm, Philip.

On 26 Jun 2013, at 16:26, Philip Newton <philip.newton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am a language enthusiast, interested in all manner of languages and writing systems.

Pleased to see you here. 

> My inclination currently is to use the SWF. (Further details available in private email, if you are interested.)

There's really no reason to choose the SWF. Although it is currently under review, I think it unlikely that the review process will take seriously the reports which have been given about what's wrong with the SWF. In short, it leaks. It is mostly phonetic, and mostly based on good rules for prediction of vowel length. On the other hand it is hamstrung with "etymological vowels" and with a confusion of vowel qualities because of a self-imposed ban on diacritical marks (even optional ones). 

> I joined this list as I am interested in the thoughts of users on the SWF and possible modifications thereto -- especially now during the review period.

It remains to be seen what the review comes up with, but it is difficult to believe that the review board (which is not made up of either of people who know the corpus well, or who have linguistic training) will apply a sufficient number of fixes to rival KS. They are spending a few months on it. We spent several years, beginning from the publication of the SWF spec. 

If you do use the SWF, you will still have available a wide array of literature in KS, which looks very like the SWF (except that it doesn't leak). Including three books which have not yet been published, the word-count of books in KS is 1,502,138. 

You won't find anything like that in the SWF. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/