Monday, July 27, 2009

Alice in Deseret

Some time ago, I received email from Thomas Thurman, mentioning a wiki he’s set up for Shavian. (Yes, I should have written about this as soon as the email came in, and yes, I'm frightfully behind on a lot of stuff at the moment.)

The main reason he was writing to me was to let me know that the site supports conversion to the Deseret Alphabet and, as a demonstration, he’s put up Alice in Wonderland. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/mxaodx.

There is a glitch in the conversion process at the moment. Shavian uses special letters for vowels followed by an -r sound and these are left unconverted when going over to Deseret. (There is also the problem of the two alphabets being intended to accommodate two different dialects of English: English as spoken by George V for Shavian, and what I believe to be New England English for Deseret.)

Still, it's rather cool to see something other than the LDS Scriptures available in Deseret. The site as a whole is worth keeping an eye on.

4 comments:

  1. I'm tempted to add this (corrected of course) to my stable of Alices...

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  2. Thomas has done the same thing for my Ewellic alphabet, with a version of "Alice" converted automatically from the Shavian. It suffers from a glitch similar to the one you mentioned, plus it neglects written accents altogether, which are not used in Shavian or Deseret but are mandatory in Ewellic. I'm not sure whether to endorse this effort or not.

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  3. If I did add it to my stable of Alices, I would have to design Deseret in the style of De Vinne, Mona Lisa, Engraver's, and Liberty.

    That might be hard.

    Well... it's hard enough doing it for Cyrillic (I have the display faces done at least.)

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