While puttering around the Web today, I came across something that combines a couple of my favorite quirks: conlangs (constructed languages), English spelling reforms, and weird fonts. George Bernard Shaw had a provision in his will to fund a contest to design a phonemic alphabet for the English language. The result was the Shavian alphabet (link). Only one book that I know of was printed in it, an 1962 edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. A Brition, Ĝan Ŭesli Starling, adapted the Shavian alphabet for writing Esperanto (link).

I'd not seen Esperanto written previously, but I could swear I was reading Romanian.

Why, according to that Wikipedia link, are l and r considered "liquids?"

Should my computer be able to translate those strange characters, such as 010 over 452
into proper letters? As it is I am unable to read some of that Wikipedia article.

What's more, I am unable to paste any of these codes into this response as an example since the inclusion of any one of them gives me a "the page you requested does not exist" error when I try to do so.

Some older browsers, particularly Internet Explorer, don't have proper Unicode support. I'd suggest upgrading to the latest version.

Also, from the Wikipedia article:

quote:

Support for this part of Unicode is fairly new, and not all computer systems support it. Unicode Shavian fonts are also still quite rare

quote:

Some older browsers, particularly Internet Explorer, don't have proper Unicode support. I'd suggest upgrading to the latest version.

I use Firefox (the latest version)

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Why, according to that Wikipedia link, are l and r considered "liquids?"

That's just a cover term for English l and r. It's so we can have a phonological rule that applies to both sounds, by saying it applies to "liquids".

I had to install a free font to be able to see the Shavian alphabet glyphs. When you see boxes with two digit hexadecimal numbers one above the other, it's usually a sign that the font being used to display does not have the Unicode glyph in question and so it displays its Unicode number instead.