This book presents a new, universal script, denoted NAVLIPI,
capable of expressing all the world's languages, from English and
Arabic, to tonal languages such as Mandarin, to click languages
such as Xo Bushman. Based on the Roman script, NAVLIPI uses just
five new or transformed letters (glyphs) in addition to the 26
letters of the Roman script; it uses no diacritics, rather making
heavy use of "post-ops," post-positional operators. Its expression
is very facile and intuitive and highly amenable to cursive writing
as well as keyboarding and voice transcription. More scientifically
and systematically organized than even Hangul, NAVLIPI incorporates
essential features of a universal script, thus far present in no
world script to date, such as universality, completeness,
distinctiveness, and practical phonemic application. It addresses
the serious deficiencies of the alphabet of the International
Phonetic Association. Most importantly, NAVLIPI addresses phonemic
idiosyncrasy, for the first time ever in any world script; among
other things, phonemic idiosyncrasy makes transcription, in the
same script, of, e.g. Mandarin and English, or Hindi/Urdu and
Tamil, extremely difficult. It is felt that NAVLIPI is introduced
at an appropriate time for a globalized world, which needs a single
script in which it is easy and intuitive to transcribe all of the
world's languages; it may also assist in the preservation of
endangered languages. Apart from presenting the new script, the
book also presents a thorough review of nearly all prior art
through five millennia to the present, a basic discussion of
phonetic and phonemic classification, "exercises" in coming up with
new scripts, a glossary of terms, and more than 620 detailed
references in linguistics and related fields. Nicholas Ostler makes
the following observation: "NAVLIPI is a systematic extension of
Roman script with a number of aims in view: To be a practical
(legible and writable) script for all the world's languages, but at
the same time to represent the languages' sounds exactly and
consistently, making no compromises on the phonemic principle. In
this ambitious goal, it goes beyond existing scripts: Beyond
ordinary Roman scripts, because it requires that its symbols are
interpreted the same way everywhere; beyond phonetic scripts such
as the International Phonetic Alphabet, by representing phonemes
singly, rather than as a set of phones; and beyond all the other
scripts, by attempting to replace every single one of them without
loss of significant phonetic detail. This is a stupendous aim for a
single system created by a single scholar. "The main obstacle to
Chandrasekhar's achievement is the phenomenon of "phonemic
idiosyncrasy," whereby the actual speech sounds are organized into
different, and cross-cutting, significant sets in various
languages: For example, p, whether aspirated or un-aspirated, is
the same phoneme in English, but the two versions belong to
contrasting phonemes in Hindi, where (however) f is heard as the
same sound as aspirated-p. By juxtaposing letters, Chandrasekhar
conjures up new symbols that represent directly the complex
phonemic reality. The attempt to have all the possible virtues of a
phonetic writing system at once - on the basis of a single man's
ideal - is what makes this a heroic endeavor." Dr. Chandrasekhar
was born in India and lives and works in America. He is a chemist
and business owner active in the U.S. defense contracting industry,
but his ethnic background places him in a multilingual,
multiscriptal society. An idea like Navlipi was most likely to
arise in India, where numerous scripts compete for the eye's
attention in everyday life, and an inquiring mind such as the
author's was moved to try to distil them into a single uniform
writing system.
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