File talk:Esperanto Shavian.png

 

 

Intention to relist for deletion

I am relisting for deletion, because due to the Christmas period I was not able to respond to the comment made in reply to the nomination that I made on 24th December, resulting in my point being dismissed without a proper discussion. So I will further elaborate my reasons why the assertion that the file is not eligible for copyright does not seem to be valid.

The claim relates to "simple geometric shapes". Whilst it is possible that an image which represents a single letter of the Shavian alphabet would count as such, the image under consideration here is definitely not a simple geometric shape, but instead is a exact copy (aside from cropping to remove a sample text) of an entire presentation of the Shavian alphabet as it has been adapted to apply to Esperanto. That image includes the following pieces of substantive creative work:

• The overall concept is novel, namely applying the basic idea of the Shavian alphabet to a language other than the one for which it was originally designed.
• The presentation has several important adaptations from Shaw's original (which admittedly would itself be out of copyright), namely:
  • The presentation is reorganised, in that the original showed the correspondence of the symbols with English phonemes and ordered them according to graphical features (tall, deep or short), while here the symbols are shown with the corresponding Esperanto orthography, and ordered alphabetically (this in itself hinging on making the observation that Esperanto, unlike English, has a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes).
  • The symbols are not simply the same ones that Shaw used for English reused in a mechanical way for similar phonemes in Esperanto. Instead, there has clearly been significant thought given to repurposing symbols in order to produce a different but cohesive set in its own right. For example: the nasal consonants (m and n) are represented using symbols which Shaw's alphabet uses for vowels; Shaw's symbol for the English velar nasal (ng) is repurposed for the Esperanto velar fricative (ĥ); several of the vowels use different symbols from the Shaw's symbols for the corresponding English phonemes; the symbols for j and ŭ are reversed from their English equivalents; a large range of ligatures is introduced that are not present in Shaw's original alphabet, based on identifying letter combinations (especially endings) common in Esperanto.
  • The image uses a clearer graphical presentation than in Shaw's original (see link above), in which the shading somewhat obscures the letters.

Regarding Kwamikagami's assertion that alphabets are not eligible for copyright, there is obviously a huge difference between simply writing down (say) the English alphabet, which has been common knowledge for centuries, and the creativity required to design a novel one.

I therefore stand by my earlier assertion that the image is clearly a creative work.

--Money money tickle parsnip (talk) 22:07, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

A huge but for our purposes irrelevant difference. Scripts are not copyrightable. That includes Tolkein's stuff, Klingon, SignWriting (despite their claim of copyright, which I see they've given up), and Shavian. Adaptations of a script to a new language is also not copyrightable. You can't, say, devise a Roman alphabet for some language and then demand that anyone using that alphabet to write their language pay you a usage fee. Only the content written with that alphabet is copyrightable.

However, a computer font is copyrightable (though we can reproduce any computer font as long as we don't distribute the actual encoding, eg. in an SVG file). Calligraphy is copyrightable. But not the script itself. Kwamikagami (talk) 23:50, 30 December 2017 (UTC)