The Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw set two main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) as phonetic as possible (that is, letters should have a to sounds); and (2) be distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings".

A contest for the design of the new alphabet was won by a Mr. Ronald Kingsley Read. Read later revised the alphabet to create Quikscript, with more ligatures intended for handwriting. His final alphabet was Latin-based.

Due to contestation of Shaw's will, the trust charged with developing the new alphabet could only afford to publish one book: a version of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion, in bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings. (1962 Penguin Books, London)

Letters

The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids (r, l) and nasals; tall letters (except Yea 𐑘 and Hung 𐑙) are unvoiced consonants. A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced consonant (except Haha 𐑣).

	Tall and deep letters:
Shavian letter	| | | | | | | | |-	Unicode text	𐑐	𐑚	𐑑	𐑛	𐑒	𐑜	𐑓	𐑝	𐑔	𐑞
IPA English pronunciation key (may vary, see below)	/p/	/b/	/t/	/d/	/k/	/g/	/f/	/v/	/θ/	/ð/
Name/example	peep	bib	tot	dead	kick	gag	fee	vow	thigh	they
	| | | | | | | | |-	𐑕	𐑟	𐑖	𐑠	𐑗	𐑡	𐑘	𐑢	𐑙	𐑣
	/s/	/z/	/ʃ/	/ʒ/	/ʧ/	/ʤ/	/j/	/w/	/ŋ/	/h/
	so	zoo	sure	measure	church	judge	yea	woe	hung	ha-ha
	Short letters:
	| | | | | | | | |-	𐑤	𐑮	𐑥	𐑯	𐑦	𐑰	𐑧	𐑱	𐑨	𐑲
	/l/	/ɹ/	/m/	/n/	/ɪ/	/iː/	/ɛ/	/eɪ/	/æ/	/aɪ/
	loll	roar	mime	nun	if	eat	egg	age	ash	ice
	| | | | | | | | |-	𐑩	𐑳	𐑪	𐑴	𐑫	𐑵	𐑬	𐑶	𐑭	𐑷
	/ə/	/ʌ/	/ɒ/	/əʊ/	/ʊ/	/uː/	/aʊ/	/ɔɪ/	/ɑː/	/ɔː/
	ado	up	on	oak	wool	ooze	out	oil	ah	awe
	Ligatures:
	| | | | | | |-	𐑸	𐑹	𐑺	𐑻	𐑼	𐑽	𐑾	𐑿
	/ɑɚ/	/ɔɚ/	/ɛɚ/	/ɝ/	/ɚ/	/ɪɚ/	/ɪə/	/juː/
	are	or	air	err	array	ear	Ian	yew

There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Roman alphabet; instead of using capitalization to mark proper names, a "naming dot" (·) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is like in conventional orthography.

Spelling in Androcles follows the phonetic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to spontaneously produce the canonical spellings. For instance, most North American dialects merge 𐑭 /ɑː/ and 𐑪 /ɒ/. Canadian English, as well as many American dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canadian border), also merge these phonemes with 𐑷 /ɔː/, which is known as the cot-caught merger. In addition, many American dialects merge 𐑧 /ɛ/ and 𐑦 /ɪ/ before nasal consonants.

There is no ability to indicate word stress, however in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in the traditional orthography:

Spelling of words differentiated by stress

Traditional spelling	convict
1st syllable stressed	𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 /ˈkɒnˌvɪkt/
2nd syllable stressed	𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 /ˌkənˈvɪkt/

Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters:

and	𐑯	n
the	𐑞	th
of	𐑝	v
to	𐑑	t

Disagreement

Some disagreement has arisen among the Shavian community in regard to sound-symbol assignments, which have been the topic of frequent arguments. Primarily, this has concerned the alleged reversal of several pairs of letters.

Haha-Hung reversal

The most frequent disagreement of the letter reversals has been over the Haha-Hung pair. The most convincing evidence suggesting this reversal is in the names of the letters: The letter Haha is deep, while Hung, which suggests a lower position, is tall. This is often assumed to be a clerical error introduced in the rushed printing of the Shavian edition of Androcles and the Lion. This reversal obscures the system of tall letters as voiceless consonants and short letters as voiced consonants.

Proponents of traditional Shavian, however, have suggested that Kingsley Read may not have intended for this system to be all-encompassing, though it seems that vertical placement alone served this purpose in an earlier version of Shavian, before the rotations were introduced. Also, Read may have intentionally reversed these letters, perhaps to emphasize that these letters represent unrelated sounds, which happen to occur in complementary distribution.

Both sides have suggested other reasons, including associations with various styles of Roman letters and the effect of letter-height on the coastlines of words, but whether Read considered any of these is uncertain. Since the letter representing the same sound in Read's Quikscript appears identical to "Hung", it is doubtful that Read reversed the letter twice by mistake.

Other reversals

Two other letters that are often alleged to have been reversed—intentionally or not—are Air and Err. Both are ligatures, and their relation to other letters is usually taken as evidence for this reversal.

Air is a ligature of the letters Egg and Roar. Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the bottom and free at the top, yet the opposite is true.

Err, is a ligature of the letters Up and Roar. Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the top and free at the bottom, yet once again, the opposite is true.

Variants

Quikscript

Some years after the initial publication of the Shaw alphabet, Read expanded it to create Quikscript, also known as the Read Alphabet. Quikscript is intended to be more useful for handwriting, and to that end is more cursive and uses more ligatures. Many letter forms are roughly the same in both alphabets; see the separate article for more details.

Revised Shaw alphabet

Paul Vandenbrink has created a modified Shavian alphabet which takes the controversial step of replacing most of the specific vowel letters with markers indicating which of several sets of vowel types a vowel belongs to, thus reducing the number of vowel distinctions and lessening the written differences between dialectical variations of English. This variant, and not the original Shaw alphabet, is presented at http://www.shawalphabet.com/.

Ŝava alfabeto

An adaptation of Shavian to another language, Esperanto, was developed by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling (John Wesley Starling); though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. As that language is already spelled phonemically, direct conversion from Latin to Shavian letters can be performed, though several ligatures are added for the common combinations of vowels with n and s and some common short words.

Pronunciations that differ from their English values are marked in bold red.

Ŝava letter	𐑨	𐑚	𐑔	𐑗	𐑛	𐑧	𐑓	𐑜	𐑡	𐑣	𐑙	𐑦	𐑢	𐑠
Pronunciation	[a]	[b]	[ts]	[ʧ]	[d]	[e]	[f]	[g]	[ʤ]	[h]	[x]	[i]	[j]	[ʒ]
Conventional orthography	a	b	c	ĉ	d	e	f	g	ĝ	h	ĥ	i	j	ĵ
	𐑒	𐑤	𐑵	𐑫	𐑩	𐑐	𐑮	𐑕	𐑖	𐑑	𐑪	𐑘	𐑝	𐑟
	[k]	[l]	[m]	[n]	[o]	[p]	[r]	[s]	[ʃ]	[t]	[u]	[w]	[v]	[z]
	k	l	m	n	o	p	r	s	ŝ	t	u	ŭ	v	z
	Ligatures
	| | |-	la	kaj	aŭ	aj

Use with computers

Shavian is encoded in plane 1 of Unicode, from U+10450 to U+1047F. Support for this part of Unicode is fairly new, and not all computer systems support it. Unicode Shavian fonts are also still quite rare. Before it was standardised, fonts were made that include Shavian letters in the places of Roman letters, and/or in an agreed upon location in the Unicode private use area, allocated from the ConScript Unicode Registry and now superseded by the official Unicode standard.

Fonts

These fonts contain full Unicode support for Shavian.

• Apple Symbols, part of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
• Andagii
• ESL Gothic Unicode
• Code2001 Contains rough-drawn Shavian characters as of version 0.919 (April 2008).

See also

• Shorthand
• Quikscript

External links

• ConScript Unicode Registry, describes unofficial assignment of Shavian letters in Unicode private use area (Since withdrawn in favour of the official encoding)
• Shavian fonts, list by Luc Devroye
• Omniglot.com article on Shavian
• Browser test page for Unicode Shavian
• Yahoo! Group on Shavian
• shavian.org
• Revised Shaw Alphabet, history, etc.