FAQ - Shavian Additional Glosses and comments welcomed:
What is the Shaw or Shavian alphabet?
by Paul Vanderbrink [PV] Glosses by Steve Bett [SB]
PV: The Shavian or Shaw alphabet is a modern, phonetically accurate
replacement for the old Roman alphabet to write English. The Shaw
alphabet has been designed to write modern English more quickly and
effectively. The Roman alphabet was designed specifically for Latin,
over 2,600 years ago, and over time has become the alphabet of
choice for hundreds of languages. It also became the Standard
Alphabet for written English, as Latin was the language of education
and literacy, at that time that English was first written down.
The Roman Alphabet is not really an appropriate Alphabet for
English, because the English Language uses a wider variety of
sounds, than are found in the Latin and the other Romance Languages.
The 26 Letters are inadequate to represent the 40 odd English sounds.
The Roman alphabet uses over 40 vowel letters and vowel letter
combinations made up from the 7 Vowel
Letters, "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "w" and "y". It also doubles
Consonants and adds a silent "e" to the end of the words to indicate
different vowel sounds. Unfortunately, with time, the pronunciation
of these vowel sounds in some English words have changed and not all
of those various vowel letters and vowel letter combinations
consistently represent the same sound, anymore.
The Shaw alphabet uses a system, that can handle a wider variety of
vowel sounds and their combinations and represent them accurately
and consistently.
SB: The Shaw alphabet is a non-Roman, near 100% phonemic, symbols
system suitable for writing English as it is spoken.
Alphabet Systems with one symbol per sound and no silent letters are
more compact and faster to write. Shaw saw it as a parallel
alphabet which would win converts due to its superiority. Shaw
recommended a new set of letters so the new spellings would not be
considered uneducated or ugly.
Who created the Shaw alphabet?
SB: Shaw specified the linguistic requirements for an alphabet code
as early as 1941. He wanted one unequivocal symbol for 42 English
speech sounds and he did not want it to be confused with traditional
spelling. His model was phonemic shorthand. In his will, Shaw left
most of his fortune to fund the development of a new alphabet. The
will was contested and only a small sum [less than $20,000] was made
available to carry out Shaw's proposal. The group that controlled
the funds decided that the best they could do with such limited
funds was to run a contest.
PV: A contest was announced specifying the linguistic requirements,
in 1958. Four contestants submitted alphabet schemes that met or
surpassed the requirements. The Shaw Alphabet was created from an
amalgam of these 4 proposals. Kingsley Read, an architect and
designer, provided the majority of the design. He also created a
script or cursive version of the Shaw alphabet called Quickscript.
SB: In 1941, Shaw specified the goal for his proposed British
alphabet. He himself used Pitman shorthand and was familiar with the
advantages of phonemic writing. Pitman, however, was not linear and
difficult to print. Shaw was impressed with Sweet's "current"
linear shorthand but objected to the focus on abbreviation.
Ronald Kingsley Read was impressed with the essay which appeared as
the preface to the book, The Miraculous Birth of Language, and
contacted Shaw. He showed Shaw his early attempts to build a
phonemic notation to match Shaw's requirements. Shaw encouraged his
efforts.
In his will, Shaw left most of his fortune to advancing his
linguistic ideas, in particular the development and propagation of
an improved English Alphabet. The will was successfully challenged
by lawyers representing the British Museum and other charities on
the grounds that you can't leave money to an idea. Shaw's fortune
did not amount to much until the spectacular success of the
adaptation of his play "Pygmalion", into the musical, "My Fair
Lady". Sir James Pitman negotiated a deal whereby a small amount of
the fortune, about 8,300 British Pounds, would be used to fulfill
the terms of the will.
Regards, Paul V.
P.S. Excuse the test. I lost my first draft, and had to retype
everything in again. So I did a test first.
P.P.S. I made a few small corrections, including removing the
statement describing Ronald Kingsley Read, as the sole Creator of
the Shavian Alphabet.
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
<pvandenbrink@s...> wrote:
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