1. What is the Shaw or Shavian alphabet?
The Shavian alphabet is a modern, phonetically accurate replacement
for the old Roman alphabet for English. The Shavian 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 while it has become the alphabet of choice for
hundreds of languages, it is less than ideal for the English
Language..
The Roman or Latin Alphabet became the customary alphabet for written
English, at a time when Latin was the primary language of education,
and English was only a collection of vulgar Dialects.
Shavian represents orthography corrected and made an accurate. It is
a guide to pronunciation by means of the new alphabet, which has been
adapted specifically to fit the English language.
The new Shavian alphabet for written English allows each word to be
spelled as it is pronounced and pronounced as it is spelled.
The Shaw alphabet is a non-Roman, nearly 100% phonemic, set of 47
symbols suitable for writing English, as it is spoken.
Alphabetic systems with one symbol per sound and no silent letters
are more compact, faster to write, and much easier to learn. Spelling
is obvious instead of obtuse.
The streamlined letter shapes are designed to be legible when rapidly
written -- They represent a kind of linear shorthand.
2. Who created the Shaw alphabet?
G.B. 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 any of those new symbols to be
confused with traditional spelling. He himself used Pitman shorthand
and was familiar with the advantages of phonemic writing. However,
Pitman's writing system was not linear and difficult to print. Shaw
was impressed with Sweet's "current" linear shorthand, but objected
to its focus on abbreviation.
Kingsley Read, an architect and designer, was impressed with G.B.
Shaw's essay on an improved English Alphabet, which appeared as the
preface to the book, "The Miraculous Birth of Language", and
contacted G.B. Shaw. He showed Shaw his early attempts to build a
phonemic notation to match Shaw's requirements. Shaw encouraged
these efforts
In his will, Shaw left most of his fortune to fund the development
and implementation of a new alphabet. The exact nature of this
Alphabet was not specified.
The will was challenged by lawyers representing the British Museum
and other Public charities on the grounds that you can't leave money
to an idea.
G.B. Shaw's fortune did not amount to much until the spectacular
success of
the musical opera, "My Fair Lady". Sir James Pitman negotiated a deal
whereby a small portion of this fortune, about £8000, would be used
to fulfill the terms of the will.
The group that controlled the funds decided that the best they could
do with such limited funds was to run a contest.
Accordingly 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, although Kingsley Read did in
fact provided the majority of the design.
The prize of £500 was divided equally between the 4 finalists.
Later on Kingsley Read would also created another script or cursive
version of the Shavian alphabet called Quikscript, where he could
more fully express his own ideas. Quikscript, which closely resembles
the Shavian Alphabet, although some of the letters have been swapped,
never gained wide popularity..
Three minor revisions have been added to Shavian over the years to
correctly represent American English speech and add a mechanism for
marking names given that Capitalization does not exist in the Shavian
Alphabet. There is no upper and lower case.
3. What is the biggest single improvement of the Shavian Alphabet
over the Roman Alphabet?
Vowel Letters make up almost half of the Shavian alphabet. There are
enough Shaw Letters (23) to indicate the exact vowel sound for any
syllable in any English word..
The Roman alphabet uses only 5 vowel letters along with over 30 vowel
letter combinations made up from "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "w" and "y"
and also adds
a silent "e" to the end of some words in order to indicate all of the
various vowel sounds used by English. Most of these combinations are
2 or 3 letters long.
Unfortunately, all of those various vowel letters and vowel letter
combinations are not logical and do not even consistently represent
the same sound. The Shaw alphabet is a writing system, which can
handle a wider range of English vowel sounds and represent them both
accurately and consistently.
_____________________attached____________________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
<pvandenbrink11@...> wrote:
>
> Hi B.J.
> I was just going to post excerpts from the Manual right here on the
> forum.
> > > 1. Frequently Asked Questions (f.A.k.)