Shavian - Shaw Alpahbet

What is the Shaw or Shavian alphabet?
by Paul Vanderbrink [PV] Glosses by Steve Bett [SB]

PV: The 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 has become the alphabet of choice for hundreds of languages. It became the customary alphabet for written English, as Latin was the language of education, at the time, that the writing of English.

SB: The Shaw alphabet is a non-Roman, near 100% phonemic, symbols system suitable for writing English as it is spoken.
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. The alphabet displayed on this page was designed by Kingsley Read, the winner of the Shaw alphabet competition.

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.
Further revisions to remove some confusing spiral letters and to streamline an overly complex vowel design were successful and incorporated in this book by the author.
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.

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. The will was 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 My Fair Lady. Pitman negotiated a deal whereby a small amount of the fortune, about £8000, would be used to fulfill the terms of the will.

Why was the Shaw alphabet created?

The Shaw alphabet was developed in between 1958 and 1959, at the specific bequest of George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright.

As a writer of spoken English, he believed the Roman alphabet was inadequate to represent common spoken English. He believed that a phonetic alphabet tailored to English would both improve and standardize English communication around the world, and reduce class distinction based on accent. See Chapter 6, for details on the History of the Shaw alphabet. [link]

SB: Shaw attempted to write dialect using the traditional writing system. Shaw was probably as successful in writing dialect as any author since Twain but that is not saying much. The traditional orthography cannot unequivocally represent any dialect of English due to the polyvalence of the letters. On the average, each spelling represents over 14 pronunciations. With a phonemic alphabet, the kind used in dictionary keys, writing dialect would be simple. The issue then would shift to what dialect to represent in print. Shaw wanted to write "The King's English" which was about the same as BBC broadcast English.

What makes the Shaw alphabet different from the regular alphabet?

Roman alphabet has 26 letters, many with more than one pronunciation. [see the 70 Orton phonograms]
Shaw Alphabet has 53 letters, each with only one pronunciation. It also has 8 vowel markers.
[SB: Some symbols represent ligatures & combinations. I think Paul is talking about his version of the Shaw alphabet. Classic Shavian had 44 letters]
Roman alphabet has a number of silent letters, some of which are used to indicate an alternate pronunciations of a preceding letter.
[SB: Almost every letter is silent in some word]
Shaw alphabet pronounces all letters and vowel markers and is completely phonetic.
Roman alphabet has capital letters for each of the 26 letters. So the reader must recognize 52 characters, in any case. Some lowercase characters are not easily distinguishable.
For example the lower case "L" resembles the upper case "I" and the number "1". Capital letters are used to indicate the beginning of [a] sentence, names and many other things.
Shaw alphabet [Paul's version] has no Capital letters. The 19 vowel letters are organized into 9 sound pairs which sound alike, except for the addition of a Glottal Stop. The Shaw Alphabet differentiates between vowels that begin a word and have a glottal stop, (Primary) and vowels that begin a syllable and don't have a glottal stop, (Secondary).

Whoops, the 19th vowel represents another plain vowel sound that is always pronounced without a preceding Glottal Stop. So it doesn't match up with another vowel.

Why it easier to spell words with the Shaw Alphabet?

English has a wide number of variations in its spelling using the Roman alphabet. Multiple spellings for the same word are considered acceptable. (ie. Colour, color, gaol, jail, key, quay)
Different English words can even have the same pronunciation, (i.e. One, won) with little regard to the phonetic value of the Roman letters.
Shaw alphabet spells each English word phonetically with very little redundancy. There are only two additional redundant letters, that can be used for direct transliteration of Roman and Hebrew letters, but they are not used for normal transliteration or transcription.
Written English using the Roman cursive alphabet is falling into disuse, except to provide signatures for legal documents, due to the easy availability of computer word processing.
The form of each of the Shaw letters has been simplified to ensure only 1 or 2 pen strokes are required to write each letter. It is faster to print in the Shaw Alphabet, than to write in the Roman cursive alphabet.

SB: It may be easier to spell words in Shaw starting from scratch, but there are other phonemic alphabets which would be easier for those adept in the traditional orthography. New Spelling [i.t.a.] is an old way to represent English speech using the most common English spelling patterns.

What is the difference between a Shaw vowel letter and a Shaw vowel marker ?

Both vowel letters and vowel markers are part of the Shaw alphabet, but they have different functions. The Shaw Letters indicate the exact vowel sounds for the key vowels of a written word. The Shaw Vowel Marker indicates just the kind of vowel used in the written word and how the internal vowels hold the syllables together.

The main or Primary Shaw vowel letters each represents a specific vowel sound preceded by a Glottal Stop in order to make it emphatic. A Shaw vowel marker indicates the presence of a vowel, without an associated Glottal Stop. A vowel marker does not indicate the specific vowel. It indicates the type of vowel. For example, whether it is a long, short, double, half sized vowel or Schwa. A vowel marker does not necessarily give an exact pronunciation. There may be as many as 6 different vowel sounds, represented by any one particular vowel marker. Or as few a one vowel sound in the case of a Schwa.

The Roman alphabet uses over 30 of vowel letters and vowel letter combinations made up from "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "w" and "y" and also adds the silent "e" to the end of the word to indicate many of the various vowel sounds used by English. Unfortunately, all of those various vowel letters and vowel letter combinations are not logical and do not consistently represent the same sound. The Shaw alphabet uses a system, that can handle a wider variety of vowel sounds and their combinations and represent them accurately and consistently.

Hugh Birkhead wrote: http://mixsynth.fearfulsilence.com/

Why do we need another way to write English words?
Doesn't the present one work well enough?

The problem with written English spelling is that it takes twice as long to learn as more phonemic spelling systems. Laubach and others have claimed that they can teach an illiterate how to read a newspaper in 3 months [2 hours per day] if they know how to speak the language and the writing system is over 85% phonemic.

Shavian is an alphabet designed especially for English.

"So what's the point of that," I hear you ask, "why would we need another alphabet to write English if we already have one?"

The answer is quite simple. Shavian does a much better job.

What's wrong with what we've got?

Our current alphabet, the Roman alphabet, was brought in by Latin-speaking monks a thousand or so years ago; it's much the same nowadays as it was way back then. Way back when the 26-letter Roman alphabet was first introduced, it suited English - as it was - fairly well, but it wasn't properly used in the following years. As English developed, the sounds of words were changed (often dramatically) and other new sounds appeared, so the spellings should have been changed and new characters included; of course neither happened. Despite the huge changes in the way the language was spoken, the spellings changed very little, which means that a thousand or so years later, we are left with a written system better suited to Middle English than the modern English we all speak today.

Because the Roman alphabet is such a bad match to the different sounds of our spoken language, it often relies on tradition to dictate the way words should be written. Take the word 'although'; say it, and you'll agree it consists of four clear sounds (paw, live, this, open), yet when written it uses up eight letters, four of those just for the the last sound!! Also, you should be able to take off the 'alth' from the word and be left with a word pronounced like 'oh', but we all know that isn't true; it could be pronounced as 'uff' (rough), 'off' (trough), 'oo' (through), 'aw' (thought) or even 'ow' (bough)!

When we were children, most of us were probably shouted at for not spelling 'Autumn' with an 'n'. As adults, many of us are branded 'fools' or 'uneducated morons' because we might spell 'definitely' as 'definately'. We are NOT the ones at fault here - it's the spelling system. But a simple spelling reform is not enough, because the Roman alphabet has simply not got enough letters to represent all the sounds that we use. A new alphabet is the only sensible solution.

Where does Shavian come in?

Wouldn't it be nice to stop using all these stupid spellings? Wouldn't it be nice to just write words down more closely to the way we SAY them? Wouldn't it just be nice to have an alphabet that suited the language perfectly? Problem solved! There IS an alphabet that does not use stupid spellings, that uses word constructions that correspond precisely to the spoken sounds, and that does indeed suit the language perfectly: this dream alphabet is Shavian.

How did Shavian come about?

The famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was always against the use of the Roman alphabet in English, because of its sheer unsuitability; consequently, he wrote all of his famous plays using the more efficient Pitman's Shorthand system. Many of his plays (including the well-renowned Pygmalion) contained hidden messages, which included references to his dislike of English writing. When he died in 1950, it was found that he had left the whole of his estate to the creation of a new, phonetic and un-muddled English alphabet. Even though his will was disputed by various other parties (who managed to get some of the money for themselves), enough money was left over to make a good job of fulfilling Shaw's wish.

Soon after Shaw's wish was known, a competition was arranged by the Public Trustee (responsible for carrying out the instructions in the will) to find the best alphabet design possible; the sum of £500 was offered as a prize. By the closing date, over 400 entries had been received; out of these, four designs were considered worthy of the prize, and each designer received £125. One of the four winning designers was a designer and linguistic expert called Kingsley Read; his design was the most noteworthy of the four, and so he was dubbed the creator. The finished alphabet was named the Shaw Alphabet (after George Bernard Shaw), or Shavian (as it is more often called today).

After the alphabet had been designed, there was a sizeable amount of money left over; this was used to produce a copy of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion transliterated into the Shaw alphabet, which was distributed to thousands of libraries and bookshops so as to spread the alphabet amongst all the English-speaking countries.

The namer dot - a substitute for upper case?

When you name a letter, you're supposed to just write the letter with a namer dot before it, as explained in the ShawScript newsletter (at least I think that where it was). So, any time you write an abbreviation with the intent that each letter should be pronounced individually, you should probably use a namer dot before each. In this case, the periods or full stops become redundant. Either one would work alone, I suppose, but I’m not fond of periods in the middle of a sentence. It would also eliminate the confusion about double periods, since most people don’t realize the period for the abbreviation shouldn’t merge with the final one when it’s at the end of a sentence. But rather than writing the name of a Roman letter, I’ll normally just write the letter itself expecting that we’ll all know what it is.

That said, a pronounceable acronym is usually equally, if not more recognizable in speech. For example, most people pronounce NASA, though it’s usually listed among unpronounceable acronyms. So, we would do just as well to write /nAsa = Nasa, with one namer dot to indicate that it’s a simple name rather than the abbreviation, for which I would write

Except is pronounced as /ik´sept/ Accept is pronounced /&k'sept/

When it comes to well-known abbreviations like these, there are a few different options that are used. Since many are recognized in speech, some will simply spell out the names of the Roman letters. I don't like this approach so much since it requires deciphering a Roman > Shavian code, which depends partially on dialect, since letter names tend to vary.

The second option that I've seen commonly is to invent a new abbreviation in Shavian, referring to the actual pronunciation of the words rather than the Roman letters. Thus, USA becomes Vsa (VnFtad stEts v amerika), IBM becomes ibm (intDnASanal biznes maSInz), etc.

I normally prefer to just keep the Roman letters for well-known abbreviations of names. I rarely abbreviate common nouns, though.

Regards,
Joe
/JO

HUGH: All you have to do is the same as you do in, e.g., T.O. - i.e. (there's
three good examples) separate the initial letters with full stops (periods).

> PV: I wouldn't go as far as the second option, unless I could somehow
> mark the abbreviation as nonpronouncable, as it is. Maybe, we need an
> abbreviation marker, equivalent to the period after the letter in T.O.
> Otherwise abbrev. could be confused with a valid word that happened
> to have that spelling.
> Because Shavian as compared to T.O, eliminates a lot of redundant or
> silent letters, it much more likely that a random string of letters
> will be a pronouncable word.

> My method of handling abbreviations is based on your first option
> which involves simply spelling out the names of the Roman letters in
> standard format.
> Anyway, my suggestion is to only use these abbreviations for
> recognizable or common proper names, like the names of a country and
> then to write them out the Roman Alphabet phonetically.
> That is the way it is pronounced, in any case.
> Since it is used only for proper names, an abbreviation of this kind
> would always have a namer dot.
> (i.e. /VkE /VesE /Ven /eSpISIE /nEtO)
>
> For unrecognized proper names, I would additionally use a namer dot
> in front of every letter representing an abbreviation. This is in
> lieu of the periods that are used in T.O.
> (i.e. /JE /pI /mPgan, /JE /lO, /es n /el, /F /bI /em)
> It seems redundant to use a period as well as the namer dot.
> Opinions?
>
> I would also avoid using Ad-hoc abbreviations.
> Some times newly introduced terms as well as terminology common to a
> particular technical or scientific speciality are abbreviated to save
> space in a technical paper. The abbreviation is introduced at the
> beginning of a paper and referred to by an abbreviation thereafter.
> New terminology should be written out in full.
>
> Regards, Paul V.
>
> P.S. I guess in my mind, I am distinguishing between pronouncable
> abbreviations and the unpronouncable Strings of letters, that we
> sometimes use to keep things straight in a complicated Tecnical paper.

> --- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, Joe <wurdbendur@g...> wrote:
> > When it comes to well-known abbreviations like these, there are a
> few
> > different options that are used. Since many are recognized in
> speech, some
> > will simply spell out the names of the Roman letters. I don't like
> this
> > approach so much since it requires deciphering a Roman > Shavian
> code, which
> > depends partially on dialect, since letter names tend to vary.
> >
> > The second option that I've seen commonly is to invent a new
> abbreviation in
> > Shavian, referring to the actual pronunciation of the words rather
> than the
> > Roman letters. Thus, USA becomes Vsa (VnFtad stEts v amerika), IBM
> becomes
> > ibm (intDnASanal biznes maSInz), etc.
> >
> > I normally prefer to just keep the Roman letters for well-known
> > abbreviations of names. I rarely abbreviate common nouns, though.

> > On 1/27/05 11:41 AM, "paul vandenbrink" <pvandenbrink@s...> wrote:
> > > Hi Hugh
> > > There is whole unresolved area, where Shavian Abbrev. are
> concerned. Not just the standard four. But how to write abbreviated
> names, like U.N. , U.S.A. and IBM.

On 1/27/05 11:41 AM, "paul vandenbrink" <pvandenbrink@sprint.ca> wrote:

> Hi Hugh
> There is whole unresolved area, where Shavian Abbrev. are concerned.
> Not just the standard ones. But how to write abbreviated names, like
> U.N. , U.S.A. and IBM. Did you want me to present a possible solution.
> Regards, Paul V.

GBS and the ABC
Based on an article by Barbara Smoker
Spelling Progress Bulletin
www.spellingsociety.org

General thesis: Shaw was a mouthpiece or propagandist more than an original thinker. Shaw's interest in phonetics started in 1879 when he was introduced to Henry Sweet, an Oxford don. Also at around age 23, Shaw met Alexander Ellis. Ellis was an eminent philologist and Anglo-Saxon scholar who had collaborated with Isaac Pitman on the development of Phonotypy, one of the first expanded 40+ character phonemic alphabets.

Before Ellis there had been an unbroken line of alphabet reformers going back to the 16th Century including Sir John Cheke, John Milton, James Howell, Herbert Spencer, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Nicholas Murray Butler, to name a few. The idea of alphabet reform certainly did not originate with Shaw. Shaw never claimed this but Newspapers often sneered that alphabet reform was a tom-fool idea that only Shaw would have put forward" .

Among other popular fallacies is the view that profits from My Fair Lady, Shaw's only play with a phonetic theme, are available to fund the alphabet revolution.

Sadly, it is not so. Estate duties took £524,000, and Shaw's estate did not get out of debt until 1957. It would still be in debt had it not been for the Royalties from the play. The royalties accruing since 1950 should have gone into the Alphabet trust, if Shaw's wishes had been carried out (except that Shaw would not have allowed My Fair Lady to have been born--but that is another story).

Under English law, no one may make a bequest to an abstract cause, without an organizational beneficiary - unless the bequest is charitable.

In 1957, after 6 days of argument, the Chancery court decided that the alphabet trust could not be categorized as either educational or for public benefit (the only two options available under British law).

The Public Trustee lodged an appeal that although he could not by law be forced to administer the alphabet trust he should be allowed to do so.

Before this could be heard, an settlement was reached out of court between the Public Trustee and the three residuary legatees: The British Museum, The Royal Academy of the Arts, and the National Gallery of Ireland. An amount of £8,300 was allocated from the estate for the alphabet project outlined in Shaw's will.

Immediately after this settlement, the Public Trustee announced a 500 p rize for a suitable alphabet of 40+ letters enabling English to be written without indicating single sounds with more than one letter.

The closing date for the competition was Jan 1, 1959. Over 1000 applications for details were received. About 450 entered the competition and 250 survived the first sifting. Schemes that used Roman letters were rejected.

Shaw knew there was likely to be a court case and that this would draw attention to the project. He fully expected that the alphabet trust would be upheld. Seven years before his death, he wrote to all the government departments, learned societies, colleges, committees, and councils whose functions seemed remotely relevant. None of them would accept Shaw's conditions.

There are many mistaken ideas about Shaw's ultimate aim. What he wanted was a one sound per symbol system where the symbols were shorthand like but linear so they could be easily typeset. It would be a parallel writing system that would compete with the traditional system. The fitter would ultimately survive.

Shaw felt that a new alphabet was the only hope of orthographic reform. Tampering with traditional spelling would stir up emotional hostility and lead to confusion. We all tend to defend habitual mental processes. A new alphabet could exist side by side with the traditional one. It would be like parallel number systems such as Roman numerals and Hindu-Arabic numbers.

Without an augmented alphabet, only a partial spelling reform would be possible. As long as there are digraphs, we get problems such as mishap and bishop /mishAp - biSap/

Shaw hated the inefficiency of using silent letters and digraphs. "As to spelling the very frequent word THROUGH with 6 letters instead of 2.

Traditional letterforms could be greatly improved. Similar shapes could reflect similar sounds. As it is similar shapes (e.g., E & F) are unrelated in sound. The shape of some letters are unnecessarily complex requiring up to 3 pen strokes instead of one.

A news-article on a dual-language immersion program at a school in
Lubbock, Texas, makes an astounding claim.

Spanish Literacy to English Literacy
http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/102904/lif_102904044.shtml
By RAY GLASS, AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

First-grader Gabriel Reyna surprised everyone at home one day when he
picked up a children's book he had never before seen and began reading
to his 2-year-old sister — in English.

"It was amazing," said his mother, Kristilie Reyna. "He had never been taught to read English."Gabriel was learning to read Spanish in the Two-Way Language Enrichment Program at Harwell Elementary School. Ninety percent of the instruction during class days was in Spanish for the English-speaking youngster, yet he was able to read English. Alondra Gonzales, a third grader at Harwell Elementary, and enrolled in the Two-Way Language Enrichment Program, intently studies her lesson.

"Nobody learns how to read twice," said Rosa Waters, dual-language coordinator at Harwell Elementary. "They learn to read in one language, and their brain automatically transfers all those skills into the second language.

We have a lot of students reading in Spanish and, all of a sudden, they
begin reading in English without even having one single class or lesson." ...

This is consistent with my bicodal hypothesis. Overlearn a simple phonemic writing system first. Then transition. The task of learning to read the second time is much simpler since so much of your training transfers.