Shavian:Alphabet
- Many people seem to reach this page first; the home page has a great deal of useful information on it. You can also read about the Shavian alphabet on Wikipedia.
Contents |
History
George Bernard Shaw was frustrated by the inconsistencies of the spelling system of the English language. When he died, he left a large sum towards the design of a new alphabet. His will stipulated that it had to have a one-to-one letter to sound mapping, and it had to be distinct from the Latin alphabet so that it didn't look like mispelled words and confuse people.
However, various people contested the will, on the grounds that you can't leave money to an idea. In the end, they only took away most of the money and gave it to libraries and so on; a little bit was left which was used to hold a competition to design the alphabet and print one book in it. I have a copy of this book and I think it was done rather beautifully.
The winning alphabet was designed by Mr Kingsley Read. Kingsley Read had the idea of using a set of letters which rose above the line ("tall" letters), and then also turning them a half turn to make them sink below the line ("deep" letters).
Consonants
- ๐=P ๐=T ๐=K ๐=F ๐=TH ๐=S ๐=SH ๐=CH ๐=Y ๐=NG Tall letters
- ๐=B ๐=D ๐=G ๐=V ๐=DH ๐=Z ๐ =ZH ๐ก=J ๐ข=W ๐ฃ=H Deep letters
In general, tall letters represent unvoiced sounds (like ๐ "t" for tall) and deep letters represent voiced sounds (like ๐ "d" for deep). This makes it a lot easier to remember which is which. The only exceptions to this are the last two pairs shown, which don't represent sounds which have voiced or unvoiced counterparts in English: ๐ and ๐ข (y and w) and ๐ and ๐ฃ (ng and h). It has often been speculated that this was an error.
You might be happy to realise that ๐ is a ๐ with a ๐, which is in fact what the letter sounds like.
There are also "short" letters which have no tail or ascender, like most lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet. They include all the vowels, and four more consonants which don't have voiced/unvoiced pairs: ๐ค=L, ๐ฎ=R, ๐ฅ=M, ๐ฏ=N. Note that these pair off in an easy-to-remember way, and look a bit like vowels, since these letters and all vowels fall into the class of sonorants.
Vowels
- This section needs expanding.
The vowels are:
- ๐ฆ ๐ฐ ๐ง ๐ฑ ๐จ ๐ฒ ๐ฉ ๐ณ ๐ช ๐ด ๐ซ ๐ต ๐ฌ ๐ถ ๐ญ ๐ท
You can find a key on Wikipedia-- the link is at the end of this post; I won't bother giving a key here because the Latin alphabet is really bad at representing the vowel sounds of English. [TODO: Now this page is getting popular, I should probably write something more here.] (It is worth noting, though, that ๐ฆ and ๐ด are very similar to one of the sounds made by the respective Latin letters of similar shape.) I would have to say "๐ฆ is the vowel sound in 'if'", and so on. In fact, this is how the original chart was drawn up; the letters don't really have names in theory, but in practice people name them after the example words in the original chart. This means that, for example, ๐ฃ gets called "ha-ha". Yes, honestly.
Ligatures
There are also a few ligatures. They represent a few pairs of letters that often appear together-- for example, ๐ฟ is ๐ plus ๐ต.
Abbreviations
In addition, certain very short words are represented with a single letter: ๐ฏ=AND, ๐=OF, ๐=THE, ๐=TO.
Naming dot
There are no capitals or lowercase, but you place a mid-line dot before proper nouns: "๐ ยท๐๐ฑ๐๐พ๐ฏ ๐จ๐ค๐๐ฉ๐๐ง๐". (One way to look at this is that a dot represents a capital in the Latin alphabet but you don't use them at the start of sentences.)
Unicode
At one point people used to represent Shavian using the Latin alphabet with special fonts (the "Latin mapping"). Now there is space in Unicode for Shavian. However, it uses a particularly unusual part of Unicode which requires the use of a technology called "surrogate pairs" to represent it. Some software does not yet support surrogate pairs, which is a bug in that software; other software works fine. Twitter allows it in tweets but not in searches. Firefox supports them but treats them as two characters which display as one. I hope these will be fixed soon.
Keyboard
- See main article: Shavian:Keyboard