Ronald Kingsley Read (19 February 1887February 1975) was one of four contestants chosen to share the prize money for the design of the

Shavian alphabet The Shavian alphabet (; also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It wa ...

, a completely new alphabet intended for writing English. He was later appointed sole responsible designer of the alphabet. In 1966, after extensive testing of Shavian with English speakers from around the world, Read introduced

Quikscript QUIKSCRIPT is a simulation language derived from SIMSCRIPT, based on 20-GATE.a programming language for the 1960s Bendix G-20 computer References * "Quikscript - A Simscript-like Language for the G-20", F.M. Tonge et al., Communications of ...

, a revised form of his Shavian alphabet. Quikscript, also known as the "Read alphabet", has more ligatures than Shavian, which makes it easier to write by hand. Its appearance is more cursive than Shavian. A few days before his death, he completed a new alphabet called ''Soundspell'' (now ''Readspel''), based, probably for increased chances of popular acceptance, on the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...

. In the early 1960s Read also produced the quarterly journal ''Shaw-script'', which was printed using the Shavian alphabet.

References

External links

*
Quikscript io group

Shavian Yahoo Group
1887 births 1975 deaths Creators of writing systems {{writingsystem-stub