Shavian They

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 was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright Bernard Shaw.

Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet. It should be:
# at least 40 letters;
# as phonetic as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes);
# distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply misspellings.

Letters

The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids (r, l) and nasals; tall letters (except Yea and Hung ) are voiceless consonants. A tall letter rotated 180° or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing the corresponding voiced consonant (except Haha ). The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural.

There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper names, a " naming dot" (·) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography.

Each character in the Shavian alphabet requires only a single stroke to be written on paper. The writing utensil needs to be lifted up only once when writing each character, thus enabling faster writing.

Spelling in ''Androcles'' follows the phonemic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectal variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to produce the canonical spellings spontaneously. For instance, most North American dialects merge and (the father–bother merger). Canadian English, as well as many American dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canada–US border), also merge these phonemes with , which is known as the cot–caught merger. In addition, some American dialects merge and before nasal stops (the pin–pen merger).

There is no ability to indicate word stress; however, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in spoken discourse. For instance, the noun ''convict'' and the verb ''convict'' can be spelled and respectively.

Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words ''the'' (), ''of'' (), ''and'' (), ''to'' (), and often ''for'' () are written with the single letters indicated.

History

George Bernard Shaw, the writer, critic and playwright, was a vocal critic of English spelling because it often deviates from alphabetic principle. Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBC
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