Shavian alphabet
Encyclopedia
The Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet
conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language
to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling
. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish
playwright George Bernard Shaw
. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as phonetic
as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to sounds); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet
to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings."
s, liquids (r, l) and nasals
; tall letters (except Yea ๐ and Hung ๐) are unvoiced consonant
s. A tall letter rotated 180ยฐ or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced
consonant (except Haha ๐ฃ). The alphabet is therefore largely featural.
There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Roman alphabet; instead of using capitalization to mark proper name
s, a "naming dot" (ยท) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is like in conventional orthography.
Spelling in Androcles follows the phonetic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic
"r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical 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 spontaneously produce the canonical spellings. For instance, most North American dialects merge ๐ญ /ษห/ and ๐ช /ษ/. Canadian English
, as well as many American
dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canadian border), also merge these phonemes with ๐ท /ษห/, which is known as the cotโcaught merger. In addition, many American dialects merge ๐ง /ษ/ and ๐ฆ /ษช/ before nasal consonant
s.
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 the traditional orthography. For instance, convict /หkษnvษชkt/ and convict /หkษnหvษชkt/ can be spelled ๐๐ช๐ฏ๐๐ฆ๐๐ and ๐๐ฉ๐ฏ๐๐ฆ๐๐ respectively.
Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words the (๐), of (๐), and (๐ฏ), to (๐), and often for (๐) are written with the single letters indicated.
's Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which included several exponents of phonetic writing. He also knew Henry Sweet, creator of Current Shorthand
(and a prototype for the character of Henry Higgins
), although Shaw himself used the shorthand system of Isaac Pitman
. All of his interest in spelling and alphabet reform was made clear in Shaw's will of June 1950, in which provision was made for Isaac Pitman, with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee, to establish a Shaw Alphabet. Following Shaw's death in November 1950, and after some legal dispute, the Trustee announced a worldwide competition to design such an alphabet, with the aim of producing a system which would be an economical way of writing and of printing the English language.
A contest for the design of the new alphabet was won by a Mr. Ronald Kingsley Read
. Read was then appointed the sole designer of the new alphabet.
Due to contestation of Shaw's will, the trust charged with developing the new alphabet could only afford to publish one book: a version of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion
, in bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings. (1962 Penguin Books, London)
Proponents of traditional Shavian, however, have suggested that Kingsley Read may not have intended for this system to be all-encompassing, though it seems that vertical placement alone served this purpose in an earlier version of Shavian, before the rotations were introduced. Also, Read may have intentionally reversed these letters, perhaps to emphasize that these letters represent unrelated sounds, which happen to occur in complementary distribution
. It is also possible that he was motivated at least in part by the high frequency of the English suffix "-ing": In handwriting, the tall "Hung" allows "ing" / ษชล / to be written without lifting the pen ( ๐ฆ๐ ), which is impractical or impossible with the hypothetical deep "Hung" ( ๐ฆ๐ฃ ) when writing with a fountain pen
, the implement of choice at the time of Shaw's death; practical ballpoint pen
s did not become available until the early or mid 1950s.
Both sides of the debate have suggested other reasons, including associations with various styles of Roman letters (namely, the /g/ in /-ing/, often written with a bottom-loop in script) and the effect of letter-height on the coastlines of words, but whether Read considered any of these is uncertain. Since the letter representing the same sound in Read's Quikscript
appears identical to "Hung", it is doubtful that Read reversed the letter twice by mistakeโhe may have thought it best to leave things as they were, mistake or not, especially as a corrected /ng/ might in hasty or careless writing be confused with his new letter for /n/ in Quikscript.
, and their relation to other letters is usually taken as evidence for this reversal.
One of the beliefs about that leads to such allegations is that Air "๐บ" is a ligature of the letters Egg "๐ง" and Roar "๐ฎ". Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the bottom and free at the top, yet the opposite is true. Another such belief is that Err "๐ป" is a ligature of the letters Up "๐ณ" and Roar "๐ฎ". Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the top and free at the bottom, yet once again, the opposite is true.
, also known as the Read Alphabet. Quikscript is intended to be more useful for handwriting, and to that end is more cursive and uses more ligatures. Many letter forms are roughly the same in both alphabets; see the separate article for more details.
, was developed by ฤan ลฌesli Starling (John Wesley Starling); though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. As that language is already spelled phonemically, direct conversion from Latin to Shavian letters can be performed, though several ligatures are added for the common combinations of vowels with n and s and some common short words.
Pronunciations that differ from their English values are marked in bold red.
Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.
and now superseded by the official Unicode standard.
These fonts contain full Unicode support for Shavian.
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of lettersโbasic written symbols or graphemesโeach of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling
English orthography
English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish
Irish people
The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...
playwright George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as phonetic
Phonetic alphabet
Phonetic alphabet can mean:* phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing.** International Phonetic Alphabet : the most widespread such system...
as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to sounds); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
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 vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s, liquids (r, l) and nasals
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
; tall letters (except Yea ๐ and Hung ๐) are unvoiced consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s. A tall letter rotated 180ยฐ or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...
consonant (except Haha ๐ฃ). The alphabet is therefore largely featural.
| Tall and deep letters: | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shavian letter | ||||||||||
| Unicode text | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ |
| Pronunciation (may vary, see below) |
/p/ | /b/ | /t/ | /d/ | /k/ | /ษก/ | /f/ | /v/ | /ฮธ/ | /รฐ/ |
| Name/example | peep | bib | tot | dead | kick | gag | fee | vow | thigh | they |
| ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ก | ๐ | ๐ข | ๐ | ๐ฃ | |
| /s/ | /z/ | /ส/ | /ส/ | /tส/ | /dส/ | /j/ | /w/ | /ล/ | /h/ | |
| so | zoo | sure | measure | church | judge | yea | woe | hung | ha-ha | |
| Short letters: |
||||||||||
| ๐ค | ๐ฎ | ๐ฅ | ๐ฏ | ๐ฆ | ๐ฐ | ๐ง | ๐ฑ | ๐จ | ๐ฒ | |
| /l/ | /r/ | /m/ | /n/ | /ษช/ | /iห/ | /ษ/ | /eษช/ | /รฆ/ | /aษช/ | |
| loll | roar | mime | nun | if | eat | egg | age | ash | ice | |
| ๐ฉ | ๐ณ | ๐ช | ๐ด | ๐ซ | ๐ต | ๐ฌ | ๐ถ | ๐ญ | ๐ท | |
| /ษ/ | /ส/ | /ษ/ | /oส/ | /ส/ | /uห/ | /aส/ | /ษษช/ | /ษห/ | /ษห/ | |
| ado | up | on | oak | wool | ooze | out | oil | ah | awe | |
| Ligatures: |
||||||||||
| ๐ธ | ๐น | ๐บ | ๐ป | ๐ผ | ๐ฝ | ๐พ | ๐ฟ | |||
| /ษr/ | /ษr/, /ษษr/ | /ษษr/ | /ษr/ | /ษr/ | /ษชษr/ | /i.ษ/ | /juห/ | |||
| are | or | air | err | array | ear | Ian | yew | |||
There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Roman alphabet; instead of using capitalization to mark proper name
Proper name
"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
s, a "naming dot" (ยท) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is like in conventional orthography.
Spelling in Androcles follows the phonetic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic
R-colored vowel
In phonetics, an R-colored or rhotic vowel is a vowel that is modified in a way that results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant...
"r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical 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 spontaneously produce the canonical spellings. For instance, most North American dialects merge ๐ญ /ษห/ and ๐ช /ษ/. Canadian English
Canadian English
Canadian English is the variety of English spoken in Canada. English is the first language, or "mother tongue", of approximately 24 million Canadians , and more than 28 million are fluent in the language...
, as well as many American
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canadian border), also merge these phonemes with ๐ท /ษห/, which is known as the cotโcaught merger. In addition, many American dialects merge ๐ง /ษ/ and ๐ฆ /ษช/ before nasal consonant
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
s.
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 the traditional orthography. For instance, convict /หkษnvษชkt/ and convict /หkษnหvษชkt/ can be spelled ๐๐ช๐ฏ๐๐ฆ๐๐ and ๐๐ฉ๐ฏ๐๐ฆ๐๐ respectively.
Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words the (๐), of (๐), and (๐ฏ), to (๐), and often for (๐) are written with the single letters indicated.
History
Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
's Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which included several exponents of phonetic writing. He also knew Henry Sweet, creator of Current Shorthand
Current Shorthand
Current Shorthand was developed beginning in 1884 and published in 1892 by Dr. Henry Sweet. It shares some similarities with the Gregg system, with which Current is contemporary...
(and a prototype for the character of Henry Higgins
Henry Higgins
Henry Higgins may refer to:*The fictional character: see Pygmalion or My Fair Lady*The Australian politician and judge H. B. Higgins* Henry Higgins -See also:*Harry Higgins, English cricketer*Henry Huggins, fictional character...
), although Shaw himself used the shorthand system of Isaac Pitman
Pitman Shorthand
Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman , who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds, and words are, for the most part, written...
. All of his interest in spelling and alphabet reform was made clear in Shaw's will of June 1950, in which provision was made for Isaac Pitman, with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee, to establish a Shaw Alphabet. Following Shaw's death in November 1950, and after some legal dispute, the Trustee announced a worldwide competition to design such an alphabet, with the aim of producing a system which would be an economical way of writing and of printing the English language.
A contest for the design of the new alphabet was won by a Mr. Ronald Kingsley Read
Ronald Kingsley Read
Ronald Kingsley Read was one of four contestants chosen to share the prize money for the design of the Shavian alphabet, a completely new alphabet intended for writing English...
. Read was then appointed the sole designer of the new alphabet.
Due to contestation of Shaw's will, the trust charged with developing the new alphabet could only afford to publish one book: a version of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion
Androcles and the Lion (play)
Androcles and the Lion is a 1912 play written by George Bernard Shaw.Androcles and the Lion is Shaw's retelling of the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requited mercy of a lion. In the play, Shaw portrays Androcles to be one of the many Christians being led to the Colosseum for torture...
, in bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings. (1962 Penguin Books, London)
Disagreement
Some disagreement has arisen among the Shavian community in regard to sound-symbol assignments, which have been the topic of frequent arguments. Primarily, this has concerned the alleged reversal of several pairs of letters.Haha-Hung reversal
The most frequent disagreement of the letter reversals has been over the Haha-Hung pair. The most convincing evidence suggesting this reversal is in the names of the letters: The unvoiced letter Haha is deep, while the voiced Hung, which suggests a lower position, is tall. This is often assumed to be a clerical error introduced in the rushed printing of the Shavian edition of Androcles and the Lion. This reversal obscures the system of tall letters as voiceless consonants and deep letters as voiced consonants.Proponents of traditional Shavian, however, have suggested that Kingsley Read may not have intended for this system to be all-encompassing, though it seems that vertical placement alone served this purpose in an earlier version of Shavian, before the rotations were introduced. Also, Read may have intentionally reversed these letters, perhaps to emphasize that these letters represent unrelated sounds, which happen to occur in complementary distribution
Complementary distribution
Complementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment...
. It is also possible that he was motivated at least in part by the high frequency of the English suffix "-ing": In handwriting, the tall "Hung" allows "ing" / ษชล / to be written without lifting the pen ( ๐ฆ๐ ), which is impractical or impossible with the hypothetical deep "Hung" ( ๐ฆ๐ฃ ) when writing with a fountain pen
Fountain pen
A fountain pen is a nib pen that, unlike its predecessor the dip pen, contains an internal reservoir of water-based liquid ink. The pen draws ink from the reservoir through a feed to the nib and deposits it on paper via a combination of gravity and capillary action...
, the implement of choice at the time of Shaw's death; practical ballpoint pen
Ballpoint pen
A ballpoint pen is a writing instrument with an internal ink reservoir and a sphere for a point. The internal chamber is filled with a viscous ink that is dispensed at its tip during use by the rolling action of a small sphere...
s did not become available until the early or mid 1950s.
Both sides of the debate have suggested other reasons, including associations with various styles of Roman letters (namely, the /g/ in /-ing/, often written with a bottom-loop in script) and the effect of letter-height on the coastlines of words, but whether Read considered any of these is uncertain. Since the letter representing the same sound in Read's Quikscript
Quikscript
Quikscript is an alphabet specifically designed for the English language. Quikscript replaces traditional English orthography, which uses the Latin alphabet, with completely new letters. It is phonemically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written...
appears identical to "Hung", it is doubtful that Read reversed the letter twice by mistakeโhe may have thought it best to leave things as they were, mistake or not, especially as a corrected /ng/ might in hasty or careless writing be confused with his new letter for /n/ in Quikscript.
Other reversals
Two other letters that are often alleged to have been reversedโintentionally or notโare Air and Err. Both are ligaturesLigature (typography)
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...
, and their relation to other letters is usually taken as evidence for this reversal.
One of the beliefs about that leads to such allegations is that Air "๐บ" is a ligature of the letters Egg "๐ง" and Roar "๐ฎ". Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the bottom and free at the top, yet the opposite is true. Another such belief is that Err "๐ป" is a ligature of the letters Up "๐ณ" and Roar "๐ฎ". Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the top and free at the bottom, yet once again, the opposite is true.
Quikscript
Some years after the initial publication of the Shaw alphabet, Read expanded it to create QuikscriptQuikscript
Quikscript is an alphabet specifically designed for the English language. Quikscript replaces traditional English orthography, which uses the Latin alphabet, with completely new letters. It is phonemically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written...
, also known as the Read Alphabet. Quikscript is intended to be more useful for handwriting, and to that end is more cursive and uses more ligatures. Many letter forms are roughly the same in both alphabets; see the separate article for more details.
Revised Shaw alphabet
Paul Vandenbrink has created a modified Shavian alphabet which takes the controversial step of replacing most of the specific vowel letters with markers indicating which of several sets of vowel types a vowel belongs to, thus reducing the number of vowel distinctions and lessening the written differences between dialectal variations of English. This variant, and not the original Shaw alphabet, is presented at http://www.shawalphabet.com/.ลava alfabeto
An adaptation of Shavian to another language, EsperantoEsperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, was developed by ฤan ลฌesli Starling (John Wesley Starling); though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. As that language is already spelled phonemically, direct conversion from Latin to Shavian letters can be performed, though several ligatures are added for the common combinations of vowels with n and s and some common short words.
Pronunciations that differ from their English values are marked in bold red.
| ลava letter | ๐จ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ง | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ก | ๐ฃ | ๐ | ๐ฆ | ๐ข | ๐ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [a] | [b] | [ts] | [tส] | [d] | [e] | [f] | [ษก] | [dส] | [h] | [x] | [i] | [j] | [ส] |
| Conventional orthography | a | b | c | ฤ | d | e | f | g | ฤ | h | ฤฅ | i | j | ฤต |
| ๐ | ๐ค | ๐ซ | ๐ต | ๐ฉ | ๐ | ๐ฎ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ช | ๐ | ๐ | ๐ | |
| [k] | [l] | [m] | [n] | [o] | [p] | [r] | [s] | [ส] | [t] | [u] | [w] | [v] | [z] | |
| k | l | m | n | o | p | r | s | ล | t | u | ลญ | v | z | |
| Ligatures |
||||||||||||||
| la | kaj | aลญ | aj | |||||||||||
Unicode
Shavian was added to the UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.
Block
The Unicode block for Shavian is U+10450–U+1047F and is in Plane 1 (the Supplementary Multilingual Plane).Fonts
Support for this part of Unicode is fairly new, and not all computer systems support it. Unicode Shavian fonts are also still quite rare. Before it was standardised, fonts were made that include Shavian letters in the places of Roman letters, and/or in an agreed upon location in the Unicode private use area, allocated from the ConScript Unicode RegistryConScript Unicode Registry
The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Area for the encoding of artificial scripts. It was founded by and is maintained by John Cowan and Michael Everson...
and now superseded by the official Unicode standard.
These fonts contain full Unicode support for Shavian.
- Andagii
- Apple SymbolsApple SymbolsApple Symbols is a font introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther." This is a Truetype font, intended to provide coverage for characters defined as symbols in the Unicode Standard. It continues to ship with Mac OS X as part of the default installation. Prior to Mac OS X 10.5, its path was...
, part of Mac OS X v10.5 LeopardMac OS X v10.5Mac OS X Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on 26 October 2007 as the successor of Tiger , and is available in two variants: a desktop version suitable for personal computers, and a... - Code2001 Contains rough-drawn Shavian characters as of version 0.919 (April 2008).
- ESL Gothic Unicode
- MPH 2B Damase (public domain)
See also
- QuikscriptQuikscriptQuikscript is an alphabet specifically designed for the English language. Quikscript replaces traditional English orthography, which uses the Latin alphabet, with completely new letters. It is phonemically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written...
- ReadspelReadspelReadspel is a new script or writing system invented by Kingsley Read. It is based on the Roman alphabet, but with new meanings for the letters, so that each symbol represents a distinct phoneme in the English language, and, more importantly, each phoneme in English can be represented with only one...
- ShorthandShorthandShorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphฤ or graphie...
- Pitman shorthandPitman ShorthandPitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman , who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds, and words are, for the most part, written...
- Gregg shorthandGregg ShorthandGregg shorthand is a form of stenography that was invented by John Robert Gregg in 1888. Like cursive longhand, it is completely based on elliptical figures and lines that bisect them. Gregg shorthand is the most popular form of pen stenography in the United States and its Spanish adaptation is...
- Deseret alphabetDeseret alphabetThe Deseret alphabet is a phonemic English spelling reform developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.In public statements, Young claimed the...
External links
- shavian.org
- Yahoo! Group on Shavian
- Omniglot.com article on Shavian
- Revised Shaw Alphabet, history, etc.
- Browser test page for Unicode Shavian
- ConScript Unicode Registry, describes unofficial assignment of Shavian letters in Unicode private use area (Since withdrawn in favour of the official encoding)
- Lingua-EN-Alphabet-Shaw, a PerlPerlPerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
module to transliterate - Shavian fonts, list by Luc Devroye
- Assorted Shavian fonts, a variety of Shavian fonts to download
- Shavian transliterator, a device to transform text into the Shavian alphabet