Shavian, ITA, IPA & other Augmented Alphabets

The Shaw alphabet, developed by Kingsley Read, is probably the most famous non-roman  alphabet for English.  It was not the first (see Wilkin's 17th century script in the chart below).  Pitman's ITA and the IPA notation developed by Jones and Passey are the most famous augmented Roman alphabets. ITA and the broad romic notations by Daniel Jones and Henry Sweet merely supplemented the Latin character set with graphemes for sounds that were ambiguously represented in the traditional English writing system [TO].  Sweet also developed a phonetic shorthand [Current] which influenenced Read's design of Shavian.  George Bernard Shaw had praised Sweet's notation in his preface to a book published in 1941 but felt that Sweet had become too engrossed in abbreviating it to improve ones ability to write faster than people could talk.  Sweet's Broad Romic notation (which was mentioned in My Fair Lady) and his Current shorthand were very well though out but never marketed.

[below] The Shaw Alphabet [or Shavian] as it appears in the special edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion.  The key is shown on the right and in the letter matrix below:
 

See the chart below, col. 7 Shavian Character Set p   t   b  ch  dh   s   sh   tsh(ch)   y   h  b  d   p   j    th    z   zh  dzh(j)     w  ng voiced   l    n   i    eh  ae  uh   ah   uu  ou  aw r   m  ee  ei   ai   up  oh   oo  oi   ah    combinations:  are  ahr  air  error   ar   ir   ia   yu

   The features of Shavian were defined by George Bernard Shaw, a long time critic of English spelling.  Shaw thought that any phonemic notation related to the Roman character set would be interpreted as bad spelling or ugly spelling by the general public. Shaw himself found ei tsheir the Follick/IPA transcription of "a chair" to be an abomination.  Rather than offend the sensibilities and habits of those who had already learned TO, it would be better to start over from scratch.

     The letter-matrix below shows the shapes associated with 41 English phonemes. Pitman, the source of the numeric arrangement, allows for slightly more than 41 phonemes by listing frequently overlooked phonemes such as /3:/ as 21/22. 

1.  The numeric order is from a similar letter matrix found in Pitman's Alphabets & Reading (appendix).  Pitman grouped similar sounds together instead of using an alphabetical order. A strict alphabetical order wouldn't work because there are only 26 letters to cover 41 sounds.  For a modified alphabetical order, see Bett's letter matrix for alternate notations. 

 2.  The heading in column 2, WES , refers to World English Spelling (ca. 1932) which is closely related to ALC Phonetic (1980) and New Spelling (1900).  WES, which uses 42 word signs,  is about as close as one can get to traditional English orthography (TO) in a phonemic notation. 

3.  This column shows where these letter forms may have originated. Egyptian and Phoenician shapes are shown in the column titled "derived from". The early shapes represented common objects whose name began with the phoneme sound:  Egyptian peh (papyrus mat, pad), Semetic pe (mouth, pout), Greek pi (no pictorial referece).  English words that start with the consonant phoneme [p] and name objects that look like the ancient shapes include pad and pout. (col. 5). 

The source of the [gq] shape used for the phoenician [b] has always been something of a mystery. Rouget's hypothesis seems to be the best to date.  The [q] shape is very close to the hieratic shorthand for the Eg. [ba] phonogram. The ba was a crested crane. The earliest Semitic [b] was a floorplan for a house [bet] which looked something like the shape of the Greek pi. The name evidently stuck but perhaps the phonogram shape was changed to match the Eg. ba.

5.  Key words begin with the sound of the phonogram. 

6.  The story of the alphabet begins with the early Egyptian and Sumerian writing systems.  Originially the letter shapes had referential value in addition to being sound signs.  The letter's shape was usually a simplified phoneticized picture of something familiar.  See alphabet for the full story. 

7. PMF- pictographic monoline fonetic - a monoline or single stroke script with a key word association [b=boot].   The key word is the letter name.  The shape of the name is similar to the shape of the sound sign or letter.  Egyptian,  Phoenician, and other Semitic scripts also had this acrophonic mnemonic.  Such mnemonics can simplify paired associate learning. 

 8. IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet - the script widely used by linguists 

 9. AMF - analytical monofon - a script similar to PMF with the emphasis on analytical combinations rather than iconicity. 
10. S-A - Shaw Alphabet (Shavian script) 
11. Pitman Shorthand (1848) version - The marks for the consonants can be found in later versions of this popular shorthand, the vowel notation was simplified.
12. Wilkins-One of the earliest attempts to devise a clever set of related sound signs for English 
There have been many shorthands for English, but this was the first to be based on sounds. Although devised by one of the founders of the Royal Society, the script seems to have gone unoticed by those interested in developing commercial shorthands.  Pitman and Ellis seem to have been aware of it.  It is easy to see a certain visual relationship between Wilkins' vowel notation and Pitman's 1848 shorthand. No real connection has ever been documented. 

Six Augmented Alphabets
  1     2     3     4      5        6     7    8     9     10   11   12

Comments: Rationale for shape selection - K and C

The preference for K has something to do with the fact that it is less ambiguous than C.  In TO, C is the more frequently used letter.

The situation is analogous to the choice of EE over EA to represent /I:/.  EA is the more frequent spelling but EE is less ambiguous.

In a positional spelling system such as RES, the c could be used for the initial letter and the k could be used for a terminal.  Thus instead of KLOK for *clock we would have *clok.  One would still might need a rule such as k before the I and e vowels if the goal is to approximate TO.

Portuguese uses a cedilla, a small s below the c, to indicate a c that sounds like an S. C-cedilla (zedilla, little z) is available in Latin-1.

The augmented script, Pictographic Monofon, side steps the controversy by merging the C and K into a "<" shape (see above).  PMF characters have to be rapid  single stroke shapes which have a rotated or mirror image for a related sound.  The mate to C/K  is G.  CG = < >.  In PMF the sounds are related to the shapes through acrophonic letter names. > = Goad and < = Corner.  PMF chracters look and sound like their names.  The concept of a phoneticized picture was one of the eariest concepts in alphabet development.  It was a key concept from about 3500 b.c. to 1000 b.c.  By the time the greeks adopted the Semetic script, there was no longer any attempt to find familiar objects and relate their shapes to the names.  Everyone can see the connection between the 22 Phoenician characters and half of the Greek alphabet.  This is because the sound shape connection was the same.  Few can see the connection between hieroglyphics and the early Semitic scripts because the sound shape connection was lost in the process of forging new object names to be associated with letter sounds.

I have speculated that the origin of both K and C is Egyptian.  The K  began as a hill - a kind of upside down U.  Then a pointer was added to indicate that the reference was to the slope of the hill.  The shorthand or hieratic form in some hands is identical to both the Phoenician K and our modern K.
(All Semitic scripts were written right to left, Egyptian was usually right to left but could be
left to right or top to bottom.  When the direction changed, the characters were flipped)

The sound associated with the Eg. K is /q/ as in *loch.

The Egyptian scribes had a rotated J they associated with /s/.  This grapheme is said to be a piece of folded cloth.  The connection between this sound sign and our modern c for /s/ is much more elusive and speculative.

The Semitic /s/ and /sh/ probably comes from the Egyptian /sh/ shape for shallow pool which was a w with some flourishes.  The W shape becomes associated with the Heb. Shin and the rotated w becomes the Greek sigma. 

I believe but have no evidence to back up this conjecture that the lower case Egyptian script was influenced by Egyptian Coptic.  80% of Coptic is nearly the same as Greek but they did retain six Egyptian sound signs and marked certain other affinities.  The c shape is called sima. I don't 
think the Greeks had a letter C at the time.  The Etruscan's had a <  shape  which was probably a gamma-form since it was located in the gamma position in the alphabet.

Another hieratic W or UU form was associated with the sound /oo/.  In hieroglyphics it is a chick.  A coiled rope was also associated with the /oo/ sound.

I probably make more out of these coincidences than is actually there but it is fun to speculate. 

Steve
 

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