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| The Shaw Alphabet
A 50 Character Non-Roman fonimik Alphabet download font here help The shaw alphabet competition in the 1950's drew hundreds of new alphabet proposals. The one submitted by Kinglsey Read was selected as the winner. Another proposal submitted by John Malone became Unifon. Malone failed to follow one of the directives. The new alphabet was to be non-Roman. George
Bernard Shaw [1856-1950] was
a prolific playwright, novelist, and social critic. He is the
only person to win both an academy award and the Nobel prize for literature.
Shaw wrote the screen play for the popular 1938 film version of Pygmalion.
[more]
Gettysburg
Address in Shavian For skor n
sevan jirz agO Qr ...
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| .................. | The lionspaw
font must be installed to view the following. More on phonetics
<HERDER> should be written 
ha:da haada
or 
hXdD hXdD
hDbDt [hXbDt] Ha hXdD slept on gOt her [hx] /harbart [hxbDt] Ha hXdD slept on gOt her [hx] Herbert the herder slept on goat hair. However, due to a typo, hair and her were reversed /hxbDt Ha hxdD slept on gOt hX.
The Lionspaw font was developed
by Lionel Ghoti - a pseudonym: both names are puns
This chart is not much help to someone who does know the sounds that match up with the IPA characters. There are other web pages that deal with the correspondences between Shavian shapes and key words. shavian-ipa-red2.gif This chart is not compatible with Androcles and the Lion so air and er need to be reversed. The page on the origin of the Shaw alphabet
will probably be of interest. The first full articulation of the
project appeared in the preface
to a 1941 book.
Revised 12kb
Alternate Notations for IPA phonemes TWS = traditional writing system, SA = Shaw Alphabet Starting with the 13 simple or uncombined vowels, the keywords are note: E and O are sometimes considered to be diphthongs ei/ou
Compare this to [Uni] < I txt Du xks > and [Englik] < ai toot dhx oks > Unifon merges the awe and ah phonemes and assigns x. Unifon could easily assign x and X to discriminate the two sounds. Unifon is much easier to keep straight than keyboard Shavian. El, Ap, Ok, hCk, hUp can be deciphered without a key when one is told that the lazy U [C] represents the u sound in pull and the rest of the upper case letters are all long vowels. On the next line, 13 combined vowels
or diphthongs are listed
Does it make sense to learn keyboard locations
for ligatures?
By comparison, Unifon is a breeze: ace is As, ease is Ez. ice is Is, Ot is oat, and ooze is Uz. [ Shavian Es, Iz, Fs, Ot, Mz]. Unfortunately, Unifon has its unnecessary combinations as well. Y is you, qt is out [AUt], Ql is oil, herder is hcdc or hcrdcr [Shavian hXda/hXdD]. Shavian has no way to distinguish British non-rhortic speech and American rhortic speech. hXda or hXdD is as close as we can get. Unifon has no good way to distingish the first and second syllable in herder. more www.unifon.org/shaw-alfa.html Notations that do not make substitutions for combinations are simpler. See the case for Uni-Case. Spanglish uses digraphs such as yu, ais, aut, oil, hrr, hrrdr, ir, er, aart, or, tur, tair, and aur. Hasselquist's Iqliz simplifies ire/our/are to ar. "I need to but some air in our far tire..." becomes something like "Aai nid tu pwt sam er in aar faar taar befor wi gow tu faar." or "A nid tu p't s'm er in ar far tar bifor wi go tu far. The redundant keys are qQ, xX, and cC. These are reused in augmented alphabets. However, the assignments are very easy to forget and usually requires a key. Ascott's Saundspel uses q for ng, c for ae, and x for ? Some caps could be used without messing up the SO for show and CRC for church seems to work without too much visual disruption. liZr for leisure and and garaaZ/garaaj Wot izz thi Aj av yur garaaj. shavian-ipa-red2.gif
Some potential confusion surrounds the pronunciation of words such as on, are, our, and err because the British pronunciation is a little different than American pronunciation.
The only missing phonogram appears to be /3:/. In
Shavian it is always 3:r.
Shavian does a better job with ah and awe [y and Y].
Unifon represents both with [x]
&meric& hau aar yu
CUT AND PASTED LETTERS
A Herder: a
H PMF or pictographic monofon is an attempt to re-romanize shavian.
Over 50% of the shapes are the same but many have been reassigned to different
sounds [phonemes].
MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, she says youll be glad to see her when you know
what shes come
act 3
Act 4
SHAW'S PREFACE TO PYGMALION [Musical version: MY FAIR LADY]
Shaw becomes interested in Phonetics in 1878 When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. The importance of Phonetics Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington,
and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of
a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on
the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it
Sweet's shorthand [Current] I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an illnatured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly. Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the patent shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. [Sweet's] true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. Pitman's shorthand The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopædia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman's. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Was Sweet the model for Prof. Higgins?
Eoghan [Eoghan [nOt]:
[Steve's [stIvz] alternate transcription]
[Many of the differences are there for effect and do not indicate that Hugh's transcription in error but rather that in a phonemic transcription there is a range of possible pronunciations. There are some standardized spellings in Shavian such as H for the [and] n for [and] & v for [of] which I have ignored.] Comments welcomed
If someone wants to work on a Shavian dictionary, I will put it up.
Other notations: Quickscript and Readscript Kinglsey Read, the inventor of the Shaw Alphabet in 1950 went on to
publish a simpler script in 1960 called Quickscript.
Phonemic Transcription Systems for English
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long
endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate,
we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living
and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the
living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be
here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last
full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth
of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall not perish from the earth.
Hi Scott, [scott wrote] I am new to this. I am sure that this is a newbie question. I have been getting along pretty well with it, but I am having a very difficult time trying to decide what to do with the "er" ending on words. I also have a difficult time figuring out when to use the "Up" character, and when to use "Ado". Any suggestion would help. Get a Longman's pronunciation dictionary or some other one that uses IPA, then with an IPA to Shavian table you should have no problem. unstressed er endings = D
Phonetic transcription or sound spelling takes a while to get used to. Here are a couple of good test cases. Shavian has both a stressed and unstressed version of ER. Most of those on in the discussion group don't make a clear distinction between the two. Some of the answer can be found at http://www.unifon.org/shaw-alfa.html You can also ask newbie questions that some members of the Shavian forum seem to object to at the phonology forum -- www.egroups.com/group/saundspel. In a one syllable word there is no difference between ado and up.
Normally the stressed form is used.
GA=general american RP=BBC British Educated accent GA RP ALT RP AL GA HERder hXdD hXda hyda HARder hRdD hyda hyrdar perTURB pDtXb patXb partarb air x x ea ear/er cub kub kub kab kab curb kurb kub kub kDb disturb distXb distyb
Steve
Romaji by Prof. David B. Kelley [Ph.D. Linguistics] more pmf This ancient find in the city of Ras Shamra is the earliest indication of a more or less conventional alphabetical order. Dr. Kelley has speculated that the order is related to the 28 asterisms or lunar mansions or houses found in ancient zodiacs. This order would have been very important in ancient times and may have served as a mnemonic. As shown here, the script is related to the more complex accadian cuneiform. Rosetta Stone. Abecedary
Eglsh:
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| r | 
Visit Hotsuma another
highly analytical notation
Link Alpha Index 1-index-spelling 
Send comments to
saundspel@egroups.com
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© 2000
BETA
Information Design
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This
chart provides the IPA correspondences for the Shaw alphabet characters.
A more condensed one based on the chart found in Androcles & the Lion
can be found 
The
problem was that the first person to create a digital font did not spend
much time selecting the keyboard locations for the new phonograms. Many
of the key assigments are arbitrary. All of the others who later
developed Shavian followed the lead of the first. The result is a
dozen of arbitrary assignments that are impossible to guess. Text
written in this new code is almost impossible to read without a key.
The unifon keyboard code is much better and U2 is an improvement of Unifon
I. All unigraphic codes are going to be initially more difficult than the
more familiar digraphic codes.
Some confusion regarding
the representation of herder air
Are you sure
she heard her heder call. [traditional]
ago
ah 
age
errth-her 
air 
are 
ash
ir-ear
eel
el
AS
will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which
I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their
language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell
it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like.
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some
other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible
to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The
reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that
is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been
heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past.
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