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Summary Shaw's preface turned out to be more historically significant than Wilson's entire book. Starting on page 22 in this preface, Shaw explains the problems with the traditional orthography and suggests a solution: a new alphabet for English. He then develops his concept of a new 42 character non-Roman phonemic alphabet for English. Shaw later published a few short commentaries in the London Times on the same topic which are reprinted in Tauber's Shaw on Language.
Shaw begins by describing a "...hopelessly inadequate alphabet devised centuries before the English language existed to record another and very different language.
Even this alphabet is reduced to absurdity by a foolish orthography based on the notion that the business of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word instead of its sound and meaning. (p. 22) Shaw's rationale for the new script is utilitarian - adopting a new alphabet would save time and effort. "The waste of time in spelling imaginary sounds and their history (or etymology as it is called) is monstrous in English and French." p. 28 It typically takes over 500 letters to indicate less than 400 sounds, so a unigraphic system would save 20% off the top. Cut spelling, by removing superfluous words, achieves a similar savings.
Later after documenting problems with pronunciation caused by the lack of unigraphic sound signs ["..we cannot note down the diphthongal pronunciation until we have a A HREF="shaw-pref-2.html#36dips">separate single letter for every vowel"], Shaw reiterates, "My concern here, however, is not with pronunciation but with the saving of time wasted. "We try to extend our alphabet by writing two letters instead of one; but we make a mess of this device. "With reckless inconsistency we write sweat and sweet, and then write whet and wheat, just the contrary." p. 35
According to Shaw, "Our present spelling is incapable of indicating the sounds of our words and does not pretend to; but the new spelling would prescribe an official pronunciation." p. 45
Shaw believes that English has 42 distinctive sounds (18 vowels, 24 consonants) and calls for a new alphabet with one letter for each sound. Shaw thinks that most of the work has been completed, "What remains to be done is to make the stroke and hooks and curves and circles look nice." p. 43 The new alphabet must be so different that no one could possibly mistake the new [42 character] alphabet for the old. p.39
This preface to Wilson's book came to the attention of Kinglsey Read, an amateur typographer, who shared an interest in improving the English writing system. The exchange of letters between Shaw and Read initiated the idea for the Shaw proposed British alphabet competition. (See Bob Brown's paper) The winning entry was submitted by Read. Notice that similar sounds have similar shapes. B is a P rotated 180 degrees. D is a T rotated 180º.
Shaw also believed in simplifying both the English language and its writing system.
"... 'broken English,' which is a sort of home made pidgin, is quite sufficient for intelligible speech. Instead of laughing at them and mimicking them derisively we should learn from them." He was a supporter of BASIC English "a thought out pidgin, ...[that] gets rid of much of our grammatical superfluities." (p. 44)
The approximate page breaks in the original publication are shown in red. The page number is inserted next to the first paragraph break on the page. If the page has no paragraph break, the page number is often left out. Some new paragraph breaks have been added by the editor of the electronic copy. The graphics do not appear in the book. These have been added.
A brief history of the Shaw alphabet
By R. G. Collin
George Bernard Shaw, an Irishman by birth, was one of England's
greatest playwrights. He was an expert on the English
language and served on the BBC's Spoken English Advisory Committee
from 1926 to 1939. His continual use of written
English drove him to seek a more economical way to write it
down. As a result he learned Pitman shorthand and most of his
plays were written, fully spelled with this 40-letter alphabet.
In his later years he was passionate about reforming written
English and sought a wholly new alphabet "to be used and taught
concurrently with the old alphabet until one or the other
proves the fitter to survive."
As early as 1901 Shaw was publicly supporting spelling reform.
Shaw called one of his plays, Pygmalion, an "advertisement
in the science of phonetics" and between the first edition in
1912 and the last in 1942 he experimented with different ways to
represent the cockney accent of one of the plays characters.
Sometime during this period Shaw came to the conclusion that
digraphic schemes or proposals that used dicritical marks or
extra letters would not suffice to clarify the existing alphabet.
In January 1942 Ronald Kingsley Read (in later life he dropped
the Ronald) wrote to Shaw about some ideas for phonetic
writing. Shaw was encouraging in his reply and a friendly correspondence
ensued. In 1943 Read sent a "manual" to Shaw
setting out a new alphabet and its detailed rationale. Shaw
was impressed and wrote to another English spelling reformer C.
K. Ogden "This is far and away the best alphabet with the best
head at the back of it that has yet come my way." Kingsley
Read was certainly qualified for designing a new alphabet, he
was educated as a designer and started his own company as a
lettering expert, supplying everything from neon and shop-signs
to sign writing and calligraphy. Furthermore he was
interested in phonetics as a result of his involvement in drama
and speech training.
Shaw died in 1950 a wealthy man, most of that wealth being earmarked
for his new English alphabet, which would use a
completely new set of between 40 and 50 characters. His Will
also requested that an estimate be made of the world's
man-hours wasted in writing and printing English with an alphabet
of 26 instead of 40 or more letters, and a valuation in
money of those wasted hours. Although Shaw's intentions were
clear enough, other beneficiaries of Shaw's Will led by the
British Museum, challenged the legal validity of the Clause
on development of the new alphabet. After a long and costly
hearing this Clause was pronounced invalid on a legal technicality.
Eventually, with Sir James Pitman's intervention, some
£8,300 from Shaw's estate was given towards the development
of the new alphabet.
In 1958 the Public Trustee, as executor, announced a world-wide
competition to secure ideal designs for the Shaw
alphabet, the main object being "the saving of labour giving
a means of writing and printing the English language which will be
more economical of the writers time, of the paper and ink of
the printer, and of transport and storage." Competitors had one
year in which to prepare their alphabetic entries at which time
467 entries were received from around the world. A panel of
judges including Sir James Pitman and Peter MacCarthy, a lecturer
in phonetics at Leeds University, evaluated the entries.
Four of the entries were found to conform to the requirements
stipulated in the Will. One of these entries was from a
Canadian, Pauline Barrett, the other three were British, J.
F. Magrath, S. L. Pugmire and Kingsley Read. The prize money
of £500 was distributed evenly amongst these four entries.
One of these four, the alphabet designed by Kingsley Read, was
eventually chosen to fulfil the final condition in Shaw's Will
which was that the chosen alphabet be used alongside
conventional written English to produce a book containing his
play Androcles and the Lion. This book was to be distributed
free to all public libraries of Britain, the Commonwealth and
North and South America and to all National libraries of the
world.
On 20 November 1962, 12 years after Shaw's death, two editions
of the book were published by Penguin Books. The
hardcover edition of 13,000 books was distributed free to libraries
around the world as stipulated in Shaw's Will while an
additional 40, 000 paperback copies were issued commercially.
The introduction of Androcles and the Lion included an
offer by Sir James Pitman to "arrange 'circles' of five or six
who, drawn together in a friendship by Shaw's alphabet, will all
circulate their own letters to which each in turn will add."
Pitman however became too busy to carry out this promise and
Read undertook to handle the invited correspondence from those
that were interested in developing their skills in the Shaw
alphabet. As a result of this correspondence Read was able to
test the first version of the Shaw alphabet through an
organised, world-wide correspondence between people of greatly
varying speech accents including British (from many
counties), American and Australian. He also published a small
duplicated magazine in the Shaw alphabet called ShawScript
for a number of years after the publication of Androcles and
the Lion. From Read's extensive experience with writers of the
alphabet from a number of different English speaking regions
of the world he observed some deficiencies in the alphabet. In
particular four of the original characters in the Shaw alphabet
tended to be "malformed grotesquely." Surprisingly however
there was little variation in actual spelling. Read states that
"after four years of handing correspondence it seemed clear to me
that some graphic and phonetic changes in the alphabet would
increase its already striking facilities." Read went on to
implement a refined "final alphabet" which was further tested
with writers of the original Shaw alphabet willing to trial the
changes. Tests of the resultant second alphabet that Read termed
Quickscript were excellent. None of the letters were
found hard to write or read after a reasonable amount of practice
and they could often be joined to each other for even
quicker writing without losing their readability. Since 1967
Quickscript has been used satisfactorily and according to Read
"all who have experience of writing in both alphabets prefer
Quickscript's facilities and its relative simplicity in
sound-writing." Read died in 1975 at the age of 88. He would
have been pleased to know that the Quickscript alphabet
gained further impetus when in 1979 it was publicised in a widely
read and intriguing book published in Australia called The
Surprise Edition of Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 2. The 27-page
article written by Cole Turnley, who preferred the name
Second Shaw Alphabet to Quickscript, gave an extensive introduction
to the alphabet including its features and use.
Unfortunately the article generated very little interest with
the Australian public. It appears that both the original Shaw
alphabet and its derivative, Quickscript, have not gained the
support that such efficient and effortless methods of writing
deserve. Sadly, Shaw's conviction that such an alphabet would
quickly gain support through its inherent merits, and become
widely adopted, seems as fanciful today as ever.
References
Brown, B. The Shaw alphabet competition - some background. Simplified
Spelling Society Newsletter, April 1991.
Turnley, C. Second Shaw alphabet. The surprise edition of Cole's
Funny Picture book No. 2, 1979. Read, K. Quickscript,
its alphabet and manual. Smart, P. The Kingsley Read alphabet
collection: a catalogue. The Library University of Reading,
1983. Shaw, B. Androcles and the lion. Penguin Books, Public
Trustees Edition, 1962. Read, K. Sound-writing
1892-1972. In The Kingsley Read alphabet collection: a catalogue.
Further information
For a comparison of the Shaw alphabet with that of Quickscript
see Bob Richmond's site at
http://members.aol.com/RSRICHMOND/quickscript.html
Any person interested in obtaining a copy of the Quickscript
manual can email me at collin-@agresearch.cri.nz.
The manual is 26 pages long and is available for the cost of photocopying
and postage.
