Introducing Shavian
The symbols above might seem to belong on some baked clay tablet in a museum, or on the hull of a starship in a science-fiction movie, but in fact they represent one word in the English language, which happens to be the name of the alphabet in which they are written: "Shavian".
The Shavian alphabet exists as an alternative to the Roman alphabet in which most English is written. The Roman alphabet in more-or-less its current state was brought to England by Latin-speaking monks. With its 26 letters, this alphabet was used to write Latin very efficiently, but it is not ideally suited to transcribing the English language, which has over 40 basic speech sounds. In order to get around this, some letters can represent any one of several sounds, and groups of letters are used to represent a single sound. The word "through", for example, is composed of three basic sounds (th, r, oo) -- but it has seven letters. The first sound can only be written with two letters, and the last sound here takes up four letters. Remove the first two letters of "through", and logically you should end up with a word that rhymes with "through". You don't, though. As you might expect, a rough, rueful time is had even by thoughtful people learning the English language. English spelling used to be more phonetic than it is today (that is, its spellings used to correspond more regularly to the sounds they represented) -- but further disparities have arisen due to the tendency of spelling conventions to persist even after the sounds of a language have changed.
English, then, is written in a dead, unsuitable alphabet, using spellings which often represent dead sounds. The playwright, critic, socialist and polymath George Bernard Shaw knew this, and wanted to do something about it. He did all his writing in the phonetically-based Pitman's Shorthand, and recognised the benefits that a phonetic alphabet could offer. He gave instructions in his will that for the first 21 years after his death, the earnings from the royalties of all his works should be spent on the creation and promotion of a phonetic alphabet, using 40 or more letters, each of which represented one sound -- and one sound only -- of the English language.
If Shaw's will had been executed as he had wished, the alphabet would have had spent on it several hundred thousand pounds (worth millions today). However, the will was successfully contested by other hopeful beneficiaries, and an out-of-court settlement awarded the alphabet a piddling £8,300.
The British Public Trustee, who had been charged with the responsibility of arranging the design and promotion of the new alphabet, offered £500 of the money as a prize in a competition for the design of the new alphabet. By New Year's Day 1959, the closing date of the competition, 467 entries had been received. Of these, four were judged to be worthy of reward, and the author of each received £125. Ostensibly, the four designs would be merged together to produce one super-alphabet; but the final alphabet was based largely on the design of one Kingsley Read, an architect and designer. The alphabet is usually referred to as Shavian -- named, then, not after its creator, but after the man who made its creation possible.
After the prize money had been distributed amongst the winners, £7,800
remained of the portion of Shaw's estate that had been allocated to the
alphabet. The vast majority of this was used to produce the only book
that has so far been printed in the Shavian alphabet: a bi-alphabetic
version of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion. It was published
by Penguin Books on 22 November 1962. Around 47,000 copies were printed
in total: 13,000 hardbacks for distribution to libraries around the world,
and the rest paperbacks for public sale.
Click here for an explanation of the alphabet and a table of its letters
