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Place your fingers on your throat and say the first sound in the row
of letters, "p": you should feel your lips purse together, closing
fully and then breaking suddenly open. Your fingers should feel very little
vibration (unless you are pronouncing a vowel sound after the "p"),
and this is because when you pronounce "p" your vocal cords
do not vibrate; it is a voiceless consonant -- hence its tall form, since
all voiceless consonants are represented by tall letters in the Shavian
alphabet.
Now, keeping your fingers on your throat, say the first sound immediately
below this one, in the row of deep letters -- "b": you should
feel your lips do exactly the same thing they did as when they pronounced
"p", but this time your fingers should feel some vibration as
your vocal cords resonate, since "b" is a voiced consonant.
The sounds "p" and "b" share the same manner of articulation
in all respects except for voicing: when you say "b", you tense
your vocal cords and force air from your lungs up past them; when you
say "p", this doesn't happen. The similarity of articulation
shared by "p" and "b" is reflected in the shapes of
their Shavian letters: the deep symbol is simply the tall one rotated
through 180º.
If you look along the two rows from "p/b" to "ch/j",
saying the pairs of sounds as you go, you should notice that the same
relationships apply: for every pair, your lips and tongue do exactly the
same thing, but you voice the bottom member of the pair -- and the shapes
of the letters are identical except for rotation or reflection. (The last
two columns, "y/w" and "ng/h" do not reflect such
closely-tied articulatory relationships, and in some respects represent
a little discreet tidying-up on the part of the alphabet's designer.)
Now look at the two rows of simple short letters. Apart from the first
two pairs, "l/r" and "m/n" (again, perhaps a little
tidying-up), these are all vowels. Intuitively, or with a little knowledge
of phonetics, you should be able to notice some relationships between
the two members of each pair; but the nature of the correspondences is
not the same throughout the whole set of short letters.
Say the word "farmer". Did you just hear two "r"
sounds? If you did, then your accent is rhotic (you "say your r's"),
and you should be able to appreciate the formation of the compound letters
better than those people with non-rhotic accents.
Each of the compound letters is formed from two of the simple short letters.
The "r" sound is the second element of the first six in the
row. They are written together either because they form a pair of letters
which commonly occur together, almost as a single unit, or because a unique
letter is required to represent the corresponding sound in a non-rhotic
accent. For example, when people with non-rhotic accents say the word
"air", no "r" sound is pronounced, so such people
might look for a compound letter which represents a compound of the "egg"
and "ado" letters (which would more accurately
reflect their speech) -- but there is none, so the third letter in the
row must be used anyway. Indeed, the shapes of the two letters do not
fit together easily; the same goes for the fourth letter, "err".
One justification for this seemingly rhotic-oriented state of affairs
would be that all non-rhotic accents were historically rhotic too -- as
is reflected in the more conservative spelling of words like these, and
also "bear", "where", "fur" and "were".
Extra points
While all the letters of the Roman alphabet have two forms (lower and
upper case), each Shavian letter has only one form. The letter at the
beginning of a sentence is no different from the other letters, in form
or in size. However, proper nouns (the names of people, towns, etc.) may
be preceded by a "namer dot", which is placed at the height
of the tops of short letters. E.g.,
There is one more thing to remember when reading and writing in Shavian:
the four most common words in the English language are written with one
letter only, in order to make writing even quicker.
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