
Shavian alphabet - sandinmyjoints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
======
skrebbel
This is cool, and I agree that English urgently needs a better script.
However, design goal #3 (distinct from the Latin alphabet) makes it clear that
this is just a toy, or a proof of concept if you may. If you consciously
design a script to be as alien as possible to the target audience (English
speakers), then you simply don't _want_ adoption.

I'm no expert, and I bet this has been explored, but I always felt that
there's fantastic precedent in the world for using the Latin alphabet for
writing sounds that occur in English; especially in the Scandinavian
languages.

Eg the word "sauce", which consists of two identical consonants and a single
vowel. Why not choose å for that vowel? Sås makes a lot of sense, and
accidentally is also the Swedish word for "sauce" iirc. Or what about the two
"th" sounds? Icelandic has got you covered: Instead of "this" and "thin",
can't we write "ðis" and "þin"?

Note: this is not without precedent. The Norwegians totally overhauled their
script until it was pretty much phonetic. This gave them fantastic benefits
such as way fewer pupils struggling with dyslexia (at least, until learning
Danish or English), and heartwarmingly lovely spellings of loan words such as
"restaurang" and "stasjon".

It could be done.

Personally I think it's totally insane to use a phonetic script (as opposed to
eg Chinese) but then not spell out the sounds. The Finns, Norwegians, Italians
and Russians (and plenty others) got it right.

~~~
singularity2001
> I agree that English urgently needs a better script.

Why? Some ortografic adjustments wud do.

~~~
ahje
Fråm a Nårdik pørspæktiv its nåt riily ænyÞing batt än ædjustment. I assume
the same could be applied for German speakers, although their range of local
additions to the Latin alphabet differs somewhat from ours.

That's really just using slight modifications, using our own perception of
what English sounds to us though. I expect it would look quite alien to the
rest of the World, if the Brits started doing it based on their own sense of
what written english should look like.

While spoken and written English differ quite a lot, I suspect that to be one
of the reasons as to why English has been so successful as a a Global trade
language (I'm deliberately ignoring the Brittish Empire here). If English
hadn't been standardized, and all English-speaking countries had their own
separate written English based on their local dialects, the situation would be
quite different.

~~~
citation_please
Fram e Djurmen purßpektev, ets e bet kahmplekäted.

~~~
ahje
Precisely! :D

------
cmroanirgo
It reminds me of this joke [0]:

"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will
be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was
the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English
spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in
plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make
the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of
"k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf
20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to
reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will
enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to
akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in
the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z"
and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou"
and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no
mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze
drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst
plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl."

[0] [https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-
be...](https://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-
german/)

(I'm sure I saw this as an email well before 2006 though).

~~~
russellsprouts
A version of that joke has been attributed to Mark Twain, though this
source[0] says it was more probably M.J. Yilz, in this[1] 1971 letter to the
Economist.

[0]:
[http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm](http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)
[1]: [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-
yilz....](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html)

~~~
cmroanirgo
Many thanks for that. To me, it always seemed like it was written by someone
with a flair for the literary.

------
tomcam
George Bernard Shaw often railed against the inconsistencies of English. Its
grammar and spelling are unbelievably inconsistent and a constant headache
even to native speakers. I love English and think it’s a very expressive
language. I used to be an incredibly good speller (AutoCorrect has made that
less important). I have a superb grasp of its grammar as both a speaker and a
writer.

But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal
with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little
return for all the heartache.

~~~
empath75
Those bugs and inconsistencies are really just manifestations of the
complicated history of the language. There are few languages which have as
many diverse parent languages as English has.

~~~
oblio
No offense, but are you sure about that or are you monolingual? You'd be
surprised what rich history even obscure languages have.

~~~
psergeant
This is largely true of European languages:

[http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif](http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif)

That Norman invasion was a big deal.

~~~
oblio
Heh. "Rumanian" has 2 roots on that list: proto-Indoeuropean and Latin.

In reality, lexical analysis of Romanian shows that it has the following
roots:

* pre-Indoeuropean (some words with unknown origins, just a handful, but still)

* proto-Indoeuropean (another small bunch of words)

* Dacian/Thracian (original Indoeuropeans to settle the region; another somewhat small contribution)

* Latin (40% but basically the core vocabulary)

* Slavic (30%, especially nouns, but rarely verbs)

* French (around 20%, imports from the late 18th century onward)

* German, Turkish, Hungarian, English, etc.

So, you were saying? :) Even if you disregard the minor contributions, there's
2 prehistoric origins (pre-Indoeuropean and proto-Indoeuropean), 2 ancient
origins (Dacian and Latin), 1 major medieval influence (Slavic) and 1 major
modern influence (French).

The European continent had waaaay more invasions than the British Isles, don't
forget that ;)

------
mkl
I learned the Shavian alphabet a few years ago, and gradually built up a list
of transliterations as I read a few ebooks partially converted over (read a
bit, add some more words, repeat). I had to make the font characters too (for
Deja Vu, but I didn't contribute them back as mine seemed a bit amateurish).

What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be in
different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets
you read quickly. Unfortunately that would likely be the case for any English
spelling reform effort.

I subsequently lost most of my (NZ English) transliterations too, if I
remember correctly.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" What made me give up is recognising just how different spellings would be
in different dialects - it means you lose the whole-word recognition that lets
you read quickly."_

Losing the ability to read quickly is its big Achilles heel of Shavian and
Quikscript.

This can be mitigated somewhat as you get used to spelling things mostly the
same way and reading your own spellings, but when you have to read someone
else's writing it's back to sounding out the words in your head, which will
slow down reading speed to a crawl compared to reading traditional English
orthography.

~~~
andai
I have been using Quikscript in my journals, it saves time and strain when
writing by hand.

Still getting the hang of reading it, but that's to be expected with any new
writing system.

What did really impress me is that when you read poetry in Shavian /
Quikscript, you can SEE the rhymes as repeating visual patterns, because what
sounds the same, looks the same.

~~~
oblio
> you can SEE the rhymes as repeating visual patterns, because what sounds the
> same, looks the same.

Welcome to phonetic languages :))))

Sorry for making fun of your comment, but as a speaker of a (fully?) phonetic
language, it sounded like discovering something basic :)

For speakers of phonetic language, English rhyming is a mess. You get used to
it, but "through" and "flu", really? :P

~~~
andai
That's an interesting point. I also speak a language with a phonetic writing
system, but I have never read poetry in it, so did not have the chance to
"see" these repeating patterns of sound-symbols.

Curiously, it seems to be easier to see rhymes when first learning to read a
new phonetic system, because I still see the shapes (see the sounds!) instead
of perceiving the words directly.

Identical shapes are "grouped" together visually, in the same way as when I
look at some Japanese text (I can't read Japanese), the identical symbols
"jump" out of the page.

[https://i.imgur.com/qbRDxiu.png](https://i.imgur.com/qbRDxiu.png)

------
pmoriarty
I prefer Quikscript:

 _" To provide field testing of the new alphabet [Shavian], Read organized a
lengthy public testing phase of Shavian by some 500 users from around the
world who spoke different dialects of English. Once he had analyzed the
results of those tests, Read decided to revise Shavian to incorporate a number
of changes to improve the alphabet and make it both easier and faster to
write. He called the revised alphabet "Quikscript"..."_[1]

The main advantage of Shavian is that it is part of unicode while Quikscript
isn't. I'm not sure why that's the case. I'd have expected it to be the other
way around.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickscript)

[2] -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript/)

------
rootbear
As much as I think English needs spelling reform, I don't think a brand new
alphabet is the answer. In particular, the Shavian alphabet would be a
nightmare for people like me who had trouble with reversed letters as a child.
(My mother was particularly amused when I once wrote "rubberband" as
rudderdanb.) Symmetry between the voiced and unvoiced letters is cool in
theory but a disaster for dyslexics like me.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I'm not dyslexic at all, and I think that alphabet would be a nightmare to use
for the same reason.

------
Smaug123
To go in completely the opposite direction, Ithkuil (ithkuil.net) is a
constructed language whose script encodes semantic meaning rather than
phonetic. A written word may be pronounced in several qualitatively different
ways, as long as they have the same meaning.

~~~
singularity2001
Try chinese signs in japan

------
xenadu02
It would be far easier to make existing English spelling more phonetic using
the existing alphabet.

Such efforts wud hav the benefit of beeng immeedeeatly obveeus to existeeng
speekurs

~~~
iafisher
The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces
English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United
Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always
going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers."_

Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word.

If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they
speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically.

Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for
some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd
have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.

~~~
alangpierce
There's even plenty of precedent for the same word having different spellings
based on region, like with color/colour. I imagine it would be similarly
normal to learn that "tomahto" is the British spelling of "tomato" (or
whatever it would end up being).

~~~
dsego
We have that in south slavic languages. For example this word meaning time (or
weather) spoken and written differently based on dialect/language: vreme,
vrime, vrijeme. [1] Maybe a regional spelling reform could lead to English
starting to break apart into several different languages?

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-
Croatian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian)

------
_nalply
I'm afraid that phonetic alphabets are useless for English because
pronunciation is not stable [1] and because it has a lot of local variants. I
suspect that English will fossilise its current orthography and turn words
into logograms composed of Latin letters, similar to Chinese.

[1]:
[https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678](https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/432678)

~~~
BerislavLopac
Every single living language out there has unstable pronunciation and a lot of
local variants. A language is a living thing and is constantly in the flux,
both through time and space.

One problem with English spelling lies in tradition, with many pronunciation
changes not being followed in spelling -- it used to have quite a phonetic
spelling: if you read today's English phonetically it will be quite similar to
Middle English. Another problem are inconsistencies added just for the sake of
it: e.g. "queen" was originally spelled "cwene" (it's an Anglo-Saxon word) but
the spelling was changed according to rules of French orthography used by
Norman scribes.

English could adopt phonetic variant of Latin alphabet quite easily -- there
is a clearly defined set of phonemes it's using -- but it probably won't
because there it is too widely spread across a large number of countries (it's
an official language in 59 countries, twice as many as the second language,
French, at 29 [0]), and there is no central standardisation body whose
decisions might be accepted by all of them.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_numbe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language)

------
bloak
The point has been made that different people pronounce English differently. I
don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle: if you made a sort of union of
RP and standard American pronunciation, probably the rest of the English-
speaking world would be happy to use a spelling system based on that, if they
were willing to accept any change at all, that is.

A more serious problem, I think, is how the pronunciation of a single word
element varies between words even for a single speaker of the standard
language. How would a reformed English spelling cope with the vowels in
"photograph" and "photography", for example? Perhaps there's a neat solution,
but I don't know what it is. At least I'm fairly sure that phonemic transcript
isn't it.

~~~
seszett
Honestly I'm not sure what difference there is between "photograph" and
"photography" (now I looked it up and I would never have guessed) but most
languages that have sound changes like that just change the letters between
variants of a word, instead of keeping the same letters and changing their
pronunciation.

In Dutch, long vowels that turn into short vowels make things like _meer_ /
_meren_ (single/plural). In German, you would have _Land_ / _Länder_
(single/plural as well). French also does it with say, _régler_ / _règlement_
(verb/substantive).

English does it too in some cases, with say _wife_ / _wives_. So it could very
well be something like _photögraph_ / _phötagröphy_. I don't see why it
wouldn't work.

~~~
Smaug123
If we only added the schwa (ə) to the script, then in my Received
Pronunciation accent, it would be "photəgraph" versus "photogrəphy". On the
other hand, English has an astonishing ability to replace vowels with schwas;
pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable
spoken as "ə".

~~~
psergeant
> pretty much every sentence remains comprehensible with every vowel syllable
> spoken as "ə"

Making learning a language where the vowel sounds are the important one a
freakin’ nightmare for Anglophones.

------
seanmcdirmid
The biggest drawback of a new alphabet is that we burn word shapes into our
brain (we don’t read words by letter unless they are unfamiliar), so we would
have to get used to a bunch of new shapes (a major disadvantage) even if
pronouncing unfamiliar words was easier (a minor benefit).

Sunk cost.

------
glibgil
Deseret Alphabet attempt from the 19th century
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet)

------
lolc
As spoken language evolves we have to eventually adapt the written language.
The alternative is written English. That beast managed to incorporate a whole
body of words from another language without adapting the spelling of those
words. It ended in the tears you get every year afresh when you try to teach
kids the broken state that is English orthography.

The Shavian alphabet is attacking this from the wrong end though. For one
thing, we already have a phonetic alphabet. There is no point in inventing
another. The main issue though is that you want your alphabet be stable
against vowel pronounciation changes. Vowel pronounciation changes quickly and
carries little semantic meaning. If you try and encode that in your alphabet
it's going to need an update as you move from city to city.

The abjad (consonant alphabet) approach of just leaving the vowels as an
exercise to the reader may seem a little extreme. It has the distinct
advantage of staying stable over centuries though.

------
gfiorav
Spanish is already mostly like this. What you read is what you pronounce. Any
other languages like this anybody knows of?

~~~
oceliker
Turkish is also mostly "WYRIWYP". We like to say that it's pronounced as it is
written. As a rule, there are no exceptions in pronunciation, but there are
some exceptions to that rule. :)

Dialects within the country and in Cyprus use the "Istanbul" Turkish for
formal communication, so there exists only one "correct" way to spell each
word. But of course, for casual talk and texting, each dialect writes certain
words the way they pronounce them.

\\* One cool corollary of the WYRIWYP rule is that there's only one correct
spelling of any given sequence of sounds. If you take some native Turkish
speakers and have them listen to a made-up word, 99% of them will come up with
the same spelling independently of each other.

~~~
rootbear
It's interesting that Turkish is bidirectionally phonetic. That's not always
the case. Some languages have strict text->speech rules but ambiguities in
speech->text. Some are the other way around. I seem to recall that 'z' in
Italian has some ambiguity like that, but I forget the details.

------
lintuxvi
Interesting! I journal a ton, and love the act of putting pen to paper, but
daily wish I could write as fast as I think.

~~~
themodelplumber
I can highly recommend shorthand. I had the same desire. It's only been 2
years and some change for me, but I can write at about 80% of my typing speed
last I measured it. It's wayyyy faster than my normal writing and my hand
"switches gears" automatically when I start to write fast.

Here's a blog post that's unrelated, but you can see a little bit of my
shorthand writing in the first photo.

[https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/modeling-and-
detecting](https://www.friendlyskies.net/intj/modeling-and-detecting)

I started with Ford Shorthand (.com) and then added onto it from there.
Anyway, can definitely recommend.

~~~
pmoriarty
There's a huge difference in the effort required to learn shorthand vs
something like Shavian or Quikscript.

I learned Quikscript in less than a week. From what I've heard, most
shorthands take months or years to learn.

~~~
themodelplumber
Ah, I believe I'm familiar with this thinking. I have discussed it with other
writers of shorthand. Were you aware that you can extend Quikscript into a
shorthand system with some simple steps?

In my case, I have added my own extensions to Ford, such as representations of
words and phrases, and have added on some conventions from Gregg as well.

IMO the distinction some draw between "shorthand" and "script" for example can
make it needlessly difficult for beginners to get started.

------
divanvisagie
Are there any examples of people trying to make a change to the English
language and being successful? It seems to me that most of the changes occur
naturally rather than by directed effort.

~~~
bloak
I don't believe it's possible to make a clear distinction between "naturally"
and "by directed effort" in the case of language. The degree to which a person
is conscious of the change they are making might be a theoretical criterion,
but it would usually be impossible to apply it in practice as in most cases we
don't know who the person was, let alone what their mental state was at the
time. Even if we know who made a change and they are still living they usually
wouldn't be able to tell us reliably what they were thinking.

There are plenty of individual English words whose spellings were deliberately
changed by some person for one reason or another. Perhaps the only major
change affecting a large number of words promulgated by a single person was
Noah Webster's reform of American English that created most of the differences
between American English and British English. There's a book called _Does
spelling matter?_ which has a lot of information about English spelling and
historical reform proposals (though the book is perhaps not entirely reliable:
there are some weird non-sequiturs in it that made me suspicious).

------
egjerlow
Seems a strange criteria that it should be _at least_ 40 letters - to me it
seems like the goal should be to use as few letters as possible while still
achieving its other goals?

~~~
geowwy
English has around 40 phonemes so 40 letters makes sense

------
badrabbit
Reminds me of logban and esperanza. Nice ideas,but ultimately a complete waste
of time(outside of enjoyment).

~~~
galaxyLogic
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)

Lojban baseline was completed in 1997 so I think it's too early to tell
whether that effort was completely wasted. Esperanto has had its chance but
never really reached its goals I assume. But Lojban or something it might
evolve into could be the language of the future.

------
sjf
It's not immediately obvious what the benefit is over Pitman script, which is
mentioned in the article. It seems like Pitman is faster to write because the
characters are simpler, and afaik Pitman had a wider adoption, I've never
heard of the Shavian alphabet before.

~~~
pmoriarty
As I mentioned in another post in this thread, an advantage of Shavian (and
Quikscript) is the speed with which one learns it -- less than a week for me,
vs months or years with Pitman (or Gregg).

Also, the wider adoption of Pitman (and Gregg) is an advantage only if you
want others to be able to read what you wrote. If you prefer privacy (for,
say, your personal journal), then the rarer Shavian or Quikscript are better
choices -- though, of course, for more security you should use a code or
cipher.

------
danieltillett
Since we are talking about the lost cause of English spelling reform here is
my contribution to the long list [0].

0\. [https://www.cutspel.com](https://www.cutspel.com)

------
G4BB3R
That's why I love Esperanto, for the 1:1 correspondence to phonemes and sounds

------
TuGuQuKu
Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the
same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from
5-6 others.

~~~
userbinator
The fact that many of them are rotations/reflections of others also makes it
much harder to recognise when text is in its correct orientation. Not really a
problem if you're reading a book, but for things like signage and labeling I
could see it being a source of ambiguity.

Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional,
"evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important
layer of error-resistance.

~~~
saalweachter
Also the characters which are basically larger and smaller versions of the
same shape. Now to figure out if you're at the correct apartment, you need to
know the font size used on the door.

~~~
KirinDave
It's not really possible to write a normal word without using one vowel, so
this problem doesn't exist at all. The tall letters are pretty cleverly
selected in this fashion.

