Shavian alphabet the Shavian glyphs. Shavian alphabet The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as "phonetic" as possible (that is, letters should have a to phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings". The Shavian
Shavian alphabet could afford to publish only one book: a version of Shaw's play "Androcles and the Lion", in a bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings. (1962 Penguin Books, London). Copies were sent to major libraries in English-speaking countries. Between 1963 and 1965, 8 issues of the journal, "Shaw-script", were published by Kingsley Read in Worcester, U.K. The journal used Shaw's Alphabet, and much of the content was submitted by Shaw enthusiasts. In more recent years, there have been several published works of classical literature transliterated into Shavian. The first, released in 2012, was the works of Edgar Allan Poe