Shavian alphabet 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 alphabet consists of
Shavian alphabet similar to conventional orthography. Each character in the Shavian Alphabet requires only a single stroke to be written on paper. The writing utensil needs to be lifted up only once when writing each character, thus enabling faster writing. Spelling in "Androcles" follows the phonemic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to produce the canonical spellings spontaneously. For instance, most North American dialects merge