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An Introduction
![[bernard shaw]](shaw4.gif)
When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, his will provided for the development of a new alphabet for the English language, an alphabet of at least forty letters that could be used to write English without all the oddities of our traditional spelling. The 94-year-old Irish playwright died quite wealthy, and a few years later his old play Pygmalion(which ironically enough is about the sounds of English), in the form of the fabulously successful Broadway musical comedy My Fair Lady,swelled the funds allotted to this quixotic project to several million dollars. A court awarded most of this sum to an actors' equity (Shaw, a lifelong bachelor, had no heirs), but the rest of the money was in fact spent on inventing and promoting the Shaw alphabet. The trustees held a contest to design it, which resulted in the adoption of a design by Kingsley Read, a 72-year-old typographer who had actually corresponded with Shaw. Sir James Pitman, K.B.E., M.P. oversaw the whole project. Peter MacCarthy of the Department of Phonetics of the University of Leeds used the alphabet to transliterate Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion,as Shaw's will provided, and supposedly a copy of this curious work was sent to every library in the English speaking world. In 1962 Penguin Books published the book, in which the entire play is displayed on facing pages in the new alphabet and in traditional spelling, and I was fortunate enough to find a copy of it. I learned the alphabet, and can write it fairly easily, though I still find reading difficult. The book is out of print in 1999. Its cover has the title The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Androcles and the Lion,while the title page reads in full Androcles and the Lion, an Old Fable Renovated; by Bernard Shaw: with a Parallel Text in Shaw's Alphabet to be Read in Conjunction, Showing its Economies in Writing and Reading.(The book is too old to have an ISBN.)The firm of Stephen Austin and Sons, Ltd. in Hertford, England, designed the type, in 12-point fonts corresponding to Roman, italic, and bold face.
What is the Shaw Alphabet? It's a "phonetic" (more correctly a phonemic) alphabet for the English language. Using it, you can write English the way you speak it. Each letter represents a single English sound, so that what you say is what you write (WYSIWYW?), and what you write is what you read out loud. Needless to say, the Shaw alphabet bears almost no resemblance to any alphabet you've ever seen before. The Shaw Alphabet is often called "Shavian" - an adjective facetiously applied to any aspect of Bernard Shaw (he never used the "George").
Is the Shaw alphabet of any use today? As a practical spelling reform for English, it's unlikely at best. My chief use of it has been as a personal cipher, and I've often wondered how a cryptographer would approach a phonemic cipher with more than forty characters. You'll learn a lot about the sounds of English by learning to write down your own speech in the Shaw alphabet.
Shaw directed that the standard of pronunciation reflected in the Shaw alphabet Androcles and the Lionbe "that recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described as Northern English." On the Unicode site you will find graphic reproductions of some texts from Androcles and the Lion,so you can see what the standard orthography is supposed to be, and also what the types look like in the book. My own pronunciation is that of an educated older speaker from the western United States, and that's what I am going to write.
You must install a Shaw font to read the rest of this document.
Letters of the Shaw Alphabet come in mirror-image pairs, starting with the Tall and Deep pairs such as p peep and b bib. The vowel sounds are in pairs also, as you can see from the table. There are no capital letters; if you need to capitalize a word you use the "namer dot": /rOm "Rome" but don't use the namer dot at the beginning of a sentence. The letters have names (which I have set in bold face) which you can get from the Unicode site.. The consonant sounds should be fairly obvious. Note that each consonant sound has its own letter: "sh" is S not sh, and so on. N spells "ng": note TiNk "think" and huNgD "hunger".
The vowel sounds will be somewhat more difficult. Americans like myself will have great difficulty in distinguishing some of the King's vowel sounds, particularly those similar to "ah"; for example, I cannot tell o on from Y awe, so I simply do not use o at all. The "uh" vowels are tricky: a (ado, as in "without further ado" is used for the "uh" sound in unaccented syllables, such as agO ago; in an accented syllable you spell that sound u as in kup "cup". You will need to observe how many unaccented-syllable vowels you have in your speech, and how they are distributed. I have only two: handed hAndad - candid kAndad - candied kAndId but you may have all three, or you may have a different two sounds from mine.
The treatment of the letter "r" is I think the real stroke of genius in the Shaw alphabet. As everybody knows, some speakers of English pronounce "r" at the ends of words, while others do not. The Shaw alphabet combines the final "r" with the vowel to produce a separate compound letter to spell the sound combination. D array is used to spell the "urr" sound in unaccented syllables, while x the letter err spells the "urr" sound in accented syllables. (Make sure you pronounce this letter name err to rime with "purr" and not with "pair".) "oor" is spelled in the book with two letters, so "poor" is pUD. "Fire" is spelled fFD.
King George V did not distinguish "Wales" and "whales", I suppose to the distress of the citizens of Abergivenny. I write (and pronounce) these two words wElz and hwElz since there is no special symbol for "wh". If you distinguish "do" and "dew" (I dew not) then spell them dM and dV respectively.
There are four standard Shavian abbreviations: t for "to", T for "the", n for "and", v for "of". It's easy to invent others, and to blend letters together in a sort of cursive. The indefinite article is spelled a and an.
If you're using the alphabet as a cipher, you'll need ciphered numerals, and I use (my own invention) the initial letters of the numbers, except for O for zero, and arbitrary assignments for 4 and 6: O w t T f v s z E n.
Punctuation is the same as that of standard English, with the addition of the namer dot.
Shaw in his preface to Pygmalionobserved that "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Bearing that noble sentiment in mind, Americans (and other speakers of English without majesty) should learn, read, and write the Shaw alphabet exactly the way they speak, holding George V's pronunciation in quite as high regard as George III's tea.
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February 1999
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