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If you've never heard of the Shavian, or Shaw, alphabet before, then this probably won't interest you unless you have a lot of interest in alternative spelling/writing systems. Sorry. ๐คท
The Shavian alphabet is something I had a passing interest in many years ago. I set up a keyboard layout for it, wrote in and about it, and transliterated *The Wizard of Oz* into the Shaw alphabet. But ultimately, it annoyed me too much to stick with it, although I still think it looks kind of cool.
After George Bernard Shaw died, his estate attempted to fulfill his wish for a better writing system for English. So they held a competition and awarded a prize to the winner. The only problem was that they chose four winners and then asked one of them, Ronald Kingsley Read, to combine them all into one. The result was the Shaw Alphabet, or Shavian Alphabet.
When *Shaw* becomes an adjective, the w becomes a v. This, I believe, is a vestige from older times when the letters u, v, and w were all the same letter (u). Rules determined which pronunciation this letter had in any word, but eventually people found it more useful to create the letters v and w. I'm guessing there were a lot of annoying exceptions to the rules.
This explains why we call the letter W, "double U", instead of what it looks like; a double V. The shifting of W to V as some nouns turn into adjectives probably seemed reasonable at one time, but not it's just an unnecessary exception to the general rule; and worse, one that seems completely arbitrary.
The Shavian alphabet has around 48 letters and none of them look like the letters in the traditional English alphabet. That's by design. It was meant to make Shavian distinct from traditional orthography, and therefore to make it hard to confuse the two. Shavian starts from something of a blank slate.
There is no way to indicate stress, although this can sort-of be done because one of the vowels (ado) is never used in a stressed syllable. So if you see that letter, you know that syllable isn't stressed. This caused some annoyance for me, as I'll describe later.
The 48 letters represent English phonemes, with some of them representing syllables ending in R. These are meant to account for the rhotic/non-rhotic distinction in English dialects. I guess the idea is that you would use the same letter whether you pronounce R fully (as rhotic accents do), weaken the R sound substantially, or drop the R sound entirely. This seems to be the only nod to varying pronunciations. The alphabet was designed for *Received Pronunciation* (RP), which is the standard pronunciation that you hear most often on BBC news shows.
The first book printed in the new Shavian alphabet was Shaw's own version of *Androcles and the Lion* in 1962. That work essentially became the standard source for correct spelling.
RP has a quirk. It merges two phonemes that much of the anglophone world pronounce distincly. Namely, the unstressed "uh" sound and the unstressed "i" sound. This is called the "Rosa's Roses" merger.
In America, if you have a friend named Rosa, and she grows roses, then when you say "Rosa's roses", those two words are different. In RP, they're the same. In America, it would sound like, "ROWZ-uh-z ROWZ-iz", but in RP, it's just, "ROWZ-uh-z ROWZ-uh-z".
The unstressed "uh" sound has a special name: the schwa sound. I guess it gets a special name because it's so common. It's exact pronunciation varies, but we're dealing with phonemes; not exact pronunciation. Schwa is the same phoneme as the short U sound in "uh".
When I was reading the Shavian edition of *Androcles and the Lion*, the constant "Rosa's Roses" merger bugged the ever-loving shit out of me! It was like every single time ANY vowel was unstressed, it got the "ado" (schwa) letter. Sounding the words out, I felt like the book was forcing me to talk like some retarded person with partial paralysis in has mouth. Everything was, "Muh muh buh buh duh duh luh luh...". It felt so wrong!
RP seems to want to keep the tongue low in the mouth at all times; almost as if it's too much effort to lift it. It feels wrong.
Yes, mentally, you can correct the spellings, but when a system is advertised as being phonemic, and it clearly **isn't** for the **largest English-speaking country on Earth**, then you're going to have some serious problems getting people to accept it.
Not that American accents don't have mergers, they have plenty. The "father-bother", and "caught-cot" mergers make generating orthodox Shavian spellings difficult for us.
Here's a weird pair of letters in Shavian: UP and ADO. To me, and I expect huge numbers of other people, these have the exact same phoneme: the short U sound. The only difference is that UP is "stressed" and ADO is unstressed.
Want to guess how many Shavian resources explain that that's the only difference? 0. (Unless you can find an old webpage of mine on the wayback machine)
Want to guess how much time I spent wracking my brain trying to figure out what the f*cking difference between those two letters was? Too much time; that's how much.
Studying Shavian made me realize that we don't all assign the same sounds to the same phonemes. This breaks Shavian for large numbers of people. And a broken phonemic system is what we already have; why change?
Let's take one example: Egg, Meg, Keg, and Leg. Which vowel-sound do they all have? Is it like the first letter in *elephant*, or is it like the "ay" in *say*?
Would it surprise you to learn that there isn't wide-spread agreement on this? Personally, I hear something more like "say", and it isn't because of my pronunciation. I once saw a message-board post where a guy linked to a clip of *Family Guy* to show that Seth McFarlane pronounces "Meg" with the "elephant" vowel sound. I listened to it. Sounded more lake the "say" sound to me!
I'm going to call the short E sound at the beginning of the word elephant, "elephant"; and the vowel sound in the word say, simply, "say". That way I don't have to keep typing, "the vowel sound in the word...".
Dictionaries pretty much universally state that the sound in such -eg words is the same sound as in "elephant". And that's indeed how many people categorize these sounds. But I think if you carefully try to substitute the sound in "elephant" into the word "egg", many of you will find that it just doesn't sound or feel right.
This is because of a phenomenon called pre-velar raising.
AceLinguist: Pre-Velar Raising
Velars are sounds you make with the back of your tongue touching the back of the roof of your mouth (e.g. g, k, ng). You have to raise your tongue to do that, and that's what the *raising* in pre-velar raising refers to. The raising of the tongue for velar sounds causes a "velar pinch" that alters preceding vowel sounds. Thus, "eh, eh, elephant" shifts towards 'ei, ei, say'; a vowel sound produced in nearly the same manner, but with the position of the tongue higher in the mouth.
In some dialects, this pre-velar raising is embraced, and vowel sounds shift 100% of the way. But I think in most, the vowel sound shifts only partly. This doesn't cause problems for comprehension, but it does cause problems when people try to agree on what exact phonemes are being pronounced.
We've evolved to understand each other; not to agree on how we identify phonemes. Part of our evolved language system is a system for mapping the actual sounds we hear to their "correct" phonemes. So when you hear intermediate sounds, such as the 'e' in a velar-pinched 'Meg', your brain automatically maps it to a 'correct' phoneme. For some, that's the phoneme in 'elephant', for others, it's the phoneme in 'say'. And thus, two people can listen to the exact same Family Guy episode, and both hear different phonemes.
Trying to pronounce it without any velar pinch feels wrong, unless that's what your dialect does.
Learning a foreign language is difficult in part because your brain unconsciously tries to classify the intermediate sounds in the foreign language to the nearest equivalent in your native language. Thus, Japanese speakers have difficulty distinguishing L from R; their native language having only a phoneme that's sort of mid-way between the two.
Long story short: "Egg" is a terrible word to use to demonstrate the short E sound! Use a word like elephant, elf, or epsilon; something without velar pinch! When teaching the sounds of a language, you should use clear-cut, unambiguous examples, and our spelling doesn't help a lot with that. Unfortunately, native speakers may have trouble figuring out what the clearest examples are.
Guess what name the short E sound gets in the Shavian alphabet... You got it: "Egg"!
This pre-velar raising problem isn't addressed by the Shavian alphabet. My guess is that pre-velar raising is suppressed more in RP where the tongue becomes a lead weight for all vowel sounds, so maybe "elephant" gets raised only 20% of the way to "say", and nearly everyone identifies it as the closest official phoneme: "elephant".
Shavian *could* use the same strategy it uses for vowel-R combinations; it could have special vowel-velar letters, but it doesn't. And if we always used this strategy to fix such problems, who knows how big the alphabet would grow?
These phoneme issues are far from insurmountable. We could just use the spelling that matches our own dialect the closest and accept the variation in spellings. That would be like English before orthodox spellings were codified by dictionaries and spelling books. Or we could just all agree to a certain set standard spelling. That would be like our current system (so why change?).
The letters themselves present some problems. This is supposed to be a rational orderly system, but something seems obviously wrong. All the tall letters are unvoiced and the deep letters (letters that extend below the line, such as p, q, and y) are voiced. Well, except for one pair. "Haha", the letter for the H sound, and "Hung", the letter for the "ng" sound, don't fit the pattern. This has led to speculation that they were reversed by accident in the printing of *Androcles and the Lion*, and that this error was basically grandfathered in.
Shavian.info claims that Read explicitly stated that this exception to the rule was intentional, but they don't provide a source.
Similarly, there's speculation that a pair of terminal-R letters were reversed ("AIR" and "ERR"). These are both "ligatures"; letters that are supposed to be two other letters merged together (sort of). If you try to figure out which two letters were combined to form them, it's pretty easy to conclude that they've been reversed.
And those are big problems. With our traditional orthography, we can just ignore the rule exceptions and arbitrary oddities. But with a new system that claims to be rational, it's a lot harder to just accept the arbitrary. For proof of this, just hang around lernu.net and read the discussions about Esperanto; it's a mess.
The Shavian alphabet was created when writing by hand was still more common for a lot of people than typing. So there may be some truth to claims that Read made the alphabet a certain way to accommodate writing.
I'd say, this isn't really an issue anymore. Typing has won.
So if Read reversed Haha and Hung for writing purposes, then that's a weird inconsistency that no longer serves a purpose. It's an unnecessary exception to the rule; and worse, an arbitrary one.
Similarly, I've found that the way Shavian letters create white space within a word, tends to make it harder to see the breaks between words and makes reading more difficult. When hand-writing, I suppose it's easier to smoosh the letters within a word together, and make the boundaries between words more distinct. Something like this could probably be done with a computer-based font, but that's definitely not going to work for a mono-spaced font. I think the letters would have to overlap to make that work. This is one area where traditional orthography seems superior.
I guess if your native dialect is RP, or close to RP, then the Shavian alphabet will probably work really well for you, assuming that you can tell where one word ends and the other begins. Fans will tell you that there's enough flexibility to accommodate more than just RP, but I don't think it works as well as they claim.
If poor Rosa has to sell herself because of this, then it isn't a good enough system for me. ๐
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โ๏ธ Last Updated: 2022-01-21