Shavian Alphabet Table

After George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and notorious spelling-reform crusader who left money in his will to fund a new phonemic alphabet for English. The alphabet was designed by Ronald Kingsley Read, a professional signwriter and letterer, and published after Shaw’s death - its first book was a special edition of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion with the original text facing the Shavian version, which remains the alphabet’s reference spelling.

They are the three letter classes, and they encode the sound system visually. Tall letters (with an ascender) are the voiceless consonants; deep letters (with a descender) are the voiced ones - a tall letter rotated 180 degrees, with the tall part extending below the baseline, becomes its voiced partner. Short letters are the vowels plus the liquids, nasals and semivowels, which generate each other through rotation or reflection. Two exceptions are marked in this chart: YEA and HUNG are tall despite their vowel-colored and nasal sounds, and YEW is the one consonant-vowel ligature.

It does not have any - that is the point. There are no separate uppercase or lowercase forms; instead of capitalization, a namer-dot (·) is placed before a proper name. Sentences are not usually started with a namer-dot unless the sentence itself begins with a name. All other punctuation and word spacing work as in conventional English, so the only new habit is dropping a dot before names instead of hunting for the shift key.

It is designed to be: each character requires only a single stroke, so the writing utensil is lifted only once per letter, enabling faster overall writing than Latin script. Add the single-letter abbreviations for the five commonest words - the, of, and, to, for - and ordinary English text gets measurably shorter. The tradeoff is learning 48 new shapes plus the phonemic ear for which sound (not which spelling letter) to write.

Two are documented. Word stress is not marked at all, so pairs like billow and below spell identically - usually the reduced unstressed vowel gives them away, but the ambiguity is real. And the canonical spellings follow Received Pronunciation: dialects that merge vowels, such as most North American English merging father and bother vowels, can read Shavian comfortably but find it hard to produce canonical spellings spontaneously. This chart’s class column also flags the two class-exception letters so the system’s edge cases are visible at a glance.