This is the Shavian community: a community to practice reading and writing with the Shavian alphabet.
The Shavian alphabet is a phonetic alphabet for the English language: in Shavian, you write a word the way you pronounce it. For more information you can check out the alphabet chart on the wiki page here.
The Shavian alphabet was proposed by the 20th century playwright George Bernard Shaw, and created after his death. Shaw was passionate about phonetic writing, and wrote some of his literary works in shorthand.
So how about you, why might you want to learn the Shavian alphabet? Maybe you’re…
- a writer too, and want to experiment with writing phonetically
- a non-native English speaker and you want to read English as it’s pronounced
- generally interested in linguistics, and want to play with a new toy
- interested in learning a language, but don’t have the time or inclination. Settle for learning an alphabet instead!
Just want to practice reading? Subscribe and get a few morsels of Shavian script in your feed every day.
If you want to write, come and give it a go! For text input, you have a few options. If you’re a Linux user and like to keep it simple, here’s a Shavian XKB layout you can edit as you wish. Otherwise, shavian.info has some keyboard resources.
𐑔𐑨𐑯𐑒𐑕 𐑓 𐑒𐑳𐑥𐑦𐑙 𐑑 𐑥𐑲 TED 𐑑𐑷𐑒!
I’ve been using it for about two weeks now, and as a British English speaker, I feel it can capture my accent when writing the vast majority of the time. My minor complaints about it so far are the places where I feel it isn’t unambiguously capturing my accent (the other commenter mentions 'R’s, that’s one of the issues).
Perhaps another important metric to measure it by would be whether people can reliably hear my accent when I write too.
I looked a bit into Quikscript, but I think that with the traction that Shavian has (unicode support is a big deal), and the fact that I’m not particularly interested in writing by hand, I thought Shavian would be a good start.
word, i’m with you. thanks for reigniting my interest in this! it really is so cool, and English could really use an update. XD