An Improved Shavian

Monday. January 27, 2025 - 6 mins

There was another reddit thread about the design choices that Kingsley Read made for Shavian.

There are many genius choices that Read made. We can see them explained in that thread. There are also baffling choices (𐑙𐑣, 𐑘𐑢, 𐑕𐑟, 𐑺𐑻) on which we can only speculate.

Nonetheless, that thread inspired me to revisit my own attempt at creating a better Shavian that I have not yet publicized.

The second row is me freehand writing with a mouse the new script:

In 2022, a gentleman created the Brevian (and subsequent Anglovian) scripts. There are some great ideas in there (particularly the vowels). I am being clear that I have taken some ideas from this and used it as a jumping off point.

Now here are my goals:

1. Consistency with design rules (such as voiced/unvoiced, etc) so that the design feels transparent to the user
2. Stronger logic of the vowels (taking influence from Geoff Lindsey and others)
3. More connection to the history and development of the English language itself (in letter design but also in phonological relations)
4. More flexibility (multiple meanings)

Ultimately, what I seek to do could be illustrated with the following example from a Git workflow.

Vowels

Here are the vowels:

I’ve kept these largely the same as Brevian.

Right away, you’ll see a layout that has columns and rows. Each row represents a distinct vowel category. Each column represents a consistent change applied to that category. This means that FACE and CHOICE have something in common as well as LOT and CHOICE having something in common. The relations are transparent in that way.

The 2nd column is stretched horizontally which can give a very aesthetically satisfying “push and pull” to a text which better matches the prosody of how it is pronounced out loud. It provides breathing room and some breaking up of large chunks of letters.

The 3rd column is the addition of the KIT vowel.

The 4th column is the addition of the FOOT vowel.

Consonants

Here are the consonants in the system:

I have kept these the same as Shavian and only changed what I deemed necessary to change.

In order, you can see the changes:

/s z θ ð f v n ŋ m r l h y w ʍ/

R and L

R and L are a sort of pair, just like in Shavian. The difference is that I made the shapes inspired by latin in order to avoid confusion with the new vowel shapes (LOT and DRESS).

The bonus for R is that it can still easily be attached on the ends of vowels just like in Shavian.

N and M

I knew right away that I wanted to connect /n/ with /ŋ/. This required a change in the design of N. I dug into the history of the latin letters and discovered the gorgeous N and M letters from Old Italic. A connection to history is always satisfying.

Y and W and friends

Connecting /j/ with the KIT vowel and /w/ with the FOOT vowel was another stroke of genius from Brevian.

Since I freed /h/ from being a pair with /ŋ/, I was able to simply adopt the lowercase latin h which fit quite well. It also created a beautiful combination letter for the famous /hw~ʍ/ sound in older English accents.

Historic Allophones

Historically, the following sounds are allophones in English: /sz θð fv/

You’ll notice that S and Z and the TH sounds look exactly the same except ascending and descending. Technically speaking, all of these consonant pairs are correctly rotated 180 degrees just like all the other non-allophonic pairs. So there is consistency in that regard. It just so happens that the design of the letters make SZ and the TH sounds look pretty much the same either way around!

This is intentional. S and Z still remain very close allophones even in the modern day (think of “dogs” vs “cats”, etc), as do θ and ð (think of “the” or “with”).

The letters for /f/ and /v/ are inspired by the Greek phi. Now you might say “But F and V were historic allophones just like those others! Why do these letters look more different when rotated?”

That is because F and V split to become distinct phonemes much earlier than the others.

As I understand it, the order of strongest allophone pair to weakest today is /θð/, then /sz/, then /fv/.

/n/ can also be an allophone pair with /ŋ/, which is why I wanted them to look more similar. But they’re not exactly a pair in the same way that the others are.

Future Potential

Here are some areas for consideration regarding future development. I am open to collaboration and feedback.

Descenders on certain vowels

I considered adding descenders on both the 3rd and 4th columns of the vowel chart. This would more explicitly show the addition / combination of /j/ and /w/ onto the initial vowel rather than KIT and FOOT. This could be a dialectal preference or useful in another way.

Dotted vowels

In addition to the the 2nd column in the vowel chart being stretched lengthwise, I also considered a layout that used a dotted motif instead.

This is pretty much up to your subjective taste. On one hand, I like the aesthetic of the variable width of vowels that more accurately match the (sometimes) variable length of vowels when spoken. On the other hand, the overdots could serve to bring the script more “up”, balancing out the plentiful descenders.

One option is to save either the stretched or the dotted column for an extra column that would only be needed in certain scenarios. For example, if a speaker distinguishes BAD from LAD, they could use this extra “column” as the motif for their vowel.

Etymological spelling?

This is a big, big question. Recently, I had been discussing with some colleagues the idea of an etymological spelling as opposed to a phonemic spelling. This would of course be against the explicit goals of George Bernard Shaw (Shavian), but the benefit is that it would absolutely ensure unity among all English dialects / accents in a way that a phonemic script could not.

This is where I realized that some of these extra ideas I had for vowels could come in handy. I will leave the below image without explanation as a sort of “if you know, you know” thing.

I’m not sure if this is worth pursuing or not, but I can sleep at night knowing that the system has the potential to at least make it possible.

Fin

Come stop by the Rune School discord if you would like to discuss this post.

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