Over the last week, an alternative rendering of English has come to my attention: the Shavian alphabet.
The name is derived from the last name of George Bernard Shaw, who disliked silent letters and non-phonetic spellings, and argued that the existing alphabet is insufficient to represent its sounds. However, he had little to do with its creation as it was developed more than a decade after he died in 1950.
Much more detail is available on a dedicated website run by one of its proponents. In simple terms, its main purpose is to eliminate ambiguous spellings by creating just one symbol for each possible sound actually used in English. For example, the current alphabet reserves just five letters for vowels as written, whereas there are around 20 vowel sounds. The letters of Shavian are more akin to Arabic than Latin.
This blog has taken longer to research than I initially imagined it would. However, no source seems to have addressed what I think is an obvious gap. The variant of English spoken in Scotland shares a similar problem with standard English in that the letters don’t necessarily match the sounds, with the extra issue that more words have more than one spelling, depending on how the speaker pronounces it.
On top of that is an additional guttural sound, represented by ch in words such as loch or Auchterhouse. This is not unique to Scotland, also appearing in languages such as Spanish and German.
In my view, adding a representation for that sound would go some way towards making it suitable for Scots speakers. The International Phonetic Alphabet devotes the letter x to it, which is not already used in Shavian, but also can’t be drawn with one stroke like the rest of its characters.
As it stands, it’s unlikely we’ll see any widespread use of the Shavian alphabet in our lifetimes. But who knows what practical applications might be found for it in the future?
Gavin Cameron 