On learning Shavian

I first learned about Shavian from that fantastic Robs words Youtube video, back in early september of 2024, my curiosity was piqued, and the next day, I wanted to learn more, so I found a website where I could learn the letters. To my delight, the letters made sense to me, and I memorised them all remarkably quickly. Soon afterwards, I turned my back on journalling using the orthodox alphabet. I have been journalling in shavian for well over a year now.

The domain of Shavian.school, The website I learnt my letters from last year, sadly expired a couple of months ago, but the resource is still available on Github.¹ It remains my number one recommendation as the place to start for new learners. In fact, on that note, heres my top six recommendations for those starting to learn Shavian:

1. Using a site like Shavian.School, learn a couple of new letters each day. If you can, do one lesson a day, or if you are impatient two or three, but don’t rush this! Each day, practice writing the new letters by hand, using pen and paper². Use lined writing paper for this–at first use three lines for each line of writing, and write big: your short letters should fill the space between two lines, the talls extending up to the top line, your deeps down to the bottom line. Revise the letters you learned the previous days before starting a new lesson.
2. Once you are done with the lessons, implement a regime of practising handwriting daily. I have found journalling to be perfect for this; others seem to enjoy transcribing novels, poetry or song lyrics for this purpose. One key bit of advice is to read back what you wrote. That way you will spot your spelling errors and figure out what is working and what is not, in terms of legibility.
3. Once you have learnt the entire alphabet, you will be ready to get some reading practice going. For this I do not recommend turning to Reddit or Discord – the variety in spelling [ranging from well intended typos to belligerent disregard of commonly held conventions] can make it hard for Shavers of any experience level to figure out what is being said. Instead, try reading Shavian.Info in Shavian, and then venture on to read some of the books and articles linked to on that site.
4. A right of passage for any new shaver is to read Androcles and the lion. Beautifully typeset, it conveniently has the Shavian and latin versions side-by-side — perfect for beginners. When you done with that, be sure to read all the foreword and appendix material if you hadn’t done so already. Pay particular attention to reads tips for handwriting.
5. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be itching to read more modern prose at this stage. Thankfully there are a wealth of tools out there for transliterating websites and PDFs on the fly. Few beat Dave coffins transliteration tool for this.. Personally, I use my own toolchain for this—which I will release to the world at large in the not too distant future.
6. Dot the eyes on your own shavian writing, by learning more about the established spelling conventions. The de-facto standard here is Evan Gallahan’s excellent guide on shavian.Info, which itself was heavily based on Kingsley reads 1963 spelling guide.

So what then? You’ve read a couple of victorian novels in Shavian, you can comfortably write in the alphabet by hand, and you’ve even got the knack of typing in shavian too, maybe in port thanks to my Shaw type app? Well thats the point at which eyed recommend getting actively involved in the shavian Reddit and Discord communities. It is also the point at which eyed recommend starting to figure out how to make more ligatures in your on handwriting… thats worthy of a whole blog entry of its own, so I will keep that for another time!

The utter nincompoop that I am, I wrote this entry in Shavian. But my target audience can’t read Shavian… Doh. Reverse transliteration time!

Footnotes

1. I have entertaining thought of buying the domain myself, and reviving the site… what do you guys think? ↩︎

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2. Or an iPad with an Apple pencil, like me.↩︎ ↩︎