English Needs the Shavian Alphabet

Everyone who tells the story of the Shavian Alphabet retells the story of the Shaw Will and alphabet competition. It’s a lot like filming a new Batman movie: the theater, a boy and his parents, a dark alleyway, a gun, and pearls raining to the ground. They’re both dramatic.

What the Shaw story doesn’t ever answer is “Why?” Why learn the Shavian alphabet at all? The average literate person spent 4 to 5 years to achieve basic reading and writing skills, so they assume it will take that long again. It makes no sense to even think about a 48 letter alphabet when the familiar 26 letter alphabet took so long to figure out.

The answer is in the graph below. 26 letters could be enough for 44 sounds, but there’s also only 5 vowels for 22 vowel sounds. That’s kind of what breaks the entire system. The 1,000 year history of English spelling damages the rest: 138 different spelling combinations (graphemes) for 44 sounds (phonemes). The graph below is why most of us lean on autocorrect as though spelling doesn’t make sense.

If you were a parent, and that alphabet mess was your kid’s room, your kid would be grounded until it was fixed. No question. We wouldn’t tolerate it.

Now compare the above graph of English spelling to the Shavian graph below. Compare the tangled lines to one another.

For all of the arguments I’ve ever witnessed in Shavian forums, the actual complexity looks minimal. This simplicity is why I like using Shavian. It’s why I can read English books written in the Shavian alphabet after just one year of practice. That’s how it works for other languages, and that’s how it should work for English.

You don’t have to give up what you already know to just try Shavian. It’s not going to replace the traditional alphabet tomorrow; but if you find Shavian as easy to use as I have, we should imagine a world where reading and writing are easier than they are now. And we should consider how that would change our world for the better.