On word-signs

The other day, after an interesting discussion on Reddit, I found myself going back to the source, and re-reading Peter Mccarthy and Kingsley reads writings from Androcles and the lion, and Reads Guide to shavian spelling from 1963. I came across a number of things I had either totally forgotten about, or just hadn’t really appreciated the first time round.

One of the eye openers was MacCarthy’s note on page 145 of Androcles. There he states: “it would be possible to extend the number of word–signs¹ beyond the four provided for in the design.” He goes on to suggest: “𐑓” for for², “𐑚” for be, “𐑢” for with, “𐑣” for he, “𐑮” for are³, “𐑕” for so and “𐑛” for do. Why stop at one letter words, h wonders?

MacCarthy then goes on to list a number of two letter abbreviations that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern mobile phone text exchange: 𐑞𐑑 (that), 𐑢𐑟 (was), 𐑣𐑝 (have), 𐑯𐑑 (not), 𐑞𐑕 (this), 𐑚𐑑 (but), 𐑓𐑥 (from), 𐑣𐑛 (had), 𐑣𐑟 (has), 𐑚𐑯 (been), 𐑢𐑮 (were), “and so on.” (“And so on?” Keep them coming man!)

After reading this, I cracked out my trusty Apple pencil, and started trying them out for size. Some had already been using off and on in my own handwriting, like “b” and “w”. Others seem a bit outlandish, “h” for he, in particular. One of them, “do”, is simply not all that more economical to write by hand than the full word. But I could definitely see myself writing “𐑕 𐑢𐑑” or “𐑢𐑛 𐑚” more often.

There seems to b a remarkable amount of orthodoxy in the shavian community, and there doesn’t seem to have bn a lot of innovation over the past few decades. Sure, we’ve modernized the spelling here and there, and “𐑓” was added as a word-sign, but not an awful lot more than that, it seems. Is it time we added some new conventions? Are there not a wealth of contemporary abbreviations and acronyms that could get elevated to this status?

It was refreshing to b reminded how uncharted the alphabet was in its early days, and how the original Shavers embraced innovation and evolution of the script. Just as modern English evolves, in both spoken form and it’s Roman orthography, Shavian should change too. As a first small step I, for one, will b a lot more open to experimentation with the way I write w it, and I wl promote expanding the list of word-signs moving forward!

1. His charming term, that I am totally going to adopt from now on, for the one-letter abbreviated words “of”, “the”, “kn” and “t”. ↩︎
2. That one obviously stuck! ↩︎
3. Which must have been a mistake, because “𐑸” is more than sufficient. I’ll write this down to the fact that he was writing this using the Latin alphabet, and forgot about the existence of the are vowel. ↩︎