My fair alfabet
D Smyth is right to draw attention to Shaw's fascination with the English alphabet and his desire to see a new alphabet free of some of the oddities he associated with our current writing system. Part of the legacy money I mentioned earlier went to fund the creation of a new alphabet that would resist the phonetic weirdness of the Roman-English system. Shaw was an early disciple of phonetics as a discipline (a fascination clearly evident in Pygmalion), and did most of his writing in phonetically-based shorthand.
His will stipulated that the first 21 years of posthumous royalities from all his works should be used to fund the development of a phonetic alphabet, comprising some 40 or so letters -- he wanted to create an 'alfabet' enabling us to resist the strangeness of words like 'through', which is pronounced 'thru' but looks like it should rhyme with 'rough'. (What would he have made of our current text-messaging 'system': soz i 4gt 2 fon u. cu l8r -- if you need a translation, try .)
Had Shaw's wishes been honoured, his alphabet project would have received hundreds of thousands of pounds (today, millions of pounds). Appropriately enough, the whole project was overseen by Sir , MP for Bath, and the grandson of , the creator of Pitman Shorthand. James Pitman was himself a of some importance.
But, following a legal challenge by two of the three main institutional beneficiaries -- the British Museum and RADA (the National Gallery of Ireland, to its credit, refused to participate in the challenge) -- the project was given a mere £8,300. Part of the money awarded to the alphabet project paid for a public competition which eventually produced what is now known as the , much of it the work of the typographer Kingsley Read. Most of the remaining legacy funded the publication (by Penguin, in November 1962) of the only book ever to be printed in the new script: Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion.
There are some excellent Shavian links for those who wish to find out more about Shaw, phonetics and the alphabet project.
Comments
A very well written article Will, there is so much confusion regarding Shaw's lingistic/phonetic legacy that its refreshing to see it explained concisely.