Quickscript is an alternate alphabet for the English language, designed to be phonetically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly writable. There are also adapted Quickscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English. An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

George Bernard Shaw, famous writer, critic and playwright, was dissatisfied with the limits of currently available shorthand methods. He was also mightily displeased with the vagaries of English spelling, and wanted a phonetic reworking of the written language. In his will, he provided for a competition, and Kingsley Read won it with his 'Shavian' script. After a lengthy 'beta testing' phase with about 500 users, he reworked his alphabet again and came up with Quickscript, a manual for which he published in 1966. George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 2, 1950) was an Irish playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. ... Shorthand is a general term referring to any abbreviated or symbolic writing method that improves speed of writing or brevity as compared to a standard method of writing the language. ... English spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts. ... Posthumously funded by and named for Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) was conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. ... In software engineering, development stage terminology expresses how far through the development sequence things have progressed and how much further development a product may require. ...

There are about forty unique symbols in the script, plus some ligatures (characters formed of multiple characters joined together, much as æ or fi are in some Roman alphabet scripts). The characters are designed to often flow into one another while still maintaining readability, and to be easy to write - since few computers existed at the time, and only a few typewriters were ever made with the Shavian script. In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ... ...

There is a small community currently keeping up an Internet presence in Yahoo! Groups and on an Ikonboard, with more than 150 active members. Yahoo! Groups is an electronic mailing list service provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo! has over the years bought many other mailing list providers, including the popular eGroups, and combined them into one system. ... Ikonboard is a free online forum or Bulletin Board System. ...

External links

• Official Quickscript manual (PDF)
• Omniglot Quickscript page
• Quickscript information
• Yahoo Quickscript group
• Online quickscript tutorial