Variants

Quickscript

Some years after the initial publication of the Shaw alphabet, Read expanded it to create Quickscript, also known as the Read Alphabet. Quickscript is intended to be more useful for handwriting, and to that end is more cursive and uses more ligatures. Many letter forms are roughly the same in both alphabets; see the separate article for more details.

Revised Shaw alphabet

Paul Vandenbrink has created a modified Shavian alphabet which takes the controversial step of replacing most of the specific vowel letters with markers indicating which of several sets of vowel types a vowel belongs to, thus reducing the number of vowel distinctions and lessening the written differences between dialectical variations of English. This variant, and not the original Shaw alphabet, is presented at http://www.shawalphabet.com/.

"Ŝava alfabeto"

An adaptation of Shavian to another language, Esperanto, was developed by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling; though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. As that language is already spelled phonemically, direct conversion from Latin to Shavian letters can be performed, though several ligatures are added for the common combinations of vowels with n and s and some common short words.

Pronunciations that differ from their English values are marked in bold red.

Ŝava letter
Pronunciation	[a]	[b]	[ts]	[tS]	[d]	[e]	[f]	[g]	[dZ]	[h]	[x]	[i]	[j]	[Z]
Conventional orthography	a	b	c	ĉ	d	e	f	g	ĝ	h	ĥ	i	j	ĵ
	[k]	[l]	[m]	[n]	[o]	[p]	[r]	[s]	[S]	[t]	[u]	[w]	[v]	[z]
	k	l	m	n	o	p	r	s	ŝ	t	u	ŭ	v	z
	Ligatures
	la	kaj	aŭ	aj	ajn

The digital age

Shavian is encoded in plane 1 of Unicode, from U+10450 to U+1047F, but appropriate fonts for Unicode Shavian are rare. Before it was standardised, fonts were made that include Shavian letters in the places of Roman letters, and/or in an agreed upon location in the Unicode private use area, allocated from the ConScript Unicode Registry.

External links

• ConScript Unicode Registry (http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/shavian.html), describes unofficial assignment of Shavian letters in Unicode private use area (Since withdrawn in favour of the official encoding)
• Shavian fonts (http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/shavian.html)
• Omniglot.com article on Shavian (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm)
• Browser test page for Unicode Shavian (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/shavian.html)
• Yahoo! Group on Shavian (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shawalphabet/)
• shavian.org (http://www.shavian.org/)
• Revised Shaw Alphabet, history, etc. (http://www.shawalphabet.com/index1.html)