There's a better English alphabet.

Enjoy this exploration of the Shavian (𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯) alphabet! And play War Thunder for FREE on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. Use my link playwt.link/robwords to download the game and get your exclusive bonus: multiple Premium Vehicles, Premium Account, an exclusive 3D decorator for your vehicles and much more. See you on the battlefield!
The Latin alphabet is useless for describing the English language. We're constantly having to use combinations of letters to express single sounds! That's why the Shavian alphabet - or Shaw alphabet - was invented.
It was designed as part of a competition paid for by George Bernard Shaw, via money left in his will. Its 48 characters represent every sound you can think of in the English language. It's more efficient and it's easy on the eye too.
The Shavian Alphabet
𐑐 Peep - 𐑑 Tot - 𐑒 Kick - 𐑓 Fee - 𐑔 THigh - 𐑕 So - 𐑖 Sure - 𐑗 CHurch - 𐑘 Yea - 𐑙 huNG
𐑚 Bib - 𐑛 Dead - 𐑜 Gag - 𐑝 Vow - 𐑞 THey - 𐑟 Zoo - 𐑠 meaSure - 𐑡 Judge - 𐑢 Woe - 𐑣 Ha-ha
𐑤 Loll - 𐑮 Roar - 𐑥 Mime - 𐑯 Nun - 𐑦 If - 𐑰 EAt - 𐑧 Egg - 𐑱 Age - 𐑨 Ash - 𐑲 Ice
𐑩 Ado - 𐑳 Up - 𐑪 On - 𐑴 OAk - 𐑫 wOOl - 𐑵 OOze - 𐑬 OUt - 𐑶 OIl - 𐑭 Ah - 𐑷 AWe
𐑸 ARe - 𐑹 OR - 𐑺 AIR - 𐑻 ERR - 𐑼 ARRay - 𐑽 EAR - 𐑾 IAn - 𐑿 YEW
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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Why our alphabet is bad
0:57 Introducing Shavian
1:42 George Bernard Shaw
2:40 War Thunder part 1
4:01 The competition
5:50 Letter names
6:21 Letter shapes & sounds
9:29 Is it phonetic?
11:26 Accents
12:33 Countries & names
13:41 It's more efficient
15:38 Too many letters?
16:16 Why is it forgotten?
17:20 How YOU can use it
18:24 War Thunder part 2

[@RobWords]

*Shavian Alphabet below* ⬇️ And play War Thunder for FREE on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. Use my link playwt.link/robwords to download the game and get your exclusive bonus: multiple Premium Vehicles, Premium Account, an exclusive 3D decorator for your vehicles and much more. See you on the battlefield! 𐑐 Peep - 𐑑 Tot - 𐑒 Kick - 𐑓 Fee - 𐑔 THigh - 𐑕 So - 𐑖 Sure - 𐑗 CHurch - 𐑘 Yea - 𐑙 huNG 𐑚 Bib - 𐑛 Dead - 𐑜 Gag - 𐑝 Vow - 𐑞 THey - 𐑟 Zoo - 𐑠 meaSure - 𐑡 Judge - 𐑢 Woe - 𐑣 Ha-ha 𐑤 Loll - 𐑮 Roar - 𐑥 Mime - 𐑯 Nun - 𐑦 If - 𐑰 EAt - 𐑧 Egg - 𐑱 Age - 𐑨 Ash - 𐑲 Ice 𐑩 Ado - 𐑳 Up - 𐑪 On - 𐑴 OAk - 𐑫 wOOl - 𐑵 OOze - 𐑬 OUt - 𐑶 OIl - 𐑭 Ah - 𐑷 AWe 𐑸 ARe - 𐑹 OR - 𐑺 AIR - 𐑻 ERR - 𐑼 ARRay - 𐑽 EAR - 𐑾 IAn - 𐑿 YEW

[@robertnortan87]

Very interresting. Some of the consonants herein are double and could be replaced with two like CHurch that could be written TSHurtsh instead and I cannot believe we have all the vowels English can provide in all that. Redundant double consonants could replace any missed one or exotic sounds that do not exist isolated in English like Cyrillic Ж Greek Z which is no DZ nowadays and probably never was, or French J.

[@brothertaddeus]

𐑥𐑲 𐑯𐑱𐑥 𐑦𐑟 𐑑𐑩𐑛𐑰𐑳𐑕

[@ClockMaster-mq2hm]

@@robertnortan87 Using the phonetic alphabet instead could have helped here.

[@rubiks6]

Long "A" is not a single sound but is composed of "eh" and "ee." Try it. The same is true of the long "I" sound, composed of "ah" and "ee." Try it.

[@lindarobish7775]

@@rubiks6. Those are referred to as diphthongs.

[@abarette_]

I'm not dyslexic but even I can tell this must be every dyslexic's nightmare

[@thespider7898]

I feel like the fact there's more variety of characters might be a bit easier, because repetition seems to make letters flip around more frequently. I'd have to learn it well enough to read in it before I'd know.

[@navypilot47]

Considering the way symbols are paired with certain sounds, I feel like this could cause dyslexics to develop speech impediments too.

[@aimeeontheharp]

Even for those who aren’t dyslexic, we can’t tell if the writing is upside down!

[@abarette_]

@@aimeeontheharp I mean that can also rarely happen with Latin alphabet dıup dnıp sun uns But it indeed is a more proeminent issue with Shavian

[@thespider7898]

@@aimeeontheharp The punctuation makes it pretty obvious

[@ZZValiant]

One problem that the Latin alphabet has that Shavian doesn't solve is that there are a lot of letters that are easily confused for people with visual processing difficulties. Specifically d, b, p, q are just rotations or flips of each other. At least in the Latin script you get some letters that don't have like doppelgangers like e, y, x. But every Shavian letter has a flipped or rotated twin!

[@bellarose6509]

I was thinking the same thing!😊

[@AlohaChips]

This was my first thought. As exciting as it is for efficiently representing English's sounds, I immediately clocked it as an even bigger nightmare for dyslexia and other reading difficulties than the Roman alphabet already is. It swings too far towards appealing to artistry and neatness. I think someone could possibly address it by dropping the rule against diacritics and redesigning without caring as much how often the pen needs to be lifted to draw each character. Additional judicious but sparing use of dots, crossbars, and ligatures could go a long way towards ameliorating things like what a serious problem the four characters in the "short" group represent, seeing as they are nothing but flips and rotations of the exact same shape. It looks slick and polished but a writing system has to do more than look good.

[@protolingus]

Right? I looks worse for dyslexia, in fact. I don't mind spelling reform efforts like this, but if we're scrapping orthography, we can do better than this.

[@caffeinatedangel]

I just commented about this issue too! If this were my alphabet, I'd need some sort of outside assistance to function whenever I'd need to see the written word. It took years of struggle for me to just get to a place of mostly peace with our current alphabet.

[@nerfpup3089]

it tppk me 15 years to differenciate my left from my right so d and b are the bane of my existence. I think we should just replace d with delta. its cool

[@exquisitepullup]

One problem is that Shavian sometimes obscures related words. Infinite and finite would be written much differently even though they’re related.

[@ABoxIsMyHome]

But they are pronounced differently so makes sense

[@markbyrd7710]

​@@ABoxIsMyHomepronounced differently, but very much related. So it's nice to see the similar spelling to understand the relationship of words.

[@ABoxIsMyHome]

@@markbyrd7710 fair

[@andrewsveikauskas]

I feel like the pronunciation change that happens to "finite" when you add a prefix syllable "in" happens somewhat predictably when syllables and stress changes in English words... I don't speak Russian but I have a little exposure to it, they do that sort of thing even more than English, the unstressed vowel "weakens"...

[@nanachiyota8580]

​@@ABoxIsMyHomeand

[@LittleSpaceCase]

shavian looks like a nightmare situation for dyslexia

[@jaunedroite]

My impression is that the designing the letters in a way so that can be written with a single stroke was a good idea in the past, but a bad idea in the current age. A lot of letters look quite similar on first sight, the roman alphabet is more varied. Which I would hypothese makes it easier to read.

[@kennethflorek8532]

Yes, and people have been reading hundreds of times as much as they write for centuries, perhaps forever. And a book is written once to be read by millions. And research says that people read by recognizing words by shape first, then the initial and last letters, before they get to spelling. Efficiency for recognition makes more sense than efficiency for writing. Fonts for lowercase are not efficient insofar as symmetry and similarity, to look artistic, are preferred. Numbers are worse. However, that font for reformed spelling may be better for recognition. Hard to say. I just think the argument in favor of it is ill conceived. To Shaw, an idealog, the past was best obliterated. We have some amount of the past, like some DNA, deliberately retained in the spelling of words by the decisions of those who, without our consent, chose for us how to spell them. It surely is odd to read and understand things from the 1600's, because spelling has been conserved while the sounds have changed, but it is not a curse that would be better exorcized.

[@zarzavattzarzavatt9309]

some characters look alike and can be easily misspelled in handwriting. imo its simplicity makes it "error prone" :)

[@albummutation2278]

yeah i was just thinking how much of a nightmare this would be for dyslexics. i'm mildly dyslexic myself (mostly just had the b-d mixup as a kid, still troubles me sometimes), and this alphabet kind of seems like one that would be very difficult for me to adjust to. edit: after trying for like 10 minutes, i am already having issues with the vowels specifically. 𐑺, 𐑻, 𐑼, and 𐑽 are all terrible lol. 𐑱, 𐑲, 𐑩, 𐑪 as well. It looks real cool, and I love the idea (kind of fuck the latin script IMO) but it's very difficult for me to differentiate.

[@JustSaralius]

@@albummutation2278 Absolutely this! I have studied Japanese and, being mildly dyslexic too, some of their characters are so difficult to learn, because they are so similar. This immediately gave me the same, but worse, vibes. Not very good for dyslexic people at all.

[@paulspencer1590]

One of the rules I learned when studying book design is that sentences in lower case are inherently easier to read than those in upper case because of the much greater variety in the shape, height and width of the former, as well as the presence of ascenders and descenders in some and dots and crosses in others.

[@A11V1R15]

I think if it wasn't designed to be only one stroke, it would have been way better. More diversity of shapes helps reading accessibility. Also the rotation feature could as well be like in Japanese where it's the same character but with an additional feature and would be better for dyslexic people and whoever wants to put a text in a different orientation without the ambiguity of the text looking upside down

[@yitzakIr]

Rotated text would probably create some pretty interesting pronunciations in this language. Apple -> uh-Br

[@lettersquash]

Agreed. There are other arbitrary choices, like avoiding double letters / diphthongs / accents. Accents are used to good effect in many alphabets, and combinations of letters, although reducing the assumed (and dubious) "efficiency" of letter-count, can also simplify. It's all a bit make-it-up-as-you-go-along, such that Rob might have two spellings (British and American English), but we were told it wasn't phonetic, but phonemic. That is very approximate, since there isn't anywhere near a one-to-one mapping of phonemes in words as spoken by people with different accents or habits. Is it "arbitrary" or "abitry", "library" or "li-bree" or "li-berry"? Shall I call the police or the plees? Will it bother you, or bover you? English, in fact, went throo a long period of arbitry spelings befor we broute sum order to it, whereupon it became more readable...and vuss mor efishunt van viss bolix iz.

[@cescimes]

​@@lettersquash just wanted to say that your comment is appreciated, very fun!

[@aceilnordemnnoos8255]

Yes exactly- adding an extra symbol to differentiate would help. I'm going to work on a way to fix it.

[@Sk8Betty.]

I took a course in college called “Diction For English and Italian Singers.” Each vocal sound was represented by a symbol. Without knowing any Italian, I can sing in Italian with perfect pronunciation if the words are “spelt” in that script.

[@katied6696]

You mean IPA?

[@Sk8Betty.]

@@katied6696 idk, this was 30+ yrs ago when I was at Marshall U. The professor wrote the book himself & sent us a file to print & have bound at a local shop called Kinkos. I dropped out to get married & have babies. IPA means Pilsner to me haha. ✌️❤️🇺🇸

[@user-wb7by2ws3t]

@@katied6696 I've been known to "speak in tongues" after several pints of IPA... never managed to sing opera though! ;-)

[@ferruccioveglio8090]

@@user-wb7by2ws3t "Libiamo, libiamo ne' lieti calici che la bellezza infiora. E la fuggevol ora s'inebrii a voluttà."

[@tconiam]

@@Sk8Betty. You must not drink beer! LOL IPA is short for India Pale Ale which I feel is an over seasoned beer compared to a refined Pilsner. I had a professor that made us buy their book that was printed by the college as one of those plastic spiral bound versions with just a heavy paper cover. It even cost more then the commercial hard cover textbooks on the same subject used by other profs! They were quite proud of themselves too...

[@shadowcentaur]

So your video has sent me down a rabbit hole. I'm now writing all the magic scroll props for my D&D game in Shavian. Glad the algorithm landed you on my home page

[@Ch1oe2472]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a similar idea.

[@confushisushi]

Tunic is a great Zelda-esque puzzle solver that has it's own alphabet that you can choose to decipher, or look up the answer (It seems it's all the Shavian sounds but different writing style). Just mentioning because it's a great game, and also if you're into the extra credit stuff it may add more cool scripts for your repertoire

[@kippy7883]

In college I tried to learn Shavian to take notes with in class, but had a lot of trouble deciding what vowel characters to use, especially for unstressed syllables. Like if the first syllable in “believe“ should be “bih,” “buh,” or “bee.” And since repeating “believe”over and over to myself was kind of freaky to my roommates, I gave up.

[@ambisonic8440]

Could it be that you can choose either sound depending on how you say it？or is it a fixed spelling cuz I personally pronounce it like Buh Lee v

[@ChrisMcQueenMusic]

that’s the part I feel stuck on. Practically speaking that just seems like a constant headache. Imagine the confusion between people with different accents reading each other’s words. Like almost every other word would involve extra mental processing even after you’ve learned the new alphabet. That’s the opposite of a time saver 😬

[@skiegazer1953]

That's the first thought that came to my mind as I watched this video. Wouldn't the spelling of some Shavian words change depending on the speaker's native accent? (i.e. British, American, Canadian, etc.) How would you be able to "standardize" a word's "true" spelling based on the current English? I can't wrap my brain around it. As you can tell, I'm a card carrying Grammar Police member! 🤭🤫

[@lsfornells]

This should be taken in a more light way by the ones proposing a phonetic alphabet. If two vowel sounds are very difficult to distinguish by a significant number of speakers then they should be collapsed into one, at the writing level. Of course native speakers would still use their own slightly different sounds depending on region or pronunciation variety, but that should not make the writing more constrained by others. As a native Catalan speaker, I can say that the language has evolved in recent years to remove or to make some vowel sounds more similar, particularly because of the influence of Spanish accent speakers. For example the word "dona" means "woman", while "dóna" means "give". Also "neta" means clean (feminine), while "néta" means "grandchildren" (also feminine). They must not technically be pronounced the same way, and true native speakers make a clear distinction, as depicted by the addition of an accent in the writing. However Spanish native speakers, and many young Catalan naive speakers, can't make a distinction anymore so this is being lost. As a consequence it is now accepted to write all these words without the accent. The same should be applied to any phonetic form of written English. Even if two similar vowels must technically be pronounced in a slightly different way, if they sound close enough, or they are particularly indistinguishable by many speakers, then just use a single letter for them.

[@emilyrln]

Missed opportunity to start a vowel cult with your roommates 😂

[@jaredlash5002]

Biggest problem I see with the Shavian alphabet is the fact that, while the characters don't require you to lift your pen while writing the characters themselves, they do require you to lift your pen to write successive characters. In other words, this doesn't seem like you could create a cursive alphabet with it.

[@jaredlash5002]

Also, "Yea", "Woe" and "If" all require that the writer is very precise in their penmanship to ensure the angle of the stroke is exactly what is intended. None of that slanted writing that a lot of people enjoy doing.

[@Leblribrbrrq]

The letters already looked handwritten to me. Too many curves and precise angles.

[@NehauonElAprendizDelMundo]

Who tf cares about cursive

[@pleappleappleap]

@@NehauonElAprendizDelMundo Anyone who does a lot of handwriting. Cursive writes out much faster.

[@user-vl8qw8hp1g]

​@@NehauonElAprendizDelMundo It has been proven that the ability to write in cursive helps develop fine motor skills. Writing notes by hand also helps the brain retain more information than typing notes, so there's that.

[@thesaladballs]

this is something i’ve actually thought a lot about since learning how cyrillic script (the writing system for russia, ukraine, bulgaria, etc.) works about a decade ago now. and then i looked back at english and was like “where the hell did we go wrong?!” for those who don’t know, cyrillic languages are very phonetically consistent with spelling, and they also have letters for what we would consider “compound sounds”. for example, the “ch” sound in cyrillic is “ч”. they have this for “sh”, “cz”, and “ju”as well. so why don’t we have them in english? well, we kinda did for a bit, with the letter “thorn” or “þ”. this letter made the “th” sound. unfortunately, this was lost due to the invention of the printing press around the 15th century. but if you’re enlightened you can blame the french. regardless, that’s actually why the term “ye old” exists, because it fell out of fashion for the letter “y” instead. all this to say, here’s my proposal. i don’t dislike shavian, however, there’s a bit of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” sort of attitude i hold towards latin script. i don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the latin alphabet that shavian fixes. namely, it’s still not very easy for people with dyslexia (in fact, it may be worse) nor does it translate to cursive very well. so why not just… add some new letters? bring back thorn and add a couple more similar to how cyrillic script does? ofc, im no scholar nor am i in a position to change the tides of culture to slot my perfect alphabet in. maybe one day we’ll be better

[@CrankyOtter]

Agree completely. zh - ж ch - ч ts - ц kh- х sh - ш ALREADY EXIST & we can use them too.

[@Rezentix]

​@@CrankyOtteralso, since θorn looks too similar to ðe letter p, we could use ðe Greek θeta (θ) instead of ðe th digraph. Or, even better, we could do what IPA does: use θ for ðe voiceless th, and use ð (called eð) for ðe voiced th.

[@Vinemaple]

One infuriating thing about modern Cyrillic is that loanwords aren't spelled phonetically. Pizza in Russian is spelled "pizza" instead of "pica" with a ц.

[@Rezentix]

@@Vinemaple 🤨 What are you talking about? Pizza in Russian is spelt, well, пицца, which is quite precisely a phonetic spelling.

[@Vinemaple]

@@Rezentix But it's not pronounced "pitstsa," now, is it? And that's not how I learned to spell it.

[@jozibrewer]

I'm Utahn, and early during Utah's colonization there were a lot of religious immigrants/refugees moving there from across Europe who spoke different languages. In an attempt to make learning English easier, the Mormon leadership instituted the "Deseret Alphabet". Although short lived, I think it's pretty interesting, and like to imagine the alternate reality where it was more widely adopted across the Mormon corridor. Still, it is occasionally seen on pioneer era structures and gravestones.

[@MrHoundDoug]

Cool looks kind of Greek. Interesting it looks to have forty characters like GBS' proposal requirements.

[@RobWords]

Yes, I'm definitely going to get round to Deseret at some point.

[@grobredos]

Thank you. I look forward to it.

[@yubacore2743]

@@RobWordsthat would be awesome. I was thinking during your video ‘how is this different than Deseret?’ You couldn’t really use deseret today because accents spoken then are not around anymore so there are letters we wouldn’t use today. It’s also interesting that it gives us insight about how people sounded back then.

[@attilajuhasz2526]

16:25 (as an Australian observer)I think the same logic applies to the SI (metric system) units of measurement and its relationship with Americans and some British. "Why learn and adopt a new system, however streamlined and logical, if I've invested all my brain power 'speaking Imperial.'"

[@Headtalk]

I wonder what Shaw would’ve thought of the Korean alphabet. I know it doesn’t meet all of his standards for an alphabet, but it does some really interesting things, such as structuring letters into blocks that each represent a syllable

[@gasun1274]

It's known Sejong worked on it for quite a while and the Hunminjeongeum Haerye discussed the design principles at length. Namely similar shapes that are reflections or rotations of each other were scrapped for legibility reasons. The placement of vowels and featural design makes it easy to remember which shape correspond to which sound. The geometric shape is also chosen so that it's easy to write on dirt. Paper and ink were very expensive back then so the simple shapes and construction are needed to make it legible on dirt or with bad writing tools and mediums. It was a script designed for peasants, and it was subsequently made illegal, yet it was so easy and practical that people still used it. It was so good that they scrapped Chinese characters completely today. Mixed-script Hanja and Hangul is actually relatively recent. Since Hangul's inception most people use it in informal contexts where even Chinese loanwords are written in pure Hangul.

[@jakemeyer8188]

Ha! Maybe I should have read the comments before posting the same thing about the Korean alphabet...for the same reasons. You beat me to it!

[@thisdeath]

hmm yea korean alphabet are really cool :0

[@a8lg6p]

I was thinking about this too…how it reminds me of Hangul. Too bad we don’t have a king!

[@xcheesyxbaconx]

I imagine he would love it. It is everything that he wanted for English, and if we had the same phonemes in both languages I'm sure he would have called to adopt it for English.

[@beargreen1]

6:17 Who invited Ian? Poor Ian

[@diggininthecrates91]

They invited him to shave Ian

[@PolBlanesCebrian]

The problem this alphabet is trying to solve has nothing to do with the latin alphabet. The problem comes from English being a language made of so many loanwords that have been adopted in different ways, English has an etymological orthography rather than a phonological one (I mean words were adopted from other languages and old english and kept a different spelling instead of being written in a uniform spelling according to the contemporary english pronunciation). I don't know if the terms I'm using are completely correct but I hope I'm making myself understood. The way to fix this is by uniformizing writing. The only thing that's wrong with using 2 letters to represent a single sound is you lose space, but it's easier to memorize that two letters together make a similar but changed sound than one of them rather than to know the sound of 48 different characters. c -> ch, s -> sh And what fixes the loss of space when using 2 letters to indicate a modified pronunciation of a letter are diacritics. They are not an issue at all if you're trying to justify the shape of your letters by the way they are pronounced... c and ch could be c and č, s and sh could be s and š. Using the current alphabet and modifying things on it is better than a new alphabet altogether. But maybe what's going on is that people who want to make a "better" alphabet can't look at other languages to see how they've fixed things already... If diacritics were used in such way, though, english would then still have an inconsistency with some letters like z and j which should then be z and ž. And if the problem you find in diacritics is "that you can't write them in one stroke" not that anyone actually cares about that, then you can just integrate them in your letters like in this one ç. W this used to be 2 letters now it's "just one" because we say so. Ñ this used to be NN and Spanish scribes started writing one on top of another to save space in their books and now it's a diacritic. I hope you see where I'm going with this, don't throw the alphabet out the window as if it's the problem, the problem is you're not modifying it to tailor the needs of your language. And here's the true problem: enough and though are words with inconsistent pronunciation. You don't need a new alphabet to fix that, just write enof and tho and normalize that spelling.

[@Duskkit]

You've just blown my mind. And also given me a joke to share with one of my cousins. Explanation below if you want, but it's about as long as your whole comment and basically only tangentially related to a few of your sentences, so I definitely won't be offended if you don't want to spend the time to process it. My name used to be Nadyezhda, or Nadya for short. I got so many mispronunciations, even of the nickname which should have been easier than the full version. (I picked a new name for other reasons, but stuck with it largely because fewer mispronunciations of my name meant I was suddenly under much less stress in normal conversation.) Thing is, I have a stutter I can't hear myself, and I didn't even know about it until I was 13. (I had speech therapy for years, but no one ever explained that we were trying to correct my stutter, and there were a few reasons that I did know about so I wasn't completely confused about why I was put in speech therapy.) Most people assumed Nadia, which is more common. Not knowing about my stutter (and also first learning the word "syllable" further into elementary school than would have been most useful) I didn't figure out that what I need to say was "two syllables, not three" until long after I'd given up. The constant mispronunciations from all but my immediate family wore on me, but every time I tried and failed to correct someone was even worse... One cousin, with a name that started with J, would always say and write Nadja. That was more subtly different, and not the same mistake I was relentlessly battered by from every angle, so I never chose to correct it. And now you're essentially saying the full version of my name should have been written as Nadyejda! (Well, Nadyežda, but in a context where ž replaces j...) People learning my full name through writing would always look at those three consonants in a row, near the end of an overwhelmingly long first name, and balk. (With every new teacher first taking roll, I'd wait not to hear my name, but for a pause with visible confusion.) And people who I introduced myself to out loud... well, we've already covered that my pronunciation has never been as good as I think it is, because I can't hear the effects of my stutter. I *did* figure out the proper method to teach people the pronunciation pretty early on, but it wasn't worth my while to do that with every new person. Written syllable breakdown (Nad-yezh-da) plus the guidance that "zh" is related to "z" the same way "sh" is to "s". It wouldn't have occurred to me on my own, and I wouldn't change how I wrote my name to Nadyejda for the same reasons I never chose to swap to Nadia, but the pronunciation of "zh" used can indeed be written as "j". That might have been easier. All this thinking about misspellings and mispronunciations of names is making me too sad to actually laugh right now, but I do genuinely find it hilarious that I could have been "Nadja, short for Nadyejda" according to my cousin.

[@PolBlanesCebrian]

@@Duskkit I read your whole comment and also mine all over :D This was the perfect example of what I explained! A foreign word Latinized with letters that don't really match its pronunciation and so causing confusion. Language needs to evolve! And in my opinion, conserving the history of words within them is secondary to keeping a consistent relationship between letters or letter groups and sounds. I have to be honest, it would have been infuriating to me not being able to correctly pronounce my own name to teach it to others... but as you see you can write it as it would be spoken so that people understand. I'm guessing your name is originally croatian or serbian, I have a friend who's surname is Raženj and had very similar problems albeit she was able to pronounce it fine herself.

[@talinpeacy7222]

I like the idea of tweaking diacritics and spellings to use the old latin alphabet in better ways. It wouldn't be hard to change diacritics a bit to more naturally be included into letters and maybe a few other tweaks that could transition via just implementing them in a way similar to slang.

[@radikostov9700]

@@Duskkit I am confused. Is your name Надежда?

[@Duskkit]

@@radikostov9700 Derived from it, yeah. (I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet well enough to actually read anything, but Надежда is the version of my name that's written on my Christmas stocking so I can recognize it with context.) I believe Nadezhda, without the Y, is a more common way of writing it in this alphabet.

[@allengilbert7463]

Those flipped characters are really going to mess with my dyslexia. But, for me, why I'm so resistant to changing the Latin alphabet or even the spelling of words is because every time I read a word I'm looking into the history of the English-speaking world. They come from many different languages and at different times, even coming into English multiple times in different forms, so getting rid of what we already have feels like tearing down an ancient historical building and replacing it with a cheap facsimile.

[@mysteriousdeath14400]

It may or may not be helpful to you to remember that modern English spelling conventions were created by a person who didn't actually know the history of words. He just kind of guessed and got a lot of it wrong.

[@allengilbert7463]

@@mysteriousdeath14400 Only certain parts of words, he didn't completely change the spellings, so they still retain a bit of the original language, but modified to make it easier for English speakers.

[@AbWischBar]

⁠@@mysteriousdeath14400 even if misinterpreted by some official language Doctor, the root of the word will often still shine through. Though some words have undergone severe misinterpretation, most can be traced back to their roots. And I agree - that is a valuable property of using the Latin alphabet even though pronunciation is often violated. Only in my early 30s did I start looking up the roots of terminology. But it made such a difference to know the meaning of words like “parabola”. There are probably many who can remember concepts by associating them with a word without understanding the exact meaning - but I am not like that. Understanding the root helps me visualize, understand and remember the concept. And so yes, even though it is tempting to switch to a phonemic alphabet (which would also help me get the pronunciation right), I would lose this very relevant connection. Edited: originally I had "loose" instead of "lose" in my last sentence. Just for future readers who may be confused about responses to my comment.

[@BarBar3ar]

Flipped letters seem like a poor idea in general. Letters can easily be found without directional context. Any alphabet should be able to accommodate flipping a sign upside down without changing its meaning, even that sign is a single letter. Changing the sign for Ward A to Ward V shouldn't be so easy. If the orcs are marking themselves with Z it would be good to know if this random supply crate in the woods has a Z or an N on it.

[@Dioxazine_Stars]

I 100% agree

[@CymbalineMedia]

One issue with Shavian is that it doesn't account for sounds that are atypical in English. Loanwords, words with foreign etymologies, and non-Anglophone names would still need to be represented with Latin letters or somehow bodge together Shavian to make it work. You either end up with a dual-character system like Japanese or smashing together letters to represent with foreign sounds like ... English.

[@shavianalphabet4307]

Shavian represents foreign words as they are pronounced by English speakers, but with more options to specify which English vowel sound to use. This usually allows more accuracy, while sticking with the general set of sounds English speakers are comfortable pronouncing. If absolute accuracy is required, using the original script is an option. Using the Latin alphabet, on the other hand, is no guarantee that foreign words and names won't altered significantly in the mouths of most English speakers, particularly those words and names from languages that use non-Latin scripts.

[@abarette_]

What sounds does it even lack? I can only think about French 'u'/German 'ü', French/German 'r' (both voiced and voiceless), Japanese/Spanish 'r', and then nasal vowels though you could just represent those as vowel + ng . maybe some other kinds of h sounds as well though most languages don't need more than two of those

[@magnificenthonky]

​@@abarette_It lacks the Cough-Up-Phlem sounds, utilized by those desert countries that produce terrorists. Of course, the traditional Roman Alphabet doesn't account for that, either.

[@JamesDavis-ps6yy]

​@@magnificenthonkyyou mean the sounds also used in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and old English? Seriously. Your prejudice is showing

[@thevalarauka101]

@@magnificenthonky also known as pharyngeals (and technically neither German, Dutch, Afrikaans, or Old English has them)

[@dasdiesel3000]

Excellent video. What else is new? Your joy for exploration of language always shines through and makes topics a blast

[@ashleyhamman]

This has proven useful for my thinking about conlang scripts. I've thought about m/n and b/p sound similarities, and while I think flipping a character is not the way to go (impacts readability for people with dyslexia and such), being able to have letters wherein you can do little variations for local accenting and sounds would be incredibly useful. Deliberate flexibility within a character system.

[@shivmongoose3343]

I'm frankly agog once again at how something that so closely informs my interests has gone unnoticed by me all these years. I'm 64 and often casually considered inventing something very like Shavian. Thank you and I'm off on a quest to discover cursive and other scripts in my newly discovered medium as I will henceforth be keeping my journal using it.

[@rich8021]

I have thought this myself. My bigger goal was to get rid of homonyms and the like. To, too, two, spelled differently for sure, but when you say them, there needs to be context or you may not understand. I think Shavian could help out with this. drop too and use also or as well. At least that would be one down. :D

[@Genii69]

I understand that one of the ideas for the characters is that you don't want to lift your pen but what would have been so much easier to learn and use would be to keep the letters we currently use that only have one sound (B, D, F etc) and only create new characters for sounds that are not currently represented by only one character or a character has more than one sound (oo in book, short A in cat, long A in cake, etc). Doing this would give words somewhat of a framework that would be easier to learn by site. Sort of like those paragraphs you see going around the internet where it shows how amazing the mind is because you can read whole paragraphs of words that are totally misspelled because there is enough of a framework there that the brain can easily figure it out. When none of the characters has any resemblance to what we already know, there is no starting point...

[@Hashiriya985]

i mean if the objective is not removing the pen from the papper you can write in cursive, dont know if english speakers do that, but here in Brazil is very common to write the Roman alphabet in cursive but it usually looks like a bunch of black metal band names

[@JMurph2015]

​@@Hashiriya985cursive is reasonably common in English, but simce handwriting is out of fashion, fewer and fewer people can read/write cursive.

[@laurencefraser]

@@Hashiriya985 Australia and New Zealand abandoned cursive decades ago in favour of linked italics (it has... a Very Large number of advantages), but hand writing in general is a less important skill when all official doccuments, corrispondance especially, is typed, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn that many younger people can't even manage that. ... Of course, the number of people who also can't Type properly is a bit concerning (and not limited to Australia and New Zealand, at all).

[@davidannen7448]

I think it would be better to bring back archaic letters (æ, ð, þ) before adding new ones, and even changing the sounds redundant letters make (c should be the ch sound, and q shouldn't need a u to make its unique sound)

[@Hashiriya985]

@@JMurph2015 didnt tought about that. you have a point.

[@Ca7iburn]

@robwords today was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time I watched you on the news. What a breath of fresh air your calm demeanor was.

[@DitchTroll]

I think there's a middle ground. A hybrid of the two systems seems more practical to apply. Reusing parts of the latin alphabet would still allow English speakers to recognize sounds in other languages that use that alphabet. The letters c, x, and y should definitely be replaced and shavian letters for sounds like ch, sh, and th should be used.

[@KyleDavis328]

English used to have two distinct letters for TH, Thorn (Þ þ) and Eth (Ð ð). And we still have two distinct TH sounds, most just don't notice it. Think of the differences in how the TH is pronounced in _thin_ and _this_, in _thin_ the TH is voiceless, could be mistaken for an S sound from someone with a lisp (like myself). On the other hand in _this_ the TH is voiced, and operated like the TH equivalent to a Z. So we could represent the voiceless TH as Thorn, and the voiced TH as Eth (which by the way, lowercase eth is the IPA letter for the sound). The otherwise useless letters of C, X, and Q could potentially serve the purpose of some of the other digraphs, and given their usage in other languages, either C or Q could be CH, the other being dropped (or if there's some reason to have two CH sounds, then use both) and X could be SH. And Y does serve a purpose in English, consonant Y is a distinct English sound that is similar to that of the J in Germanic languages. And J in English is already used for an alternative representation of the soft-G sound, something which should become universal in English, but that's beside the point. Vowel Y is a bit redundant though, that can't really be argued.

[@peggyjones3282]

This would be a nightmare for dyslexic people. If they think learning the difference between d and b is impossible, try those angled ones.

[@Gin2761]

I was thinking the same! Some differences of this alphabet are very hard to perceive.

[@pokerformuppets]

Yes, you can tell this was invented 60 years ago, before dyslexia was something anyone cared about.

[@insevered2730]

But you could say the same for Chinese or even Japanese kana Hindi arabic they all have writing systems a hell of a lot more complex than English or even shavian and they seem to do just fine so I don’t think you can use this as an argument against it

[@arttoegemann]

It's just perverse that the letter that looks like a 1 is pronounced two.

[@abarette_]

For consonants it might be fine because of the height difference, but the vowels? lmao don't even try

[@DusanPavlicek78]

This is so interesting! The Shaw's quote "a saving of a hundred percent of my time" immediately caught my attention (14:08): He should have said fifty percent instead of a hundred because if he saved 100 percent, it wouldn't have taken him any time at all, which is not the case 😉

[@danielstreeter6738]

Not to mention his particular selection of three letter-heavy words as opposed to an actual passage of text.

[@kikivoorburg]

I guess he meant that the standard form was 100% more time (i.e. 200% of the compact form). Indeed though, when describing a time-saving one should use the original as the standard and that would give 50%.

[@cloudkitt]

Well he was a writer rather than a mathematician. But I think he was speaking from the perspective of his theoretical efficient system. Because if you wrote something that took you x time, and then you wrote it again over 2x time, you would have spent 100% more time on that writing the second time through.

[@kellerkind6169]

So it looks like he didnt do his math(s) after all 😀

[@Blackberry7620]

@@cloudkittHe's still wrong. Going from 9 to 18 is a 100% increase, but 18 to 9 is not a 100% decrease.

[@ethanlamoureux5306]

Thank you for covering Shavian! I learned to read and write the Shavian alphabet back around 20 years ago or more. Here is how I would write the preamble to the US constitution, using my normal spelling, not modified to be more “standard” or “proper.” It looks like I use more compound letters and other spellings which make it even shorter than your version. For instance, I spell “little” as “𐑤𐑦𐑑𐑤”. I have no idea if this will be visible to most people, because they may not have a font for it, but anyway, here it is: 𐑢𐑰 𐑞 𐑐𐑰𐑐𐑤 𐑚 𐑞 ·𐑿𐑯𐑲𐑑𐑧𐑛 ·𐑕𐑑𐑱𐑑𐑕, 𐑦𐑯 𐑹𐑛𐑼 𐑑 𐑓𐑹𐑥 𐑩 𐑥𐑹 𐑐𐑻𐑓𐑧𐑒𐑑 𐑿𐑯𐑘𐑩𐑯, 𐑧𐑕𐑑𐑨𐑚𐑤𐑦𐑖 𐑡𐑳𐑕𐑑𐑦𐑕, 𐑦𐑯𐑖𐑵𐑼 𐑛𐑩𐑥𐑧𐑕𐑑𐑦𐑒 𐑑𐑮𐑨𐑙𐑒𐑢𐑦𐑤𐑦𐑑𐑰, 𐑐𐑮𐑩𐑝𐑲𐑛 𐑓𐑹 𐑞 𐑒𐑪𐑥𐑩𐑯 𐑛𐑦𐑓𐑧𐑯𐑕, 𐑐𐑮𐑩𐑥𐑴𐑑 𐑞 𐑡𐑧𐑯𐑮𐑤 𐑢𐑧𐑤𐑓𐑺, 𐑯 𐑕𐑦𐑒𐑿𐑼 𐑞 𐑚𐑤𐑧𐑕𐑦𐑙𐑟 𐑝 𐑤𐑦𐑚𐑼𐑑𐑰 𐑑 𐑬𐑼𐑕𐑧𐑤𐑝𐑟 𐑯 𐑬𐑼 𐑐𐑪𐑕𐑑𐑺𐑦𐑑𐑰, 𐑛𐑵 𐑹𐑛𐑱𐑯 𐑯 𐑧𐑕𐑑𐑨𐑚𐑤𐑦𐑖 𐑞𐑦𐑕 𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑕𐑑𐑦𐑑𐑵𐑖𐑩𐑯 𐑓𐑹 𐑞 ·𐑿𐑯𐑲𐑑𐑧𐑛 ·𐑕𐑑𐑱𐑑𐑕 𐑝 ·𐑩𐑥𐑺𐑦𐑒𐑩.

[@bog2k3]

This font looks like a cross between elvish and predator scripts

[@perhapsyes2493]

@@bog2k3Beautiful in it's own way, and efficient.

[@thenormanfair]

It works on my android phone. Way to go Google?

[@mrshr3d]

@ethanlamoureux5306 I can read this :) I discovered Shavian about 6 weeks ago (Australian here, so I'm not familiar with the verse of the US constitution) "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America."

[@kevinmcgrane4279]

This is completely new to me. Thank you. Will look into it further.

[@varickveit2245]

You got me to voluntarily watch an ad. I'm impressed.

[@callen8908]

Fascinating, thank-you. Efficiency is not the over-arching goal in written language, in my opinion. That said, the Shavian character set is graceful, and its existence displays a healthy examination of the purpose and beauty of human language

[@BatManWayneCorp]

Is anyone else strongly reminded of the Tengwar alphabet? Tolkien also used a system thst grouped letters into "hard" and "soft", "vocal" and "silent" and nasal or whatever the opposite is 😂 and due to Tolkien being an English speaker, it's actually quite well suited for the English language

[@kristianwold1095]

I was thinking of the Tengwar too. But I think Tolkien invented those letters to express his elvish languages, which always seem a little more like Latin to me than English.

[@carlose4314]

@@kristianwold1095 I think he based some of it on welsh as well.

[@HarmSchelhaas]

“Strongly reminded” is a bit too strong I think. But then I’m very familiar with Tengwar, so the differences might loom a bit larger for me. There certainly are a lot of rotated and (seemingly) mirrored pairs in Tengwar, even more regular than in Shavian, though otherwise the shapes are mostly different. But Tolkien actually designed an alphabet in reaction to Shaw’s competition, which he called ‘New English Alphabet’. It looks surprisingly like halfway between his Tengwar and the ultimate Shavian, even though he of course did not know the entries till after the competition, and I don’t think he actually entered his design.

[@BatManWayneCorp]

@@HarmSchelhaas cool, is Tolkien's design available anywhere?

[@jarblewarble]

The Tengwar letters were probably inspired by Old English uncial scripts. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English literature.

[@Petra44YT]

No way! I'm so glad that English is just written as it sounds and that I didn't have to learn any funny letters before actually learning the language. I'm currently at it again, and Duolingo helps me with it, but still, it takes a long time to learn the letters. I've about two thirds of the Japanese Hiragana down now, and a few of the Katakana, but this is work.

[@rattlehead9127]

I'm curious why you say English is "just written as it sounds" when that's probably the biggest complaint about the language. We have so many words that have completely unnecessary letters in them and we have words that are spelt the same but sound different and even words that are spelt and sound the same but have entirely different meanings.

[@anthonyrobinson6448]

Diacritical marks for vowels and double consonants is better since as you mentioned many other nationalities use Latin letters and it would be much easier for natives to learn the language this way. It is a well designed system though.

[@jonahrichardson3000]

Amazing as ever, Rob :) Another reason why I think Shavian wouldn't catch on easily is because introducing a new alphabet cuts people off from the past and makes reading historical documents challenging, all the other script changes I can think of seem to be some way connected to regime change like the Latin alphabet replacing the Arabic script of Ottoman-era Turkish and Simplified Characters in mainland China as opposed to the preservation of Traditional Characters in Hong Kong and Taiwan

[@RobWords]

Very good point. It's hard enough to read Chaucer without it being in a different alphabet!

[@dougwilson4537]

It is not even the introduction of a new alphabet, that would cause that problem. The Archives of Nova Scotia, is desperate for people who can read scripted letters, so that they can continue to digitize older historical documents and correspondence. Only one generation that they haven't taught script in the schools, and now it is a specialized skill, that archivists have to learn. (except for we older folk, who volunteer our time) 😉

[@musingwithreba9667]

​@dougwilson4537 I think I heard recently here in Ontario they will start teaching script again. Somebody decided it was a stupid idea to have stopped 😂

[@londongael414]

Agreed! And think of the history embedded in individual words that we'd lose. And the potential confusion with homophones (sight/site etc)... By now, the way we spell and write is as much a part of the language as the sound of it - the way we can convey a dialect or accent, a level of education, a historical period, the fun spelling of advertising (Kwik-fit, Krispy Kreme etc), the option of SHOUTING! - all those nuances would be lost. While I think the Shavian alphabet is a beautiful piece of design, and is fun to play with, I must admit that I am deeply emotionally attached to the way we write English, and I don't care how "efficient" or "rational" any other system might be - I just DON'T WANT IT.

[@alexmckee4683]

For some people it would be a feature rather than a bug for it to be more difficult for newer generations to read historical documents.

[@taylorsloth9833]

Have you ever seen those weird keyboards that court reporters use? Its very similar to this in that they record the syllables instead of the words. I would love to see this covered in a future episode.

[@namibiaxx1016]

Steno

[@pokerformuppets]

Agree that it would be a great topic. The whole system with "theories" (what?) all seems so arcane.

[@ThatRPGuywithtoomanyOCs]

I also saw a keyboard long ago that had almost every common letter combination instead of as individual keys. So QU was there instead of q on it's own, since it's pretty much never used without it. It was a huge keyboard, granted, but the person using it was able to type at light speed since a whole word could be as little as two keys.

[@mykelevangelista6492]

My mum was quite a proficient user of Pitman shorthand and, whilst not exactly the same, it was very quick and efficient. The problem was, she developed several variations for her own speed - a sort of shorthand of shorthand - and I couldn't read some of her writing because of this, and she had to translate those parts.

[@jeri.studio]

𐑩𐑜𐑮𐑰 💯%

[@Apollo_Dionysus_Hermes]

I love how whenever I learn a new alphabet I just start beat boxing. You were telling me to spot the difference in t and p and t t t t t t p s t b s p t b pt bb pt ts kh. It was really fun for me to learn the Greek alphabet because I added so many sounds to my beatboxing vocabulary like gnK gk wt It's so awesome how humans can make so many sounds

[@monkeychicken27]

A fan of your open-minded and conceptual topic videos. Thank you for the intelligent content.

[@amherst88]

Have to say I'm old enough to not do 'social media' and have limited use for the 'internet' but your posts are one of the reasons I'm grateful it was invented -- I am utterly amazed at what you come up with every time and I realize it would not exist without this platform. If this were a university I would cast my vote to give you tenure ❤

[@amherst88]

@@cancermcaids7688 If you consider watching educational posts on YT to be the same as plugging into the umbilicus of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter et al I wonder about your faculties of distinction.

[@robertmartens7839]

they are not called posts. Uploads. Episodes.

[@thatotherted3555]

I know people of all ages who use social media. I'm picturing you as a 130-year-old sorcerer.

[@amherst88]

@@robertmartens7839 You should probably go about correcting all those people who claim to be 'posting' things to YT.

[@robertmartens7839]

@@amherst88 will you help me?

[@Sonicgott]

How very interesting. Turns out others have tried creating phonemic alphabets, too. In the game of Tunic (a little fox adventurer exploring a big strange world), which is on Steam, uses a phonemic language the fans call “Trunic,” a language comprised of phonemic runes that does the exact same thing as Shavian English. Both are eloquent and beautiful in their design. ❤️

[@RobWords]

Brilliant. I shall give that a look.

[@AlohaChips]

Yeah, I tried to invent one once and get used to writing in it to have my own "secret code". Of course any codebreaker worth their salt could have figured it out pretty easily, but it would at least baffle the casual diary snooper, right?

[@chromatos7428]

I was definitely thinking the "compound" (rhotic/non-rhotic) vowels in particular reminded me a lot of how the phonemes are combined in Trunic.

[@nsvan17]

incredibly fascinating. can't believe i wasn't familiar with this alphabet before watching this video. i really want to start practicing reading this script. also gotta say - thanks a ton for using that obnoxious background music much more sparingly in your recent videos

[@Neiot]

I have always adored your videos, I am not sure why I was not already subscribed. Thank you for educating and entertaining us!

[@bemusedalligator]

the biggest problem with english alphabet is that vowel reduction means that the phenomes of the word change not just from accents, but also based on how much emphasis the word has, how formal the sentence is, and similar alterations.

[@lsfornells]

This is common to all non-tonal languages, and not an inconvenient for the proposal of a more phonetic form for the language

[@justinsayin3979]

@@lsfornells It's not common to _all_ non-tonal languages, and not to the degree of English. To give an example, in Shavian "photo" is 𐑓𐑴𐑑𐑴, whilst "photograph" is 𐑓𐑴𐑑𐑩𐑜𐑮𐑨𐑓 and "photographer" is 𐑓𐑩𐑑𐑪𐑜𐑮𐑩𐑓𐑼. Notice that the second vowel "o" (the third letter in each Shavian spelling) is different in each word (𐑴, 𐑩 and 𐑪 respectively). This is something that afflicts nearly all Latinate word families and using Shavian would break the etymological connection.

[@lsfornells]

​@@justinsayin3979 I see what you mean, and I think that the focus for an alternative alphabet should not be to convert the English spelling into a fully phonetic one, but just to improve it significantly. For fully phonetic transcription we already have the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so we do not need to invent another one with the same exact purpose. I can give the example of the Catalan language, which is a Romance Language using the Roman alphabet. In this language your example is even worse. See this: "foto" (English: photo) is pronounced "fotu" Here I used the IPA "fotografia" (English: photograph) is pronounced "futugrəfi'ə" "fotògraf" (English photographer" is pronounced "futɔ'grəf" Not that there's always the letter "o" in the spelling. However it is pronounced "u" in some cases, "ɔ" in others, and "o" in others . Also note that "a" is pronounced like the 'shwa' sound in all these examples. However it would be pronunced as IPA "a" in "gra" (meaning seed) HOWEVER, Catalan writing is 90% PHONETIC. How can it be given the above mentioned divergences? Also the language has 7 vowel sounds while the Roman alphabet has only 5. This is because there are rules that account for the differences. In the case of Catalan, the rules are extremely simple: - All unstressed "o" are pronounced "u". All unstressed "a" or "e" are pronounced "ə". - Stressed syllables are unequivocally determined by punctuation rules (3 set of independent rules, not depicted here) - Stressed "o" is pronounced either "o" or "ɔ" depending on accent on top of the letter - Stressed "a", is pronounced "a" - Stressed "e" can be pronounced "e" or "ɛ" depending on accent Therefore there no need to use any phonetically oriented alphabet for it, while still the standard writing being technically mostly phonetic So why do not apply the same to English, by creating a special way or writing along with an adapted set of phonetic rules that would prevent the use of an actual phonetic alphabet? In the example you gave, why can't we still write "photo", "photograph" and "photographer" but adding appropriate accents or diacritics as needed, along with a set of universal phonetic rules to actually help depict the differences, even if they are not 100% accurate or valid in 100% of the cases? That would simplify enormously the learning of the language to non natives, while still preserving the Roman alphabet and the ease of reading?

[@jkonoch]

Isn't that just exciting though! Imagine this scene changed by just the use of characters: i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/5f/83/1c5f83a16430b1787c7d674c533126c8.jpg

[@hotsistersue]

While I love the idea of revamping the alphabet, the Shavian alphabet is a case of reinventing the wheel. When Rob had a go at the Roman alphabet, he added letters to the list we already had instead of replacing everything. This would make learning the new system much easier. For the pronunciation confusion (9 ways to say ough, etc.), when Daniel Webster created his American English dictionary, he aimed to simplify the spelling of words. He probably wanted to stick it to the Brits, too, as is the case with human nature. Anyway, to put this simply, there's an easier way to do this.

[@lunarna]

Shaw believed that a Latin-based alphabet will not catch on because people view correct pronunciations as misspellings. English has a particularly large amount of people who believe grammar may never change and want to "correct" others spellings, because they were taught that as children. Additionally, a Latin-based alphabet may not be as precise - Shavian has nearly double the amount of characters so an ideally precise Latin-based alphabet alphabet would look very unlike Latin in writing anyway, because of the amount of extra characters

[@harlangrove3475]

Indeed easier ways to do this. From a purely quantitative perspective, how much of the reduction in letters in English would be realized just from rationalizing the spelling of ALL words with gh, replacing ng in sing and sh in she with 1 letter, and reincorporating eth and thorn? How much would be unrealized using 2 letters for diphthongs and common consonant combinations, not just tʃ for ch and dʒ for j, but also for other common 2-consonant sounds?

[@nicholasvinen]

Google "A plan for the improvement of English spelling" for a pretty funny (but also quite sensible) take on the iterative approach!

[@harlangrove3475]

@@lunarna How many consonants are needed? Definitely new ones for sh in she, th in this, th in thin, ng in sing. Any others? Actually, a writing system which would include the letter ian but no letter for the qu in square, question, quiz, quandry, etc is at best inconsistent. If quiz SHOULD BE 𐑒𐑢𐑦𐑟 , why shouldn't change be 𐑑𐑖𐑱𐑯𐑛𐑠 ? OTOH, vowels are a PITA, especially all the sounds the letter a can make in English. How about dialects in which caught and cot are pronounced the same? How much is gained from separate letters for the i's in petite and pit, the e's in canape and set, the u's in tool and took? For that matter, how much is gained from semiconsonants w and y when u or i before other vowels could become w and y sounds AS IN LATIN? Is anything gained from separate letters 𐑩 and 𐑳 ?

[@Arkylie]

I've studied over fifty languages, and I figured out early on that overmapping is a *huge* issue. It's the reason I can't get my brain to mesh with written Irish Gaelic no matter how desperately I wanted to: my brain will not make the connection between the letters and their sounds. By contrast, moving to Japanese was a breeze -- took me a couple months to pin down the basic writing systems and I've had no trouble since that point. Because my brain didn't have a pre-existing map of those letters to fight against the new version. So although we wouldn't have to learn more letter forms, I think learning to map them to new sounds -- or, more realistically, *fewer* sounds than their current form -- would be the deal-breaker. There's no way we could, as a group, reliably learn to read words as the way their letters work when their letters have so long said something else (dose rose lose, star war we're were worm, etc.). Therefore I think that learning a completely new set of letters is absolutely a better plan than trying to teach a generation to e.g. pronounce C as CH and only CH, and X as "uh" or whatever, and throwing in some extra letters that just make the whole thing look mismash 🤷🏽‍♀️

[@washitokusei6801]

Took me about two weeks to learn hiragana and katakana (about 90 base characters combined) so this might be a fun little challenge 🙂 Thanks for the great video!

[@JeoshuaCollins]

Hell yeah! Shavian! I can actually read and write it pretty well. Love how it looks.

[@GeraldOSteen]

The Shavian Alphabet definitely seems like it could make things like palindromes far more interesting, but I do wonder how it might deal with acronyms. We tend to use a great many acronyms quite commonly, especially in the tech world. It's an interesting thing to ponder.

[@deal_4_real]

There is a Unicode ring character " ⸰ " that some of us Shavianists use in place of the standard namer dot to indicate that the following word is actually a set of initials. For the abbreviation CMS as in Content Management System, you could write ⸰𐑒𐑥𐑕. An interesting example is PIN as in Personal Identification Number. You could write ⸰𐑐𐑲𐑯, but if the reader sounded it out as a single word rather than the separate initials, they would say "pine" instead of "pin" since you are taking the initial vowel from the word "identification." If you wanted to preserve the standard pronunciation of "pin," you could choose instead to simply write the word 𐑐𐑦𐑯 "pin". And you could precede it with a namer dot if you wanted to make it extra clear that you were not talking about a literal pin. Going back to the CMS example - if you wanted to write it in Shavian while preserving the traditional pronunciation of the separate letters, you could write ·𐑕𐑰-𐑧𐑥-𐑧𐑕 to convey "see-em-ess." Of course, that's less efficient than writing the abbreviation I wrote above, or just straight-up switching back to Latin letters to write "CMS" specifically. (Shavian keyboards usually make it easy to swap between Shavian and Latin letters.)

[@ianwise2457]

I believe a common solution is to spell it as it sounds, so something like PCB would be like 𐑐𐑰𐑕𐑰𐑚𐑰 (pee see bee). or USA would be 𐑿 𐑧𐑕 𐑱 (yu es ei). Some acronyms like UNESCO and NATO are spoken as proper names, and their vowels O and A-O no longer represent their initial sound in “Organization” and “Atlantic”, so they are often written as their own words like ·𐑿𐑯𐑧𐑕𐑒𐑴 and ·𐑯𐑱𐑑𐑴.

[@Daniel-zc5lf]

@@ianwise2457 "PCB would be like 𐑐𐑰𐑕𐑰𐑚𐑰" - this is funny 'cos in Russian we transliterate acronyms from English in the exact same way. e.g. if there is a company called "PCB" and it opens business, legally it would be named "ПИСИБИ".

[@therosijedha]

​@@ianwise2457wait this is in unicode?

[@VictorDoesThingsYT]

I believe we could use Latin script for acronyms. It would be a bit weird using two writing systems at once, but I think it could be useful.

[@grantbanasik8006]

I'm not sure I can name another channel producing this kind of content, so I'm grateful for all the work that goes into these videos. Alternate English scripts are fascinating.

[@basil4154]

If you want more linguistic yt i watch k klein!

[@louiserocks1]

Dr geoff lindsey has a lot of interesting things about English language too

[@basil4154]

@@louiserocks1 i love that guy!

[@berlindude75]

Although she hasn't posted a new video in quite a while, Arika Okrent's many short videos on her YT channel of the same name were very much in the same vein as this one. Lots of interesting language and spelling tidbits. Worth checking out.

[@Appletank8]

NativeLang talks about languages through history.

[@marathorne6821]

Fascinating! 😊 This reminds me of when I learned Pitman shorthand, many decades ago when "secretaries" were a thing. That, too, has single strokes for sounds we conventionally represent with multiple letters such as "sh", and diphthongs ("how") and differentiating short vowels ("not") and long vowels ("no"). The basic learning of the system took about one term at college, and then it was a case of building up speed, and crucially, the ability to read it all back afterwards! Surprisingly I reckon I could still work out how to write in it all these years later! But equally surprisingly, I did not take my university notes down in shorthand even just a year or so later - because I feared I would struggle to read them again when it came to revision time... Efficiency notwithstanding, I guess we're all just far too invested in the Roman alphabet to adopt anything else. Thanks for getting the mental cogs turning, Rob!

[@Yasmuraz]

Reminds me of Thai language, they similar have about 46-48 letters, more vowels, but the biggest criticism is that they don’t use spaces to separate words. It makes reading more difficult not just for beginners, but natives. An easy example is how we can rearrange the letters except for the first and last characters and still read words we are familiar with. However with Thai it’s just one long word.

[@rennnnn914]

That is a nightmare for anyone who is dyslexic.

[@entropy4959]

I think the usage of diacritics and small letter groups helps simplifying the learning of a language. For example with Japanese characters these diacritics “ (dakuten) are making a sound voiced I.e. す [su] (as in sushi with a sharp s) transforms to ず [zu] (similar to zoo) or in German the dots mark a movement of the vowel towards an i so ä is what happens when you say /a/ and then slowly move towards an [ɪ/ and stop somewhere in the middle. As for groups of letters in Japanese putting a small ゅ [yu] after a sound that ends on [i] for example き [ki] combines the two to きゅ[kyu] and in German combining c and h as ch either produces /ç/ (similar to the consonant in hue) or /x/ (like the ch in loch) depending on what vowel stands before it. It is also mentioned that there is no letter for th, which there is: Þ, þ (thorn) which existed in old English but was replaced by th. Now what’s my point? Rather than inventing a completely new alphabet one could reuse the current one and make fixed rules about how every single letter and some double letter combinations are pronounced, as well as what effect a diacritic may have on a vowel or a consonant (you shouldn’t have diacritics that can be used for both with different meanings). It might also sometimes be useful to introduce new/ imported/ old letters Note: The ruleset should be kept simple An example for some ough words: Through - Þru Though - Þoù Rough - Rúff Tough - Taff Slough - Slaù Dough - Doù Bought - Bót Thorough - Þórè What have I done here? every th is reverted to Þ /u/ is depicted as u /ʊ/ is depicted as ù /ʌ/ is depicted as ú /ɔː/ is depicted as ó /o/ is depicted as o /ə/ is depicted as è I have used the diacritics ˋ and ´ to signal changes from the base sound. Here ´ shifts a vowel towards /a/ and ˋ opens the signals to open the mouth a little more than usual. This is obviously nowhere near perfect but it should (assuming my tired ass didn’t make errors) have a consistent rule set and is easier to learn than a whole new alphabet. Edit: As per question in this thread i have created a discord community for trying to actually do rework the English orthography: discord.gg/cHutQSg9UM

[@sana-helwa-ya-jamil]

I do agree and think that diacritics is the best way to reform English spelling, but the th in *th*igh and in *th*y are different sounds and it'd be helpful to learners if they were distinguished in spelling Maybe something like Þý for thigh and Ðý or Thý for thy

[@entropy4959]

@@sana-helwa-ya-jamil time to reform the English spelling in a comment section. Yeah that sounds reasonable

[@DanielMemeSmith]

You meant to say "[kyu]" there, when "ki" is paired with "yu".

[@entropy4959]

@@DanielMemeSmith yes I did that happens when you write at 4 am thank you

[@karawethan]

The problem with any phonetic script is that it will never capture the diversity of English pronunciation. Just think of all the different ways a common word like "water" can be pronounced, from the "t" being released or held (making it sound more like a "d"), to the final "r" being voiced or dropped (as in non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation), to the initial vowel taking on any number of different sounds.

[@fernlovebond]

I'm more than a little tempted to begin using this for some personal items, just to get it into my head, and maybe try to rope others into trying it. Thanks! It's fascinating, and a beautifully rational idea.

[@shdwbnndbyyt]

My late brother with severe dyslexia had no issues reading Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian) which he learned later in life as CNC installation specialist travelling in the Eastern European countries in the 1990's. English, it took him up to an hour to read a page of printed text.

[@lelandk3136]

Neat idea, though I find the letters are all way too similar to each other for my taste. My eyes just glaze right over the script.

[@josueveguilla9069]

Same.

[@encycl07pedia-]

That's usually a sign of unfamiliarity with the language. I experienced it when learning Russian (Cyrillic alphabet).

[@lelandk3136]

@@encycl07pedia- Quite possible.

[@FadeToBlack888]

like Georgian script or one of the Dravidian languages!

[@jiahturner8122]

I had the same experience when learning Arabic, but after you really learn the letters, they make plenty of sense and are just as recognizable as Latin letters.

[@Orenotter]

I see two big problems right off the bat. 1. The letters aren't distinct enough from each other. 2. We need fewer alphabets if we want to communicate across languages more effectively, not more. The biggest hurdle for beginners learning to read Japanese, Korean or Hebrew or, God forbid, Thai (I have learned many alphabets but that one is just impossible!) is that they must first learn to read all over again.

[@RichardHarlos]

Ore wrote, _"I see two big problems right off the bat."_ 1. What is the metric by which you would declare a set of letters 'distinct enough'? Is there some objective measure, or is it just a personal preference? 2. I don't see that the 'less is more' argument applies to the issue that Shavian addresses. Shavian reduces each distinct English sound to a single character. It's not a trimming of the existing alphabet, but a phonemic replacement. So, when you're replacing something that's more complicated than it needs to be, with something that's less complicated, it's a mistake to imagine that the errant complexity is best addressed with a numerical reduction. This can sometimes be the case, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it must always be the case.

[@--sql]

​@@RichardHarlosI think what Orenotter is saying is that some languages already use Arabic characters, so writing is a step for those non-native speakers need to focus less on. I'm not sure I 100% agree though, since being phonemic means that if you know how to pronounce a word, as long as you know the characters, you can write it. What I really don't understand is what advantage the Shavian alphabet has over the 48 equivalent characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[@RichardHarlos]

@@--sql wrote, _"what advantage [does] the Shavian alphabet [have] over the 48-equivealnt characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet."?_ I can't say from personal experience but consider the following excerpt from Wikipedia about the IPA. I think it offers the beginning of an answer to your question: Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English digraph ⟨ch⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter: [c], or with multiple letters plus diacritics: [t̠̺͡ʃʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription; therefore, /tʃ/ is more abstract than either [t̠̺͡ʃʰ] or [c] and might refer to either, depending on the context and language.[note 1] Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005,[4] there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA.

[@septanine5936]

In my experience its easier to learn an alphabet and read when the symbols are unfamiliar, because I don't have to change my interpretation of the symbols. I'm learning french, and just my foreknowledge of the roman alphabet alone makes it harder for me to read words correctly, because I have to remember that "ch" makes a shhh sound, and "er" and "es" sorta make an |A| sound. Regardless of if you're new to a script or not, you still have to learn to read again, because the usage, sounds, and combinations of symbols changes for each language, even if they use the same script, and fewer alphabets will not help that.

[@matthewgagnon9426]

@@RichardHarlos Basically all the letters have multiple variations that are different because of orientation. p, b, d, and q are all way too similar to each other in standard alphabet, the Shavian alphabet has multiple sets of 4 characters that are only different because of orientation. It makes it hard as shit for dyslexic people.

[@JervisGermane]

I made up my own alphabet when I was 9 that I can still use. I went the other way, with 21 letters (no J, Q, W, X, or Y) and more combinations (you'd write a J with a DG, for example, so "I went for a jog yesterday" becomes "I ooent for a dgog ee-esterdae." I've never proposed it for further use, because it solved the problem I was having reading my own writing. My letters are distinct enough that they couldn't be confused for each other even in my horrible 9-year-old penmanship. It was a personal solution to a personal problem. The same is probably true for Shavian. Whether you find it attractive or useful is going to have more to do with how you view the problems it solves (and the ones it doesn't) than any objective measure.

[@rezonthe]

I like it!

[@bnic9471]

I made my own alphabet and shared it with a few friends when I was 12, for secrecy purposes when we passed notes in class. Later on I added a bunch of letters, some for consonant blends, and others just to make it harder to crack the code.

[@juancuelloespinosa]

00:14 i remember saying to a classmate who only spoke english "You know how english isn't pronounced how it's spelled" And he replied, "What do you mean?" So you need the context of other languages to get the point

[@jabbertwardy]

I've researched English phonemes before and never came across Shavian! Thanks for bringing it to light! I also came to the same conclusion of 40 phonemes (25 consonants, 15 vowels), but was stumped about how to expand the vowel character set. Shavian looks wonderful! A couple more obstacles to adopting a phonetic/phonemic alphabet is the increase of homonyms and the loss of etymological clues to the meaning of a word (based on its peculiar spelling).

[@joerosenman3480]

BUT a phonemic system would be a huge step forward, right? I believe there are just a few steps needed to evolve English into something vastly improved, using essentially the same (but expanded) character set: First, make it phonemic Second, make consonants consistent Third, simplify words by eliminating unnecessary & silent letters Fourth, add consonants WITH new characters (or recycled newly unused old characters) for new sounds Fifth, consonant variants can be shown with special diacriticals (Example: in transliterating from Indic languages there is a “short” R denoted by an R with a dot underneath, or an “sh” formed with the center of the tongue and spoken with reduced breath denoted by an S with a dot underneath) Sixth, fix the vowel problem. Specifically: Using current vowels are fine BUT use diacriticals to guide long, short, nasal, glottal, and so on. I think making these changes in stages (with a published plan in place) would be generally acceptable though there would inevitably be a period of mish-mash, to use a technical term… 😳

[@Windgoddess540]

The Shavian dictionary spelled my name as first “𐑨𐑤𐑦𐑜𐑟𐑨𐑯𐑛𐑮𐑩” then “𐑨𐑤𐑦𐑜𐑟𐑭𐑯𐑛𐑮𐑩”. Although the second pronunciation is closer to mine, I would spell it “𐑭𐑤𐑧𐑒𐑕𐑭𐑯𐑛𐑮𐑭”. Also, I made a few writing systems a while back that transcribe sounds too. I’ve kept up with one and it has grown to be 59 characters. They all represent one sound that equates to a sound in the various languages I speak. It also constitutes of consonant clusters.

[@ender5312]

Alexandra

[@gomez3432]

that's amazing, which languages do you speak?

[@richaellr]

Would you share that system?

[@ArtyomVoinov]

That's awesome. Brillant. I'm going to learn it. And for non native speakers like me, it's even better cause the correct prononciation is directly written

[@AD-hs2bq]

Fascinating. Thank you.

[@tuxuhds6955]

I feel that the Shavian Alphabet is fresh, smooth and closer to the skin. Thanks Rob!

[@Saphfire05]

One thing that would become an issue with Shavian is the plenty of homophones that exist in English. One would either have to spell them all the same and use the context to figure out the word (which could work), or shift the pronounciations of those words so that they can be expressed differently

[@stevieinselby]

And, for all that it is designed to be phonemic and not phonetic, the differences in pronunciation between different accents are not consistent across all words. For example, most English people I know would pronounce the *oo* of wood and book pretty much the same, but people from the north-east (in particularly from Middlesbrough) say them quite differently, with wood being broadly similar but with the 'oo' of book being more like the 'oo' of boo. Any attempt to regularise spelling based on pronunciation is doomed to fail.

[@lunarna]

I mean, people talk in english and do understand each other. I don't see why it would cause any confusion in writing. Context is very powerful in language

[@stevieinselby]

@@lunarna I know plenty of native English speakers who struggle to understand some accents (Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast are generally the hardest!), to the extent of needing subtitles on TV or having to ask them to repeat everything several times when speaking to them in person.

[@lunarna]

​​@@stevieinselbyI was talking about homophones and not different accents, but it is phonemic enough for this not to be an issue. Someone using a different oo would be about as confusing as someone writing color with a "u" (not at all). You also have the advantage of being able to take reading at your own pace instead of listening to rapid speech.

[@Appletank8]

You already have to figure out homophones in speech from context. Sometimes the word isn't even changed at all, like ball, tank, mouse.

[@mumiemonstret]

14:09 It seems that Shaw reformed mathematics too! What a renaissance man.

[@mikaelahobart8237]

Commenting again after three months of playing with Shavian on my own and tryna learn the “standard” spellings in the Read Lexicon (meant for easing international communication, if anyone wasn't really paying attention/didn't go to the website): *holy cow* y'all were *NOT* kidding that this alphabet makes you weirdly aware of your own accent!! I'm so aware now of the fact I only use the [ɔ] sound in /ɔw/ ⟨𐑴⟩ and /ɔɹ/ ⟨𐑹⟩ and never, *ever* use the /ɒ/ ⟨𐑪⟩ sound. I'm constantly being shocked thinking “I'd spell this with an /ɑ/ ⟨𐑭⟩… but I guess I'd better check if that's the “standard” versio- WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘SPELL THIS WITH AN ⟨𐑪⟩/⟨𐑷⟩‽‽’” 😅 I think it'd be fun if someone wrote a story in Shavian where all the narration was in the “standard” spellings and all the dialogue was in dialectal pronunciation spellings. It might take some getting used to but once you were I think it'd be cool to be able to guess where all the characters are from based on how their dialogue is written. Might also be a big help to people like actors (especially voice actors) and audiobook narrators!

[@drlukewhite]

I initially learned to read/write using ITA, the 'initial teaching alphabet', which was a (roughly) phonetic/phonemic (?) alphabet used to teach children. The idea with it is that when they had mastered a more standardised and hence easier form of reading/writing, they would have the confidence to move on to standard English spelling. It also had 40+ characters to represent all the sounds in English. These added to the normal alphabet rather than replacing it, and the 'missing' sounds were primarily represented by letters that mainly looked like combinations of letters often used to render the sound in question. It would fail on the Shavian imperative of increased economy, but something like it would be much easier to adopt, as it's very easy to adjust to for anyone who reads English in the Roman alphabet. Having learned to write using it has left me with the strong impression that a more rational and standard way of spelling the English language would be a good thing indeed! After watching this, I find myself wondering if ITA would have the same problem of rendering dialects as Shavian had - it surely must have! It never occurred to me as kid, though!

[@tams805]

Having also taught English for quite a while, I've come to the conclusion that attempts to simplify or standardise it are solutions looking for a problem. It really doesn't take that long for someone to become good enough as it is.

[@mrewan6221]

Cool. I learned _about_ ITA in high school, but never knew if anyone ever used it. I thought that it might have been the best of "alternative orthography" systems.

[@yasmin7903]

Interesting. From your experience, would you say it made it easier to learn standard English spelling, or did it make you mix the spelling up in the beginning and get confused?

[@drlukewhite]

@@yasmin7903 for me, it definitely took a while to get a handle on all the idiosyncracies of standard English spelling (ie or ei????) but I got there in the end. I think the rationale of ITA was that before having to grapple with that you wod have the chance to experience reading and writing as creative and pleasurable so have less reason to be discouraged in the struggle!

[@laurencefraser]

@@drlukewhite It probably helps that English's Actual irregularities aren't actually too bad compared to any other langauges. Though a lot of people think there are many more than actually exist, because, for some reason, it's pretty common to teach what is actually a rather complex system as if it were much simpler than it is, and the things that don't work as a result of what is being taught not actually being how it actually works get written off as 'irregular' or flaws, when they're not. And just to clarify my stance on these things: There's no good reason why -ough is such a disaster and hasn't been at least tidied up. Just... Sound change has completely destroyed the logic that lead to that spelling in the first place. (mind you, I'm not sure how much I like the typical replacements ("tho", "enuff", and so on)). And there's no good reason why (normal) words can't end in v... especially as English has plenty of words that Do end in v, you just can't write them that way... which necessitates adding a silent 'e' to the end... but then that would affect preceeding vowels, so we have to claim that v is always treated as if it was a double letter, but you can't have actual double v, because vv and w are too hard to tell apart. So now we have a whole stack of special rules and exceptions when we could... just let words end in v in written form and be done with it. Which is to say, there are certainly some Issues that could use tidying up. Just... mostly not the things that your average random English speaker would think of. Functionally, for all that English is written using the latin alphabet, in partctice, between the two, three, and even four letter combinations needed to indicate certain sounds, and the position in a syllable affecting how a charcter is to be read, it really functions more like a syllabalry (I believe that's the word I want, I may be muddling it up).

[@swedneck]

i think this is a good idea, but the execution doesn't take into account stuff like intelligibility with other languages, history, legibility (this is absolutely miserable for dyslexics), and how it would change stuff like wordplay and iconography. and i think this is kind of a recurring theme with english and similarly hybridized languages: a major part of why it's so useful is precisely because it's an absolute mess, it gives a ton of flexibility. Any attempt at standardizing tends to just end up neutering things, which is fine for science but pretty unfortunate for culture.

[@pooroldnostradamus]

Great points!

[@jimmypad5501]

Exactly. Culture is inherently fragmented and fractal, but is practiced or performed in a way that brings coherence and structure to the otherwise randomness of history. The emergence of things over time, however messy and seemingly illogical, will always be more intuitive at the level of practice than any centralized system trying to work on a principle of efficiency

[@matthewtanous7905]

Efficiency at the cost of all else was common with people of Shaw’s time, but it’s easy to see why that would have bad results when taken too far. Though it’s still common today for those with certain ideological inclinations…

[@laurencefraser]

Here's a fun bonus: Written English IS standardized... across it's rather excessive number of dialects, and also across rather large spans of time. The standardization isn't perfect (there are two base standards with slight regional variations, and it does drift over time, just very slowly (usually)). That standardization is a Feature. I mean, yeah, the standard as it is definitely has problems, but they're Heavily outweighed by the fact that it IS a standard.

[@charliemirus4124]

10:51 I thoroughly enjoyed your American accent; you nailed it!

[@greenviolist34]

Fabulous video! ❤

[@jakemeyer8188]

Honestly, if the Korean alphabet were extended to include more sounds, I think it might be in the running for the most perfect alphabet. Each "character" is a combo of up to 3 characters that result in a single syllable, and most intriguingly, the symbols MOSTLY show how to shape your mouth or tongue in order to pronounce the sound. It's a fascinating idea.

[@didles123]

The result is that it takes up over 11,000 codepoints, and adding new sounds multiplies the number of characters. For reference, there are about 21,000 codepoints for the CJK ideographs. It's extremely wasteful, contrived system when digitized. Also it needs to split up consonant clusters into multiple syllables. There are letters which represent the same sound. The glyphs cannot be written with a single stroke. What is written can't be read without applying a bunch of sound change rules.

[@toasty9670]

there are some people that try to extend Hangeul to other languages and add other sounds, and that works pretty well. But the problem with adopting Hangeul to other languages is that it was created to function with Korean grammar and Korean sound structure, and not all languages have similar grammar to Korean nor do they have the same sound structure, like you can only have certain "clusters" of sounds in Korean, especially at the ends of syllables, whereas in English we can have words like "texts" which is 1 syllable but has 4 consonant sounds at the end

[@toasty9670]

@@didles123 there are a lot of sound change rules but every language has those, and given enough time any language's pronunciation will start to diverge from its writing system. speech is dynamic, and writing isn't-there isn't any language that's just written down, it's always spoken/signed or was spoken/signed at one point in time

[@user-hi9yx2ns1l]

It's garbage that only their own people likes.

[@DaWorldGuardian001]

@@toasty9670 even worse, "strengþs" with its consonant clusters (I'm using þ for 'th' to represent a single sound to simplify things, in case someone's confused)

[@orchardhouse9241]

Rotating the letters for voiced vs. unvoiced sounds is brilliant!

[@ronshlomi582]

Yet probably a nightmare if you have dyslexia or other visual processing disorders.

[@brookieb538]

I wonder if anyone has invented a new/better alphabet for those who have dyslexia, or other processing disorders?@@ronshlomi582

[@johnchastain7890]

@@ronshlomi582 ...or if you accidentally turn the page upside-down!

[@TeddyGNOP]

seems like it would've made more sense to mirror them instead. so you'd know if you're looking at it upside down. like - there's no way to tell the difference between 'pip' and 'bib' without more context, which can be a problem for signs and junk. silly shit like that is why we have to underscore 6's and 9's on dice and cards.

[@PhilBagels]

@@ronshlomi582 Rotating them 180 degrees is usually not a problem for dyslexia. It's usually just left-right flips that are the problem. I may be mistaken about that, but as I understand it, dyslexics will confuse 'b' and 'd' but not 'b' and 'p'. But maybe some do. I like Teddy's idea of simply mirroring them vertically, instead of rotating them. Although that suggests another possibility to me: rotate them only 90 degrees, which would make them a lot less likely to be confused.

[@mathiaslist6705]

Actually I could read the title picture from the very beginning (btw it reads "this is English") because decades ago someone adopted the Shawian alphabet for Esperanto and gave everyone on the IJK in Rijeka a book written in it to read. He used the th-sign for the ts-sound among other small changes but besides that English is still readable by knowing the adopted Shawian. Strange that the guy refered to the original as "ŝava alfabeto" although I'd say the vowel in Shaw is closer to "o".

[@Grayves_X]

I like the concept that its written how you speak, this makes writting accents for characters more fun

[@michaelmartin9022]

Back before dictaphones there were numerous "shorthand" writing systems that had a "letter" for every sound too. And they could be written quickly (being designed to be!)

[@robinchesterfield42]

Funny you mention that, 'cos I also thought of shorthand when writing my own comment on this. Somebody who's already learned a simpler, quicker version of their own language, might have less trouble reading Shavian, than people who haven't had similar training at all. Shavian kinda reminds me of a mixture of shorthand + katakana on crack. Simpler to write, maybe; easier to understand? Eeeeehhhhh...

[@thelollykitty]

10:50 Never in a million years would i think i'd hear Robwords with an American accent

[@allenellisdewitt]

One could argue you still haven't 😂

[@NehauonElAprendizDelMundo]

Why is it so hard for them to do an American accent but so easy for us to mimick a Cockney accent?

[@londongael414]

@@NehauonElAprendizDelMundo The only American I have ever heard producing a remotely acceptable London accent (Cockney barely exists any more) is Johnny Depp in the film From Hell - and his accent was (for good reasons) rather modern for the period in which the film was set. Lots of Brits can't even do it.

[@keithlightminder3005]

I really like the row system for the categories. The rotated forms remind me of syllabics in Cree and Ojibway. With no upper case keyboard keys could be two related sounds. Organized in the category rows I suppose. Making the change during the digital age might be easiest. It would be lovely to see some shavian graffiti thrown up on some walls.

[@stephanphilip6259]

So glad I found your channels :) - was wondering if you could make a video on how texting and emojis could, or have, affected our use of the alphabet

[@encycl07pedia-]

This is a bit out of your wheelhouse, but you might want to do a video about different keyboard layouts. I use Dvorak which was designed to be better for typing English. There are more, but Dvorak is arguably the most popular non-QWERTY English alternative.

[@BenjaminLupton]

Halmak is an honourable mention

[@laurencefraser]

Of course, that whole debate is rather shot in the foot by the fact that a fully split keyboard (functionally two half keyboards connected by a wire so they can actually be positioned Correctly for the person using them) with ortholinier key arrangement (the columns being straight rather than the rows), with no change to what key is where relative to each other, has a much greater benefit with much lower overhead, compared to moving which key is where around without actually fixing the fundamental problems with the basic interface element that is the standard keyboard. Benefits of moving the keys around relative to each other are more dependent on the task being done (or at least, done most frequently) than any other factor, and most of the actual benefits seem to come more from better positioning and arangments of the non-alphanumeric keys. (it's rather amusing how much things are improved by simply... not having a caps lock and freeing up that slot for something Useful.)

[@wrob08]

One of the things that confuses me about this is that there's two letters that I pronounce the same. Air and err are pronounced the same in my accent, so clearly one of those phonemes is meant to represent some sound that I don't have. I also saw that he used the "array" one word, but to me, the "a" and the "rr" in array are in two different syllables, the first of which is already there in "nun".

[@teresad7102]

I think some people pronounce ‘err’ as ‘ur’ like in ‘fur’. I also pronounce it ‘air’ which makes sense for saying ‘error’.

[@patricia7018c]

In spanish "r" sounds different to "rr" We have only 5 vowels. The "ng" "ny" "nh" of other latin languages we turn it into "ñ", those syllabels sound exactly as they are written. In spanish: They= dey Day= dey Through= zrugh Think= zink Shine= shain Shame= sheim We lack of "sh", but we adopt it from english...or turn it into ch.. There are different accents, but written language is the same for eveyone. There is a neutral pronunciation.. and a lot of regional accents.

[@lsfornells]

@@patricia7018c Nadie que tenga el Inglés como su única lengua va a entender eso. De hecho son totalmente incapaces de leer un texto usando la pronunciación original del alfabeto romano, como es el caso de los ejemplos que has puesto. Incluso el alfabeto Shavian contiene vocales únicas que para nosotros suenan claramente como dos. Ejemplo “cake” suena claramente como keik para nosotros, sin embargo ellos son completamente incapaces de distinguir los dos sonidos vocálicos en la “a” de “cake” y les suena como una vocal única. Es muy raro pero es así. Por eso el Shavian tiene tantas vocales diferentes

[@JivanPal]

@wrob08 You must be an American English speaker, because the U of "nun" is not schwa /ə/, which is the sound that the A at the start of "array" makes. Rather, that U is /ʌ/, which is often referred to as the "strut vowel", and which General American speakers mostly lack. Search "strut-comma merger" for more. Dr Geoff Lindsey also has two videos dedicated to this particular merger.

[@lsfornells]

​@@JivanPal Comments like this is what prevents English to adopt a better writing. The focus should not be at creating a phonetic alphabet like Shavian attempts to do. In fact, we already have the IPA alphabet that covers that pretty well, and can already represent all the English dialects or variations. Instead, proposals of a better English spelling should aim to simply replace ambiguities of different sounds currently represented with the same characters. English native speakers have a difficult time understanding what's required because they are deeply biased by their own early childhood learning of the language. It turns out that English can already be writing without departing of the Roman alphabet. Consonant sounds are already fairly unambiguous. Just vowel sounds are more varied, but ambiguity can be removed by first replacing the wrong ones by the proper ones according to the Roman sounds, and then disambiguate the remaining ones by adding accents or diacritics. Yes, it's obvious that there are many distinct English dialects with different pronunciations, but the writing should be unique and valid for all the dialects. This is clearly possible as is it the factual existence of Romance languages with very varied dialects, yet keeping a mostly phonetic writing convention despite pronunciation differences. The main problem I see for this to happen in English, is native English speakers inability or openness to depart from their biased notion that English Speech is phonetically very complex and can't be properly represented in an unique written form. This is just not true. Just look at languages like French or Catalan. They have just as a large set of phonetic sounds than English, yet their writing conventions are 95% phonetic if you know the rules.

[@poja82]

Your videos are incredibly good.

[@TheJeanette53]

I like the way you hesitated after “ the SH in share “…. (0:42).

[@toku_u]

I created a shorthand system in high school for note taking with inspirations from Shavian amongst other writing systems, like Cyrillic, Arabic and to an extent, Chinese (Pictograms for common nouns). I did this despite the quantity of shorthand systems out there because I thought developing it myself would help me internalise it, and it definitely did. However, the readability of my system sucks even after simplifying it quite a bit. The script was largely based on cursive writing as well as how most of the letters in Arabic join together to create a beautiful script that can be written quickly, and while I succeeded on that part I just can't seem to read the script as easily as I write it. Anyway, this video is great. Reminded me of the origins of my decision to make a writing system. I think I will go back to the drawing board and take more from Shavian to improve my own system. I also kinda want to make one functionally similar to Hangul in which letters are organised into blocks representing syllables. I really like that concept.

[@Lise7997]

Check out my Hanglishpa Writing System.

[@TSIRKLAND]

This video already addressed how there are differences of pronunciation in different regional accents, and how that can affect the use of this alphabet in a phonetic or phonemic way. (I'm still not sure I understand the difference, but be that as it may). As this channel has observed many times, language itself is constantly evolving; the sounds that different people use to say the same word will change over time as well as place. One thing about codified spellings is that the same word will look the same over a long period of time, as well as from place to place. An Australian may pronounce a word differently than an American, but when they're typing in a text message or in a KZbin comment, the words themselves will look the same, and be understood by the other equally well- perhaps better than via a phone conversation. (There are other drawbacks to written-only communication that have been observed, but that would always be true, regardless of the alphabet.). Once any one body decides to codify a mode of spelling, somebody is going to be left out- the published book was written with a bias toward British R.P. which might confuse or disenfranchise Americans and Canadians, for example. And once spelling becomes codified, it is also fossilized: a time capsule that does not change along with the changes in pronunciation that happen naturally over the passage of time. So many of our "weird" spellings are due to this fossilization, which we can only know if we bother to do the research (or listen to wise, educated KZbinrs who have done the research for us). So while this is an interesting thought experiment, there are also many reasons why it is limited. The reasons already mentioned in the video: cost of re-educating every speaker of the language, the cost of re-printing every sign, book, website, newspaper, computer keyboard, etc, etc, etc. Also, as many have pointed out in the comments: the similarities of the characters create a big hassle for dyslexic folks who already have a difficult time with similar letters in the Latin alphabet. Add to that the difficulties in either picking ONE accent to serve as the base, in which case other accents feel left out- or allowing each accent (or each individual person) to decide their own spellings, and the written language as diverse and mutually unintelligible as the spoken language is: either way, not ideal. The system of English as www have it may not be ideal, but it's the one we have, it's the one we have had for centuries, and we have adapted it and it has adapted us, and we're used to it, and it serves us well. [I also noticed that several of the characters bore strong resemblance to numerals. I saw a 1 and a 2, for sure. The video made no mention of this alphabet having its own list of numerals; I assume we'd continue using Arabic numerals- which could get confusing. There is already a problem with capital i and lower case L and the number 1, and the letter o and the number 0. Any new and "improved" system should try to avoid those similarities, I should think.]

[@victoriafelix5932]

There's also, as many others whose names elude me at present, who have pointed out other factors: 1) etymology, especially important when dealing with the many homnyms present in English; 2) parts of speech, important, as noted above, when the shifts in stress occur, bringing with them the shifts in pronunciation; 3) also, the ambiguity of the schwa, and how this will also affect the acccents of those for whom English is a secondary/tertiary/quaternary/et alia language; 4) ease of reading, especially, when in non-standard orientations (personally, I am somewhat more proficient in reading English upside down, from long years of rapid note-taking in high school); &, finally, 5) inertia--the reason why so many of us still use the QWERTY keyboard is because it takes more energy to make change happen, especially when there's a lot more stuff to change (similar to the idea of 'punctuated evolution' -- the larger the gene pool, the slower the rate that changes in the genetic material occur, yet, the lower the pool, the more rapidly the changes spread, so the more rapidly it appears that speciation seems to occur, as per the isolated populations of finches in the Galapagos islands, but I digress somewhat here). besides which, there's always the option to revivify dropped letters, such as eth & thorn, and to remember still that some letters, whilst still with us, are yet forgotten as leing letters--ampersand, i am looking at you, kid--altho I am also somewhat overly enamoured of a good, old-fashioned ligature or two....

[@MrJackets]

To adress your uncertainty, phonetic alphabets have prescribed sounds per character, while phonemic alphabets have described sounds. IPA tells you, per character, exactly what shape your mouth, nose, tongue, and throat should be, and what way they should move, while our Latin alphabet tells you which general sound should occur as a result.

[@victoriafelix5932]

@@MrJackets And it may also be a factor that, as I've been writing, reading & performing poetry for a number of decades, there's a heightened sensitivity to the general sound of the unstressed syllables in my idiolect.

[@xorsyst1]

It's a fair point, but of course there are already different regional spellings of existing English, so it's a problem we're used to and handle ok. You can understand if I write that I specialise in colours, even if you favour writing that you specialize in colors.

[@victoriafelix5932]

@@xorsyst1 Sure, I understand, & I love it as well (it still blows my incy-wincy, teeny-tiny mind that rhymes can be used to determine how poets pronounced things). And I also appreciate & love how the whole shebang's so complex & messy in its own way too. I guess I'm weird that way.

[@pierre5325]

Ohmy goodness, tis was so exciting, thank you greatly for this educatcative fun. Today I learned?

[@40Kfrog]

1:00 ...an alphabet specifically designed to screw with people who have dyslexia, more like.

[@josephschubert6561]

I think another issue with implementing Shavian is that the English speaking world spans many countries. Even when the Hangeul alphabet was made centuries ago it didn't have widespread use at first, and that was only trying to spread in the Korean peninsula and had the backing of the king. Now imagine convincing people in Texas, Idaho, and New Hampshire to tell their Senators to change the alphabet because some guy in Britain said so.

[@WingedAsarath]

One thing I do like about using the Latin alphabet is that there's so much history encoded in each word's spelling. The hints and remnants of old pronunciations are buried right there if you want to go digging, and I think that's brilliant ❤

[@techpriest4787]

Nobody cares. If you want history then to a museum... -.-

[@michaelmartin9022]

​@@techpriest4787Zippa de-doo dah, Bibbidy-bash Ss long as I'm breathing I'm going to use cash

[@Playhouse76]

​@@techpriest4787Said on a channel devoted to etymology and language.

[@jamesbuchan416]

Neat! Great video and idea. Although you seem to have forgotten about Canadian English which has entirely different spelling and some pronunciation differences from US English. Cheers!

[@rtl6832]

I love it! I absolutely want to learn how to read and write this

[@choryferguson2196]

The 90* rotation of so many of these glyphs would be an absolute nightmare for anyone with dyslexic reading difficulties.

[@FrickinFrickative]

db qp nu

[@rdhunkins]

Rob, your American pronunciation of "Helicopter" was very good. My compliments on an excellent video! I have never heard of the Shavian Alphabet in my 57 years on the planet. It's fascinating, and it has some advantages that you point out excellently. But alas, as you say, It would be expensive (in time and money) to change. Like the Napoleonic idea of a decimal calendar, this won't be adopted, except as perhaps a way to conceal messages.

[@aidanjohnwalsh2129]

I thought it was excellent, as well. 👌🏼🌟

[@dougstanton9816]

When he says the music sets the scene. There was a Prison Affair decal on the tank. If Rob's a PA fan that would be so awesome. ❤❤

[@terenceconnors9627]

This is great, especially your example of 'helicopter'. There are a couple of American regional accents that drop most 'r' sounds, the most infamous of which is my own native Boston accent. It's remarkably similar to one of the Dublin accents, except for those pesky 'r's.

[@g4_61]

Woo, it’s nice to see an episode about this! By far my favorite alternative English script; it’s just got such a beautiful aesthetic. Unfortunately, as an American, many of the vowel sounds are merged for my idiolect (marry-Mary-merry all the same!), but it’s not a huge impediment.

[@GlenHunt]

American here. I actually say marry/Mary and merry distinctly different. Same with there, their and they're. Might have to do with my growing up all over the country and being able to sample and choose. There are regions where you'd get a funny look for saying Mary Christmas.

[@jackmason5278]

Yes. Also: they're their there, to too two, do due dew. It would be nice if these homophones didn't exist, but alas they do.

[@cloudkitt]

@@GlenHunt Yup. In the Northeast here and while my Mary and merry are very close, marry is definitely distinct.

[@GlenHunt]

There, their and they’re aren’t homophone. Close, but not.

[@CAMacKenzie]

@@GlenHunt Depends on where you grow up and whom you listen to growing up From my mouth, all three sound like merry.

[@shavianalphabet4307]

Hi everyone. It's great to read everyone's reactions to the Shavian alphabet and thanks to Rob for making the video! I thought it might be useful to address some of the themes coming up: 1. 'Shavian would be a nightmare for dyslexics': I'm not an expert but I understand dyslexia can affect people in different ways. There are dyslexic people who find Shavian easier to use due to the regularity of the spelling. There are people who find the rotated and mirrored letters difficult. I've been unable to find research on what features of alphabets make life easier or more difficult for dyslexic people; the focus understandably seems always to be on orthography and font design. So, the concern is likely very valid, but the best I can say from experience is that it very much depends on the individual. 2. 'Shavian cuts us off from the history of words': Words written in Shavian have the same history and etymology as when they're written in the Latin alphabet. This information will always be available in dictionaries. The question is, do you really need to reflect the Italian history of the word 'broccoli' every time you make a shopping list? It would taste just as broccolish if spelled 'brockally' or 𐑚𐑮𐑪𐑒𐑩𐑤𐑦. And how relevant is the French origin of 'cache' to someone urgently trying to solve a problem reading a technical manual? I'm fascinated by etymology, but there's a time and a place. 3. 'Shavian would lead to chaotic spelling due to different accents': There are of course some differences in accents, and if people want to spell in a standard way it takes a little practice. But it's a matter of weeks or months, rather than the six years most English-speakers invest learning how to spell like a 15th century scribe at the moment. In practice, people spell pretty similarly in Shavian across different accents, even in informal writing. The differences are mostly charming. 4. 'Use of Shavian would cut us off from all previous English literature': This might have been a concern once, but today a whole novel can be transliterated in seconds (proof reading to a publication level takes a bit longer). Transliteration into Shavian is a trivial issue for modern IT. And the reality is that Shavian is very likely always going to be just a fun alternative orthography so we're in no danger of forgetting how to read Shakespeare. 5. 'Shavian doesn't distinguish homophones': True, but neither does spoken English and we still understand meaning clearly from context. It's not a problem in practice. Shavian, on the other hand, distinguishes heteronyms like 'read/read', 'lead/lead', 'tear/tear', 'bow/bow', 'does/does', etc. just as we do in spoken English. 6. 'We can do better': Of course! Perfection is impossible and any proposal for orthographic reform is going to be a case of 'choose your compromises'. There's a lot that Shavian gets right, hidden deep under the surface, that only becomes apparent from using it-things that don't even occur to people until they try coming up with their own solutions. For me, the main interest in Shavian is definitely not to promote it as a perfect solution ripe for immediate widespread adoption, but to explore and have fun with it as an interesting counter-example to those who say change is impossible.

[@everettflores738]

This might be something to look into. Thanks for this video. I will say though, that if Shavian isn't good for other languages, neither is the Latin script either. It can just be adapted and adopted.

[@jocloud31]

The inefficiencies of English and how it's written is something I find myself thinking about FREQUENTLY. I've even tried thinking of "inventing" a new version of English but never done anything formal with it. I'll have to go watch your previous video about fixing English next!

[@jkfecke]

The biggest issue with Shavian is that it's completely new. If you're going to reform the Latin alphabet for English, the best way to do so is to restore letters like the Thorn, the Eth, and the Yogh, and abolish c.

[@stephanierehak1029]

You could probably do away with Q while you’re at it and just use “kw” in its place, especially since you have to use 2 letters (q+u) to make that sound anyway.

[@mrharvest]

The biggest issue with the Latin alphabet for English isn't the Latin alphabet, it's the ridiculous English ortography. It would be easy to fix without adding any new characters. Book = buk, thief = thiif, though = thou, through = thruu, cough = cof. We can deal with th and sh and ch but we can't deal with oe and ou and all the other letter pairs that turn into fantastical phonemes at the whim of the word's originating language.

[@interbeamproductions]

the letter c has folks saying it should be removed that without it the alphabet would be improved it's a common complaint that's misguided at best no, you can't just replace c with k and with s you know, s becomes voiced intervocalically and suffixes preserve etymology if it's so inconsistent, why focus on c, when the quote-unquote "problem" is much worse with g? i forgot the rest of the song

[@angeldude101]

I guess in terms of alphabets, 60 years old would still count as "new". If we're going to keep þe Latin alphabet, þe least we can do is add þorn back in.

[@RabblesTheBinx]

​@@angeldude101 I mean, if you're going to bitch about English getting rid of old letters and giving other letters multiple sounds, maybe don't use a letter that has two different sounds as your argument?

[@els1f]

I leaned Devanagari to speak and read Hindi. When I finally started to read it comfortably, I was blown away by how easy it was to learn NEW words once you know the system. My reaction was "oh wow, Roman characters aren't great for English huh?"🙃

[@isaacbruner65]

That's not so much an issue of the script as of the terrible English orthography. Maltese is written in Latin letters but it's descended from Arabic so it's even more different from Latin than English, yet the orthography of that language is far more consistent than English (still not great though).

[@Colorcrayons]

You'd probably dig the Amaharic alphabet of ethiopia then, as it has similar intuitive properties as devanagari.

[@laurencefraser]

@@isaacbruner65 half the reason for the terrible orthography is the unsuitability of the script to the langauge, mind you. I should emphasise that that "half" cuts both ways, of course (see basically every other germanic language, just to start with... though they do add extra characters to the script in question, so...)

[@mohamedraaifrushdhy6693]

easiest script I know too.

[@zollgax]

People with dyslexia looking at this pile of similar single stroke squiggles and feeling pain