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| Someone's really irked at the English alphabet. |
Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. 'When Writers Go Weird' is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.
Today: George Bernard Shaw really didn't like the English alphabet and wanted a new one.
You are used to the English alphabet and language. Whether you're an expert user or dabbling in it as a secondary means of communication, you're used to it. You've read this far in a blog post after all.
Which leads to the curious case of George Bernard Shaw's distaste for the alphabet he relied on so heavily. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925--and numerous other literary awards--Shaw's native tongue was English. He was an Irishman under British rule for the majority of his life, surrounded by the English alphabet. His plays--from Pygmalion to Man and Superman--were all written with that same standard English alphabet using Latin letters.
But he hated it. It made no sense to him how we spelled words and relied so little on phonetics. Case in point, the word "ghoti" is attributed to him, where "ghoti" is pronounced the same as you would say "fish." (Using the "gh" from words like "enough," etc.)
In actuality, Shaw never said anything about "ghoti" (it comes from a letter written in the 19th century from Charles Ollier, who credited his son William with its creation), but Shaw's hatred for the English alphabet was so pronounced, everyone presumes he created the ghoti/fish comparison.
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The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer.
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He wasn't alone. The early 20th century was a quirky time with individuals promoting curious ways to overcome difficulties in language. In 1906, for example, the Simplified Spelling Board was created in the United States (and funded in part by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie) in hopes of simplifying spelling mistakes and ease the ability to learn English. The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer of the Board's suggestion of 300 new spellings and demanded the Government Printing Office adopt them in their literature. The reason we don't see those new spellings today? Congress quickly rebuked Roosevelt within months.
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| L.L. Zamenhof |
Even earlier, in 1905, an ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto (designed to be an auxiliary worldwide language easy enough for all to learn), released his Fundamento de Esperanto as a definitive guide to the new language. He gained so much traction that there was the Worldwide Esperanto Congress established that same year--a congress which is still held annually to this day. Mark your calendars and invite the kids.
(Yes, an ophthalmologist deals with eyes, but L.L. Zamenhof apparently only had eyes for languages.)
By 1908, the Simplified Spelling Society was created in Great Britain in the same vein as its American cousin (although completely lacking in tycoon affiliations), and attracted authors from throughout the country, including George Bernard Shaw, to no one's surprise.
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He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling.
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This is all to say it was a heady time for lovers of making languages accessible and for straightforward alphabets. For Shaw, though, this was a lifelong passion. He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling and punctuation, such as dropping the "u" in words like "favour" and refusing to use an apostrophe in contractions. He also spent 13 years on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English pushing a phonetic component. How much the BBC actually listened to Shaw's advice is another matter.
He felt so intensely about establishing a new English alphabet that, upon his death in 1950, Shaw bequeathed a significant portion of his assets in his will to reforming spelling. Naturally, people contested Shaw's last will and testament. Create a new alphabet for English? Was he crazy when he made the will?? But after some legal wrangling, the trust announced £8,300 was set aside from the estate and that a contest would commence for people to design a new alphabet.
There were three rules Shaw required for his new alphabet. One, it had to have a minimum of 40 letters. Why at least 40? God only knows. Two, the new alphabet should be based as much as possible on phonetic qualities. And, lastly, it should not look anything like the Latin letters the English alphabet already uses.
By 1958, the contest began. Out of 467 submissions, four winners were chosen to receive a £500 prize, with Ronald Kingsley Read largely receiving most of the credit. The Shaw Alphabet--also known as the Shavian Alphabet--was born. Made of 48 letters compared to the English alphabet's 26, it replaces lowercase and uppercase letters with "tall," "deep," and "short" status. A dot is placed over a letter if it's a proper name.
While the alphabet exists and Shaw's wishes were granted, the Shavian Alphabet never gained much traction. The trust--which had been originally responsible for holding the competition--had very little money left over. In the end, they only published Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion in the Shavian style.
As for the general movement for an easier alphabet and language, its high point was probably Teddy Roosevelt backing them. The movement petered out into a whimper by the second half of the 20th century. The American Simplified Spelling Board ceased operations by 1920. The auxiliary language of Esperanto? Estimates suggest there are only 1,000 native speakers worldwide today.
Meanwhile, the British Simplified Spelling Society changed its name to the English Spelling Society, but stopped formally endorsing a new English spelling system by 1960. While still in existence today, it largely only makes headlines when protesting major spelling competitions, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the United States. Because nothing sways worldwide opinion like raising a stink around nervous 13-year olds.
In the end, Shaw's curious desire for a new English alphabet came to fruition, if only after his death--even if the alphabet itself is largely dead now, too.
There's always Pygmalion in its original Latin letters, though.
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