Books: Oh Pshaw!

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This apparently unintelligible squiggle is an impeccable transliteration into New Shaw of some old George Bernard Shaw:

Androcles (whispering): Did you see? A lion.

Megaera (despairing): The gods have sent him to punish us because you’re a Christian.

On his death twelve years ago, Playwright Shaw, an Irishman with a masterful but impatient command of English, left £8,300 ($23,240) in trust to help eliminate phonetic vagaries from the English alphabet. Characteristically, he suggested that the best way to do it would be to scrap the whole thing and start afresh, and the prizewinner, a devoted English phonetist named Kingsley Read, did just that. The results of his work have just been released by Penguin Books: a trial edition of Androcles and the Lion, Shaw’s famous dramatic spoof of early Christians and Romans, with the English alphabet version on one side and the new Shaw-Read alphabet version opposite.

Following a number of Shavian stipulations, the Shaw-Read alphabet has 48 symbols, including 24 separate vowel sounds so that no matter what their context each one can be pronounced the same way. Its letters come in several matching-size categories such as “talls” and “deeps” (tails turned upside down). For example:

Talls, Deeps

peep )

bib (

tot 7

dead L

so S

zoo ?

It drops rafts of silent e’s, of course, and the four most commonly used words in English (the, of, and, to) economically get by with just one symbol each ( ? , f , , -I,). Logically, too, the new alphabet does away with Shaw’s own favorite example of the phonetic madness of the present alphabet, the fact that phonetically “ghoti” spells “fish.”* In Shaw-Read, “fish” is clearly J , i and “ghoti” is forever ? o -I « . All this is not likely to compensate new readers for the strange look of the new letters. Because Shaw insisted on discarding all familiar alphabetical symbols, the new alphabet writing, massed on a page, resembles a forbidding cross between Hebrew and Greek.

Inventor Read stoutly asserts that “earnest practice for a single week enables one to write with assurance if not with speed.” But Read, now 74, took more than 15 years to work the alphabet out, with the help of some correspondence with Shaw before the old man died. In the new book’s last note, Read closes with a good old-fashioned “good luck!” If he had really the courage of his convictions, he would simply have said: j>v(, c v <!. !

*Gh as in cough, o as in women, ti as in nation.