Disappointed as I thought this was something to do with Richard Shaver. Never enough stuff about the Shaver Mysteries these days.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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So, is Shavian good? I have no idea how to judge a new phonetic alphabet script, if it is practical, functional, well fit for purpose.
Like, why Shavian and not Quikscript / Second Shaw?
Certainly cool tho!
I'm not an organizer for this community. But I also find the Quikscript literature compelling. Although an advantage of Shavian is that it has an established Unicode assignment, and corresponding fonts are in circulation. For example Shavian text renders correctly for me running the Thunder Lemmy client on Android without any special setup.
The main criticism I've read of Shavian comes down to accommodating dialect differences. How you write "R"s and vowels is particularly issuous. You kinda have to pick a dialect as the one to canonicalize in spelling. But I think that applies to all phonetic alphabets - unless someone has come up with some very clever system of per-dialect glyph interpretation rules that I'm not aware of.
right, i think the intent is to simply write it like you say it, even if it is different dialect. so the spellings won't match, but they aren't meant to. in this way they will more accurately convey what is being said.
i hear you on the unicode support, and communities online seem good. there's also an Esperanto variant of Shavian which is cool.
i may start with Shavian, and maybe do some quikscript for more artistic fun since it's also geared for writing cursive.
i wanted to revisit this after spending more time with Shavian and Quikscript.
while i was initially more favorable to Quikscript as the "latest improved revision," i've actually come to prefer Shavian overall in the end. this is due to the following:
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I find an elegance to the way the Shavian alphabet uses mirroring for similar sounds. At first I was concerned it would be confusing, but with more practice I find it helpful because it narrows down the sound range I should be thinking of. Much of this is lost in Quikscript due to prioritizing different goals for handwriting flow.
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Quikscript indeed is primarily about handwriting flow. This is not an issue in an age of computers, and even when writing i'm perfectly happy with Shavian "print" as opposed to a cursive Quikscript.
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Quikscript has many more unique characters and alt-characters to facilitate cursive flow. That means many more unique symbols and rules to memorize.
The biggest items I appreciate about Quikscript are:
- Solidifying π¦ with a single sound, /Ιͺ/, which is a rule i now apply to Shavian
- Having distinct symbols for [ks] and [gz]. I'd like to import those into Shavian or create two new compound symbols, but it's not a deal breaker by any stretch.
At the end, it's the elegant simplicity of Shavian that i've come to value the most.
@hallettj@leminal.space @MxRemy@piefed.social @2910000@lemmy.world
I've been using it for about two weeks now, and as a British English speaker, I feel it can capture my accent when writing the vast majority of the time. My minor complaints about it so far are the places where I feel it isn't unambiguously capturing my accent (the other commenter mentions 'R's, that's one of the issues).
Perhaps another important metric to measure it by would be whether people can reliably hear my accent when I write too.
I looked a bit into Quikscript, but I think that with the traction that Shavian has (unicode support is a big deal), and the fact that I'm not particularly interested in writing by hand, I thought Shavian would be a good start.
word, i'm with you. thanks for reigniting my interest in this! it really is so cool, and English could really use an update. XD
Whoa that's a neat idea! I assume if it ever caught on, English would eventually drift away from this being phonetic over like a hundred years or whatever, right? But if English were at all reasonable we could also just occasionally hold conferences to update it too
Even if English didn't completely switch over, there are some fascinating possible uses for something like Shavian as a second alphabet. For example, it could be used as a pronunciation aid like furigana in Japanese, or in a novel it could be used to represent speech, and capture the accent of the speaker.
Well it's fun to play around with anyway!
Ok now I've sunk an hour or so into learning about it, and I'm just about sold on trying it out lol
Cool!
It's up to you how you do it but I just threw myself into writing with it. You can write something simple to post to the community if you like!
I don't see exactly what you're referencing. But although it is a phonetic alphabet, my understanding is Shavian is not designed to be a fast writing system, unlike Gregg or other shorthands. I think the pitch is a spelling reform for English, which puts it in a different category.
The downvotes. Threadiverse hates anything not conforming to Imperial English.
Iβve also gotten banned on communities for demonstrating shavian and contractions as βspam.β
I am saying good luck in your community. βCause threadiverse aint kind to punks.
It might be because people are using a front-end that can't display the font properly.
This is what it looks like to me for example.
Ah that really sucks π
π₯ FE issue
π₯
π€£
seriously, fonts have existed for decades. I won't tolerate imperialism.
Maybe Iβll /c/reate shorthands