Extended Shavian Letters: an Overview

There are More Shavian Letters?

The Shavian alphabet has 48 letters: a letter for each English phoneme (or close enough), so why would it need more letters? The thing is, as part of the decision to use “rhoticized Received Pronunciation” as the standard, Ronald Kingsley Read had to make choices on which phonemes to deem “marginal”, and thus leave out.

But did you know there are 6 secret letters, sometimes used by the Shavianist community today, that aren’t encoded in Unicode? Hi, I’m Haley, the creator of several Shavian word games and several more Shavian fonts, and this is a brief overview of the 6 Extended Shavian letters.

“Yeah” 𐑺︀ and “Oeuvre” 𐑻︀

As seen in the Shaw-Script Newsletter, typewritten, unjoined Shavian has 43 letters (5 fewer than the usual 48, because 5 of the compound letters 𐑸, 𐑹, 𐑼, 𐑽, 𐑿 were typed as two letters each: 𐑭𐑮, 𐑷𐑮, 𐑩𐑮, 𐑾𐑮, 𐑘𐑵). 41 of them are common with standard 48-letter Shavian, but two of them are new. The two new letters are the long vowels that only appear as rhotic vowels in 48-letter Shavian, namely 𐑺 𐑺︀𐑮 (air) and 𐑻 𐑻︀𐑮 (err). Ronald Kingsley Read called these “yeah” and “œuvre” in the Shaw-Script journal.

While the utility of “yeah” 𐑺︀ is limited, to my knowledge only being used in “yeah” 𐑘𐑺︀ and “kolea” 𐑒𐑴𐑤𐑺︀, “œuvre” 𐑻︀ is much more useful. You can finally spell “Goethe” ·𐑜𐑻︀𐑑𐑩 in a way that makes sense in a non-rhotic accent. You can finally distinguish “chauffeuse” 𐑖𐑴𐑓𐑻︀𐑟 and “chauffeurs” 𐑖𐑴𐑓𐑻𐑟. And you can finally fill awkward silences with 𐑻︀ without violating the rule that every word except “a”, “an”, and the 5 mandatory abbreviations must be spelled stressed, not weakened.

“Loch” 𐑒︀ and “Llan” 𐑤︀

A third Extended Shavian letter has been attested in Shaw-Script, namely “loch” 𐑒︀. As the name suggests, it’s used to write the /x/ in Scottish “loch” 𐑤𐑪𐑒︀. And also, you can finally spell “mach”, “Mikhail”, “jalapeño”, and “chutzpah” with proper spelling. It’s an Extended Shavian letter because only some English speakers have this sound as a distinct phoneme from /k/ 𐑒 or /h/ 𐑣. You could also use it to approximate the /χ/ sound, which is further back in the throat—uvular instead of velar—used in Welsh, like in chwyrn /χwɪrn/.

Speaking of Welsh, the next letter, “llan” 𐑤︀, was made just for Welsh loanwords. It’s the /ɬ/ sound, the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, used twice in the place name Llanelli (·𐑤︀𐑨𐑯𐑧𐑤︀𐑦) and 5 times in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (·𐑤︀𐑨𐑯𐑝𐑲𐑼𐑐𐑫𐑤︀𐑜𐑢𐑦𐑯𐑜𐑦𐑤︀𐑜𐑪𐑜𐑧𐑮𐑩𐑒︀𐑢𐑻𐑯𐑛𐑮𐑪𐑚𐑫𐑤︀𐑤︀𐑨𐑯𐑑𐑩𐑕𐑦𐑤𐑘𐑪𐑜𐑪𐑜𐑪𐑜𐑴𐑒︀).

“Which” 𐑢︀

Also in the “Great Britain” category, the fifth Extended Shavian letter is the letter “which” 𐑢︀, useful in case you still pronounce the “WH” words like that. “Weather” vs. “whether”. “Witch” vs. “which”. “Wine” vs. “whine”. “Wear” vs. “where”. This sound isn’t distinguished in the standard accent for Shavian spelling, so it didn’t make the cut.

“Llan” and “which” were back-ported from the Quikscript writing system by the prominent Shavianist Evan Gallagher, the owner of shavian.info and the creator of the Inter Alia font. Quikscript was sort of Kingley Read’s sequel to Shavian, where he turned it into a shorthand instead of a phonemic alphabet. “Loch” also made it into Quikscript, despite it being ultimately scrapped from Shavian. It didn’t achieve the same success as Shavian, so this whole alphabet is not included in Unicode.

One novel use case for this letter that I’ve never personally seen is using it to write the Māori “wh” /f~ɸ/ sound, as in “Whanganui” 𐑢︀𐑨𐑙𐑩𐑯𐑵𐑦, though the conventional way is to write it with its modern main pronunciation, 𐑓. However, loanwords like Pēpuere for “February” indicate that the pre–audio-recording Māori “wh” didn’t sound like English /f/ to Māori ears. Was the original sound /ʍ/ or /ɸ/? Is using the letter “which” better? I don’t know. And I’m in no place to speak for the indigenous people of even my own prefecture, let alone of New Zealand.

“Argh”, a.k.a. “Gogga” 𐑜︀

This sixth and last letter 𐑜︀ is Gallagher’s invention, which is a flipped version of “loch” 𐑒︀ that predictably represents the voiced velar fricative. He calls this letter “argh” 𐑸𐑜︀, but I’ve taken to calling it “gogga” 𐑜︀𐑪𐑜︀𐑩, a South African English dialectal word corresponding to “bug”, “insect”, or “beastie”. You can use this letter to tick off both Amercians and Brits by spelling the Dutch painter’s name as “gogga-on-loch” 𐑜︀𐑪𐑒︀.

Adoption

Fonts supporting these letters are few and far between. Because they’re not standardized in Unicode, they’re implemented in Inter Alia and compatible community fonts as the plain letter followed by Variation Selector 1. Well, that’s just Evan Gallagher’s reference implementation for Inter Alia, which is the de-facto standard Sans Serif font for Shavian and for good reason. (Some of my fonts also allocate them to unused code points in the neighboring Osmanya block, but that’s just my preference.)

However, very few fonts support “yeah” and “oeuvre” at all, let alone the other four. You can write off the possibility that they’re supported by fonts made outside of the Shavian community, like Noto Sans Shavian by Google or Segoe Historic by Microsoft.

Conclusion

What was the point of this article? I dunno, just to get the information out there on the Internet. I’m just a nerd. Thanks for reading this article about an obscure corner of a writing system that’s already plenty obscure.