The Shavian alphabet is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling.

It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as “phonetic” as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply “misspellings”.

Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which included several exponents of phonetic writing.

All of his interest in spelling and alphabet reform was made clear in Shaw’s will of June 1950, in which provision was made for Isaac Pitman, with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee, to establish a Shaw Alphabet.

The Shavian Alphabet is interesting for another aspect; the letters are categorized as being tall, deep, or short, with short letters being vowels, liquids, and nasals, and tall letters being voiceless consonants – flipping the tall letter makes it a “deep” letter representing the voiced version of that letter.

In other words, the shape of the letter isn’t arbitrary, but is actually tied to the phonetics.

Other interesting features; there are no upper and lowercase letters (thank god), but it still preserves the concept of proper naming by utilizing a “naming dot” before a proper name.

It’s a pity that the strength of cultural convention has hobbled us to the Latin alphabet. While it was, to be sure, an improvement over previous systems, especially in English it has a lot of problems that something like this could solve.

Via Wikipedia.