A Study in Scarlet
With my interest in languages, one YouTuber I like to follow is the “Rob Words” channel. He has posted a number of videos treating alternative ways of writing the English language. He talked about how runes might be better suited for writing modern English than the Latin alphabet we use today, and cited examples where J.R.R. Tolkein used the runic alphabet in his books to represent languages like Dwarvish from his Middle Earth fantasy world. One video that particularly stood out for me was his description of the George Bernard Shaw “Shavian” alphabet:
This alphabet looked vaguely familiar. I had encountered it many years ago when I was at an Esperanto conference and someone gave me a little booklet about a “new improved alphabet”. I put it on my bookshelf, fully intending to investigate it when I had some spare time, but somehow I never got around to it. I went to my bookshelf and dug out the dusty booklet – sure enough it was all about how to write Esperanto in the Shavian alphabet!
Esperanto already has phonetic spelling, using accent marks to ensure all sounds are represented, so the Shavian alphabet only brings limited benefits to that language. However, for English the benefits are much more significant, as described in Rob’s video. So, I decided to try and learn it.
To that end, I bought a copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Homes story, A Study in Scarlet, Shavian Alphabet edition. The publication of this edition was organised by Evan who runs the website shavian.info , and who also features in Rob’s video. Since I enjoy the character of Sherlock Homes, I thought this would provide extra motivation to learn Shavian.
The alphabet is designed in such a way that is logical and which facilitates the newcomer to remember the different shapes. After I had a passing familiarity with the alphabet design, I started reading the book. My progress was extremely slow at first, sounding out the words letter by letter like I was back in Kindergarten learning to read again. Some letters were easy to confuse with each other, such as P (𐑐), B (𐑚), F (𐑓) and V (𐑝). Others like L (𐑤) look like Latin letters which, due to habit, were sometimes misleading. It was nevertheless a lot of fun trying to decode the stange script before me.
Because the story was written in England during the 1800s, some of the words and turns of phrase are a little unusual to the modern day reader, adding a little more fun challenge to recognising the words. I haven’t read much classical literature since my school days, so it is refreshing to revisit some works of fiction from around those times. The slow pace at which I am reading the story is a nice contrast to the usual hustle and bustle of everyday life, and so I am really enjoying the story as the mystery unfolds. I am becoming a little faster as I get more practice, but I still have a long way to go before I feel anywhere near as fluent as I am in the Latin alphabet.
The other side from reading is learning to write in the Shavian alphabet. I will rewrite this post in Shavian and upload it to my blog – if you want to see some Shavian, you can use the language selector at the top of this website.
There are other books published in Shavian, such as Alice in Wonderland and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which I look forward reading once I finish the Sherlock Homes story. I’ll keep you posted how I go!