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The playwright George Bernard Shaw was an outspoken critic of the idiosyncrasies of English orthography. He campaigned for simplification of spelling and a reform of the English alphabet. In his last will he wanted that Britain`s Public Trustee seeks and publishes an alphabet consisting of circa 40 letters. Every letter should describe a phoneme of the English language. He donated all his money to set up a competition for seeking such an alphabet. The version finally selected was designed by Kingsley Read and today it is known as Shavian. An edition of his play Androcles and the Lion was published in both the standard Latin alphabet and in Shavian. The development of Shavian had little success as other attempts to reform the English spelling. Today only a small number of people is able to speak and write in Shavian. The Internet is used as a forum for those who still believe in the idea of a spelling reform. Several other books were translated into Shavian and the special edition of Androcles and the Lion is becoming a highy asked book. Structure The alphabet consists of 48 letters and one full stop. There are no cases, the numbers and other punctuation marks are the same as in Latin and there is one additional punctuation mark called "name mark" which is used to indicate proper nouns. The letters are indicative of their sounds, /p/ is represented by (p). The first 40 letters are divided into four groups of ten. The first ten and second ten are 180 degree rotations of one another, letters of the third and fourth often show a similar relationship of shape. The first ten letters are "tall" letters and generally represent unvoiced consonants. The next ten letters are "deep" letters and generally represent voiced consonants. The next twenty are the vowels and liquids. The remaining eight letters are technically ligatures, the first six involving vowels plus /r/. Since ligation isn`t optional, these eight letters are included in the proposal. Proposal
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