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The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of 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". == Letters == The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short.〔Kingsley Read, ''Shaw-Script: the Journal in a New English Alphabet'' Cover letter, 1963, page 1.〕 Short letters are vowels, liquids (r, l) and nasals; tall letters (except Yea and Hung ) are voiceless consonants. A tall letter rotated 180° or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced consonant (except Haha ). The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural. There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper names, a "naming dot" (·) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography.〔 Spelling in ''Androcles'' follows the phonemic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectical variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to spontaneously produce the canonical spellings. For instance, most North American dialects merge and (the father–bother merger). Canadian English, as well as many American dialects (particularly in the west and near the Canadian border), also merge these phonemes with , which is known as the cot–caught merger. In addition, some American dialects merge and before nasal stops (the pin–pen merger). There is no ability to indicate word stress; however, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in the traditional orthography. For instance, convict and convict can be spelled and respectively. Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words ''the'' (), ''of'' (), ''and'' (), ''to'' (), and often ''for'' () are written with the single letters indicated. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shavian alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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