The Shwah Alphabet for English

Did you know that there is another way of writing things in the English language? It's the Shwah alphabet. This alphabet is another way of writing English, an alternative to this Latin alphabet. Why would we want another alphabet, when we already have this one? There are two main reasons:

- because the Shwah alphabet is a better alphabet for English than the Latin alphabet is,

- and because Shwah is a universal alphabet that can be used to write many of the world's languages.

I don't have to explain to you that English spelling is crazy - you learned that in school. You had to learn that why, rye, sigh, buy, tie & hi all rhyme, but that rough, cough, though, through & bough don't. And you probably have a dictionary (with pronunciation guide) or a spell checker nearby.

Having crazy orthography not only makes it harder for us all to learn to read and write while growing up, but it also makes it harder for speakers of foreign languages to learn English and for us to learn their languages. How are we supposed to know that the Champs Elysées is pronounced shawn zayleezay?

But why don't we just fix English spelling, keeping our familiar alphabet? Well, many people have tried to do that, but it turns out that the results aren't as familiar as you'd think. Here are some examples:

Wuns upon a midnít dréry, wíl í ponderd wék and wéry
Over meny a kwaynt and kyuriyhs vahlyum ev forgahtn lor,
W'iyl 'I nadid, nirli na.ping, sa'dnli xer ke'm a' ta.ping
as av sM wN jentlE raping, raping at mI kAmbR dor
"'Tiz sœm vizit'r", ai mœt'rd, "tæping æt mai cémb'r dor - ónlí dhis ænd nœthing mor."

By the time you've learned how to spell and read familiar words all over again, you might as well learn a new alphabet.

The Shwah alphabet isn't the first new alphabet for English, either. One of the best is the Shavian alphabet (named after George Bernard Shaw), which looks like this:

But the Shwah alphabet may be the first universal alphabet, designed to be shared by many languages. It has a total of 50 letters, but each language will only use the ones it needs. Each letter might be pronounced slightly differently for different languages - an English b sounds subtly different from a French b or a Chinese b - but we don't really care.

The Shwah alphabet is also featural: letters share features with their sounds. For example, rounded vowels are round, and closed vowels are closed. Sounds made in the front of the mouth point towards the front (left), and sharp sounds are sharp letters. As a result of this metonymy, letters that sound alike look alike.

Take a look at it now, and we'll discuss it more afterwards.


As you can see, the Shwah letters don't correspond exactly to English letters, but they correspond to the English sounds.

Here's a box showing the English consonants, along with examples of their use:



The last three consonants are called semivowels, because they're actually vowels acting as consonants.

You may never have realized it, but we English speakers pronounce l very differently at the end of words or syllables, as in the difference between oily and oil. In Shwah, we use a different letter for this "dark" final l. This letter is actually a ligature, a combination of two letters, as you'll learn later.

Here are the English short vowels:



The otter vowel doesn't occur in American English. Where Brits use it in words like cot, Americans use the almond vowel, and where Brits use it in words like caught, Americans use the awful vowel.

In English, the rhythm of a word - which syllables are stressed and which aren't - is very important. In Shwah, stressed vowels are written high - in the top half of the line - and unstressed vowels are normally written low - in the bottom half of the line.

Here are the English long vowels:

As you can see, the long vowels are written with two short vowels, just as in the Latin alphabet. The second vowel is always one of the three glides itchy, cookie or early, written low. In the vowels eagle and oozy, the second vowel is the same as the first, so it's replaced with the Long sign, a horizontal line.

Now look at the following three words:

Note that the Long sign is usually written underneath a high vowel.

The vowel in fuel is the same as the vowel in fool, except there's a y in front of it. The same vowel occurs in unit, beauty, pure and many other English words, but we don't need another letter for it: it's just written yoo.

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading some sentences?