Box Title

Shavian Index
tMlz & liNks

Shavian, and it's close cousin Quickscript are phonetic alphabets used to write in English. There are likely less than 100 readers of Shavian in the world. Maybe less than 20 who are reasonably comfortable reading it. I am not yet to that point, though I am improving daily.

There are a number of good sites on the web which can teach a great deal about Shavian and Quickscript. Some of the important sites are below:

Demeyere.site

Shaw Alphabet Links

Shavian usergroup

Read-Alphabet (Quickscript) usergroup

I'd love to put Hugh's site here, but it has disappeared.

A simple list of the characters in Shavian can be seen HERE.

A similar list of the characters in Quickscript are listed with their keyboard letters for a font named Junior.ttf which I modified from the more standard Jerome.ttf used with quickscript. The two fonts are essentially identical, except that Junior separates the letters.

If you want to converse with others on the web in one of these languages, you will need a font. There are a number of fonts available in the files of the user groups. Some of the important ones are ghoti, androcles, lionspaw, and for Quickscript, Jerome and Junior. They can be downloaded in the Shavian and Quickscript user groups. Or all 5 can be dowloaded in this 138K zip file.

Once you have downloaded a font, you will need to install it. For Windows machines, this is not very hard.

- <Start> (bottom left corner)

- Settings

- Control Panel

- Fonts

- File

- Install New Font

- Browse to the font you downloaded.

To type, you need to follow the keyboard instruction documents.

Keyboard Program

I find this standard keyboard mapping very difficult. If you would like to experiment with other keyboard layouts for the Shavian/Quickscript fonts, you can install a small program which will redirect your keyboard.

Ewout Stam has written a NewRomaji mapping for the program.

I have written a different keyboard mapping which makes sense to me. It includes the following mapping:

"s" + "h" > "S"    This is character in "Shavian"
"n" + "g" > "N"    as in -ing
"z" + "z" > "Z"     replaces cap Z
"j" > "J"               lets you type j for the j sound
"y" > "j"                lets you type y for the y sound
"a" + "a" > "A"    replaces cap A for the at sound
"o" + "o" > "U"    as in foot
"o" + "w" > "Q"   as in ow...ouch
"a" + "h" > "y"     ah....
"e" + "a" > "I"      long e as in eat
"a" + "i" > "E"     long a is in ain't!
"I" > "F"               I could not avoid this!
"o" + "u" > "M"    ou as in ooze
"o" + "y" > "q"    oy as in oil (oy vey!)
"a" + "w" > "Y"    aw as in awful
"o" + "r" > "P"     or as in order
"e" + "r" > "D"      -er

"u" + "r" > "x" stressed er like urge

"U" > "V" yew

Both make use of multiple character keystrokes (chording keyboard) for most of the letters in Shavian/Quickscript which require a capital letter.

For now, I have put my keyboard and the needed modified installation files in a single download . You will also need the program which can be downloaded at Tavultesoft. Download the Tavultesoft program and unzip it in a folder. Copy the the files in my download in the same folder and then install the program. It will work for my keyboard driver.

Texts in these fonts:

Letterboxes:

Homepage: Rick Allnutt aka FlyFisher aka WS8G