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Shapes, Sounds, &
Sign Design By Steve Bett Abstract Shavian is a rule based constructed script. Its benefits stem from the rules used in its construction. To retain the benefits, one has to retain the rules. On the other hand, the rules are typically at odds with a traditional look. Following the rules leads to a look that is anything but traditional. It is no accident that scripts that follow an alphabetic rule fail to look like TO. To create a more traditional looking script, authors of rule based scripts have typically made concessions such as allowing some non-phonemic word forms. The challenge is to come up with a readable script without compromising the rules. The more rules that constrain the development of the script, the less arbitrary the product. The less arbitrary the relationship between shape and sound, the easier the script is to learn and retain. To facilitate learning, one should make the relationships between shapes and sounds more rule bound. Rule based scripts are much easier to learn (from scratch) than chaotic arbitrary scripts. On the other hand, the more a script deviates from TO, the longer it takes those proficient with the TO to adjust. This article introduces a script that adds pictographic rules to the rules used in the development of the Shaw alphabet - e.g., the alphabetic rule and the rule that similar sounds should have similar shapes. The surprising result is a script that retains both the flavor of Shavian and a familiar look. Pictography provides a rule for sign design and a guide for linking of shapes and sounds. It also provides a mnemonic for remembering which shapes go with what sounds. When the application of the acrophonic iconic principle results in a set of sound signs similar to those used by the Greeks and Romans, it facilitates learning and ease of use on two levels. In a recent article (JSSS, 1-1995, p. 25 ), Alice Coleman argued that while the Shaw Alphabet excelled on several important dimensions such as ease of reading and writing, it was seriously deficient in others. She was particularly disappointed with its ahistorical character, its use of non-traditional shapes, and with the amount of time and effort required to learn it. Most of the benefits of the Shaw alphabet stem from its logical structure, its regularity, and its selection of simple narrow single stroke character shapes. Developing a set of characters that are highly distinctive yet similar when the sounds are similar requires ingenuity. Had there been a requirement to retain traditional shapes in the Shaw alphabet competition, the task of creating an internal logic would have been more difficult. Fortunately, there was no pressure to be traditional. In fact, Shaw specifically requested that the new script (the Proposed British Alphabet) be so divergent that no one would mistake it for TO. (Shaw, 1941, p. 39) Coleman finds these efficient streamlined symbols to be too divergent. Such a drastic change (if adopted) would, in her words, cut us off from the past and from the community of nations who have adopted the Roman Alphabet. ( p. 25) Coleman may overstate the nature and extent of the divergence but she is correct in her assessment of its impact. Shavian is about as difficult to learn and use as a shorthand. How Divergent is Shavian? Most of the letter forms used in Shavian have historical roots. In fact, it is probably impossible to come up with a simple letter form that hasn't been used before. Most of the simplest shapes were invented by Egyptian scribes who came up with over 1,000 for shorthand versions of hieroglyphics.* Shavian carries over unchanged the S, I, and O. Slightly modified characters include the T, Z, and E. Forms similar to C, F, L, Q, and V are used but are not associated with their traditional sounds. Most of the remaining forms have been used before but not by the Romans., e.g., the shape for P is similar to the Phoenician P. Rule based scripts Rules are designed to make a script easier to learn, easier to write, and to reduce ambiguity.
The rules and features that account for the success of Shavian are ones that tend to divorce it from T.O. Taking his cue from statements made by Shaw and the rules of the Shaw alphabet competition, Read made no attempt to use history as a guide in assigning sound values to his symbol set. The resulting disconnect from traditional sound-shape associations reflected Shaw's wishes: "The new alphabet must be so different from the old that no one could possibly mistake the new spelling for the old." (Shaw, 1941, p. 39) Shavian is a rule based constructed script. When most people use the term: rule based script, they are usually referring to the alphabetic rule (e.g. Yule, 1982). It is no accident that scripts that follow an alphabetic rule fail to look like TO. As shown above, several rules were used in the construction of Shavian including the rule: Similar sounds should have similar shapes. Following this rule in addition to the alphabetic rule typically leads to an even more non-traditional look. One cannot drop or suspend the rules used to construct Shavian if one hopes to retain its reported beneifits. Some of those who have studied the subject (Notably Wilkins, Pitman, Read, and Shaw) thought that the shape of the sound sign should derive from some internal logic and not be constrained by the imperfections of any existing orthography or letter set. Wilkins (1668) after listing the problems with all existing orthographies, recommended: [Letter shapes] should be the most simple and facil and yet elegant and comely. They must be sufficiently distinguished from one another. There should be some kind of correspondence between the figure [or shape] and the nature and kind of the letters which they express. To Shaw the writer, the chief imperfection of the Roman script was that it was ill adapted to speedy writing and efficient printing. Shaw argued that the Latin characters set was 23 characters short, that digraphs were wrong, and that the remaining characters had so many different sound associations that it would be better (and less confusing) to start from scratch.1 Much of what Coleman seems to want might be attainable if there were answers to the following questions:
The benefits of the Shaw Alphabet In Shavian, each unvoiced consonant is matched by its voiced equivalent which is usually the same shape rotated 180 degrees. The distinctive shapes were designed for rapid writing and easy reading. According to Coleman, Shavian can be written twice as fast as conventional letter shapes. Writing speeds of up to 100 words per minute can be attained. Because the characters and are more compact and create more distinctive and compact word patterns, Coleman claims that texts printed in Shavian can be read 50% faster than conventional texts. Pitman (1962, p. 13) believes that Shavian text could be read 75% faster. The narrow condensed shapes used in the Shaw alphabet require less space on the printed page. Narrow letter forms combined with the elimination of digraphs results in a savings of up to 33% in space and printing costs. (Pitman, 1962, p. 12) The claims for ShawScript are impressive. Compared to TO, Shavian is alleged to be superior on the following dimensions:
Improving Ease of Learning Neither Shavian nor the mostly Roman script used by TO incorporates any mnemonic strategies for simplifying or facilitating learning. Neither script is particularly "learner friendly." Coleman suggests that the Shaw alphabet is more difficult to learn than traditional letter forms. Shavian’s use of similar shapes for similar sounds, its regularity, and its elimination of upper case forms should make the script easier to learn (from scratch) than TO (traditional orthography). The basic problem with Shavian is that it requires English readers to unlearn too many familiar sound and shape associations. Coleman (p. 26) argues that a new script should be sufficiently like the old one to (1) make acquisition fairly effortless and (2) ensure that those trained in it would not be cut off from the wealth of earlier written and printed material. For all of its virtues, Shavian falls short on ease of transition, ease of learning, and connection to the past. If ease of learning is to be the primary consideration in the evaluation of a constructed script, there are at least four strategies to explore:
ShawScript effectively uses the first two pedagogical devices. New scripts using many of the Shavian shapes can be developed that will also exploit the second and third strategies. Such a script would be immediately decipherable (i.e., easily read at a slow rate). In addition, it would be easier to learn and use than scripts that have ignored ease of learning as a primary consideration. As shown in the Figure 1, Shavian is a monoline phonemic script that has the appearance of a foreign language. While about 30% of the its letter forms could be related to traditional Roman letter shapes, only 15% retain a familiar shape-sound connection. For example, in Shavian, the J shape is associated with the /f/ sound and the 180 degree rotated J, which looks something like an f, is associated with the /v/. There are a number of other instances where simply reversing the sound to shape assignment would result in a better visual relationship to traditional forms. Examine the complete 40 character chart. The limitations of closer relationships to familiar alphabetic forms Even if 26 of the 48 Shavian characters were similar to traditional letters, there would still be 18 or so new characters and the fact that no phonemic writing systems duplicates the word pattern of TO. As shown in the Figure 1., rule based scripts always look a little strange on the printed page because they change the spelling of 30% to 70% of the words.2 See also the sentence in PMF at the top of the page.
Her research suggested that rule based (or phonemic) spelling such as WES (World English Spelling) is more disruptive to old reading habits than cut spelling. Yule's graphs (1982, p. 657) indicate that cut spelling could be read about 10% faster than TO while phonemic or rule based text was read at a rate that was about 20% slower than TO (traditional orthography). Beech's (1982) study indicated that the reading rate for phonemic spelling improves with practice. Beech estimates that the time required for adults to adjust to the difference between one form of regularized spelling and traditional spelling to be less than 2 hours: "…adults regain a normal reading speed after they have read 6,000 words of regularized text." When familiar digraphs are replaced by new letter shapes, this adjustment period is likely to be a little longer. A reasonable hypothesis might be that augmented alphabets would have an initial reading rate 30% slower than TO and that 12,000 words of practice would be required to regain ones normal reading rate. The time required to write with a regularized orthography may be over four times that required to learn to read it. In Beech’s study, 30% of his subjects were writing accurate regularized English by the end of an afternoon session. However, while their speed increased during the practice session, it was still significantly slower than their normal writing speed.3 Shavian carries over unchanged the S, I, and O. Slightly modified characters include the T, Z, and E. Forms similar to C, F, L, Q, and V are used but are not associated with their traditional sounds. It is possible to rearrange the sound shape combinations of Shavian to create a slightly less divergent script. Shavian uses 3 Roman characters: S, I, and O. Three others T, Z, and E are close. In all, about 10 Shavian characters can be associated to traditional Roman forms. Changing a few sound assignments might make 30% of the characters easier to recognize and read. 30% seems better than 8%, but it is probably not that significant in terms of making Shavian easier to learn and use.
PMF finds no connection bewteen ax and eye. The eye diphthong combines ox and eel. PMF dispenses with the sound sign for a rounded awe (see on). Read uses triphthongs for R-blends. Most of the remaining connections are the same as Shavian. To get beyond the 30% barrier, one has to either abandon the Shavian shapes or the requirement that the rotated letter-form represent a similar sound. PMF retains the rules and drops 22 of the 42 Shavian uniliteral (single letter) forms. The result may be a more familiar letterform but they are all derived from the application of rules. (end of section I) Making ease of learning and retention primary
The following table compares 9 different digraphic and unigraphic scripts. All of the rule based scripts look a little strange to those brought up on a steady diet of TO. PMF doesn't look any stranger than the other romic scripts and appears to be more compact. Pictographic Monofon (PMF) is used here to demonstrate how it is possible to develop a an iconic acrophonic alphabet which uses the same single stroke simplicity of letter form found in Shavian without losing the connection traditional letter shapes. PMF illustrates how it is possible to retain the benefits listed by Coleman for the Shaw alphabet with a script that is more historical, more readable, and easier to learn than notational systems which arbitrarily assign shapes to sounds. The power of pictography as a mnemonic device The mnemonic device used to facilitate the learning of two of the earliest scripts (Egyptian and Semitic/Canaanite/Phoenician) has not been used for some 2000 years. The trick was to use the letter name as the bridge between shape and the sound. There is no reason why this picture letter mnemonic should not be revived to make a contemporary alphabet easier to learn and remember. PMF (pictographic monoline phonemic aka monofon) is an attempt to make an augmented phonemic script easier to learn and familiar enough to be immediately readable. One way it does this is to make a font change signal a variation in sound. The key feature of PMF is the use of pictographic shapes. Figure 2. illustrates how naming letters after familiar objects provides a bridge between shape and sound.
Both Shavian and PMF are monoline phonemic scripts. This means that shapes can be formed with one quick continuous stroke and there is one and only one shape for each significant sound in the language. Both scripts are phonemic: they follow an alphabetic rule and spell words the way they are pronounced.
As shown in red in the side-bar, a common pronunciation of the phrase "A banana" has 4 different A sounds: /Ae bah-na-nuh/. These can be clearly indicated in PMF without resorting to ambiguous digraphs. PMF is a pronounceable script, TO isn't. Pictograms are used today
for international symbols but have not been consciously used in the design
of scripts for nearly 3,000 years. By using a sun sign ¤ or Pictograms or picture letters make direct reference to objects, persons, relationships, or events. They re-present by sharing criterial attributes, such as contour, surface structure, number of parts, pattern, color, and order of connection. Pictograms, unlike most logograms, are not arbitrary. The similarity between the pictogram and the reference may be remote, but the resemblance or likeness is easily grasped post linguistically (i.e., after it is pointed out).
Shapes associated with 44 sounds: A comparison of six scripts |
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| As can be seen in a more detailed version
of the above chart , when PMF fails to retain the the familiar Roman shape,
there is always a reference to a more ancient historical letter form. The
Etruscan C, for instance, is used for both C and K
and its rotated gamma form ">" is used in place of
G. The reference for > is to a camel goad (Semitic
*gimel) and to a boomerang or throwstick (*gamlu).
It can also be related to the "greater than sign".
The "corner/cant" symbol "<" is identical
to the Egyptian phonogram for hill slope and
angle (Eg. *qa) and close to
the Egyptian word for corner, *qnb-t.
The original Eg. D phonogram was a hand ( DR-T ) which became a fish (*DAG) and then a door (*DLT) in most Semitic scripts. Two acrophonic English names close to *hand refer to fingers: digits (and dactyl ). *Door would work as a transcription of *daleth but the delta shape which replaced the hieroglyphic door form in NW Semitic never looked much like a door. On the other hand, the v shape could easily represent the thumb and index finger on a hand. Rotating this form 180o looks like the tip of a spear (see T-D, above). In some ancient scripts, e.g., Linear A & B, the syllable *ti does represent the point of a spear or arrow. The same association is found in the Runic script and in Akkadian. The upper case H looks more like a hurdle or saw horse than the lower case h used here. The shape is named hurdle because the ancient *heth referred to a barrier. In the ancient Sinai script (ca. 1700 bc), the shape appears to be an abbreviation of the Egyptian glyph for hail [*hai], a kneeling man with arms upraised. The arms are missing in the modern h-form. The following table shows the vowels in cardinal vowel order and the blends or diphthongs. In some cases the shapes of the blends are derived from the shapes of the component sound signs. The letter owl, for instance, is a set of horns (ox) on top of a circle (oat). The letter hook /hoo-uhk/ is a blend of the letter hoop / ooze and the letter up / acute. A chart of consonants relates voicing, point, and manner of articulation.
Abbreviated forms shown in blue in col. 1 Letters are said to be meaningless sounds arbitrarily linked to meaningless shapes. When the pairs that must be associated are meaningless and arbitrary, they are difficult to recall.4 Pictographic scripts significantly reduce the amount of effort required to learn a new alphabet. Pictograms provide a meaningful link between shape and sound through the letter name. Anyone who can remember a list of 40 object names can easily recall the associated shape and sound. By having a reference, pictograms provide an effective mnemonic for learning and retaining letter shapes, sounds, and shape-sound correspondences. Many of the simple monoline shapes found in Shavian can be used in a pictographic script. In most cases, the simpler the form the more distant the association with a particular object. For some people even a complex shape such as the lower case "a" will be too abstract. They will require coaching to see the "a" as a representation of a bird (avian). A pictographic script with historical roots similar to the one described would seem to overcome most of the objections that Coleman had to Shavian. Such a script would be less of an obstacle to easy reading and easy learning than Shavian. The chief advantage of a pictographic script is that it does not have to be used all the time to be remembered. One can learn it in a couple of hours, and it will stick. One does not have to consult a code book to reconstruct the appropriate letter form for any sound one can pronounce. To write "ouch" one recalls the imagery associated with "owl + chick" Since chick looks like a ligature of the traditional CH digraph, in addition to a chick's head, all that remains is to recall the shape of an owl's head to regenerate the "horned circle" or Taurus zodiac shape. Pictographic scripts make excellent parallel phonemic scripts. Clearly there are some trade-offs and compromises. It is difficult to make a pictogram as streamlined as the characters in ShawScript. Without abbreviation, they could not be written quite as fast. Most PMF vowel shapes are probably more natural than the digraphs found in some phonemic scripts for English. It is also true that some PMF characters will be a little less familiar than those found in New Spelling or WES. Initially, this oddness would probably result in a greater loss of reading speed. PMF is easier to learn and use than Shavian but not quite as easy to write. The shapes are not quite as abbreviated as Shavian because they have to retain enough character to resemble particular objects. Once learned, however, abbreviated shorthand forms could be used for personal note taking (See the column titled AMF [abbreviated monofon] ). For instance, the letter hook has a barb. The barb makes it look more like a fish hook and indicates that the sound is a blend of the hoop [U]and acute [/]. The shorthand form is just a reversed J. The letter chick is ligature of the digraph [ch]. It also looks like the head of a chick. The shorthand form is a J rotated 180o. It is only when PMF is compared across four or five dimensions that it begins to look noteworthy. It may only win one of the five races, but it is always a contender. When the cumulative scores across four or more dimensions are compared, PMF comes out on top (provided that one of the dimensions is ease of learning). Summary Coleman is right, the ShawScript is ingenious and in some respects near perfect but falls short on the ease of learning dimension. Shavian is about as difficult to learn as a shorthand system. Shavian is a rule based constructed script. Its benefits and its tendency to deviate from tradition stem from the rules used in its construction. It is therefore very difficult to modify Shavian to make it more like TO and retain the benefits. Only 3 letters in the Shaw alphabet correspond to TO. The maximum number of possible rule consistent correspondences is about 12 out of 40+ sound signs. The more rules that constrain the development of the script, the less arbitrary the product. The less arbitrary the relationship between shape and sound, the easier the script is to learn and retain. To facilitate learning, one should make the relationships between shapes and sounds more rule bound. Rule based scripts may be easier to learn from scratch but those already familiar with one script rarely want to repeat the experience. It would be advantageous to have the script resemble TO because the more a script deviates from TO, the longer it takes the already literate to adjust to it. The challenge is to do this without violating any of the construction rules. This article introduced a script that added pictographic rules to the rules used in the development of the Shaw alphabet which included the alphabetic rule and the rule that similar sounds should have similar shapes. The surprising result was a script that retains both the flavor of Shavian and a familiar look. Pictography provides a mnemonic guide for linking of shapes and sounds. The application of the acrophonic iconic rule resulted in a set of sound signs similar to those used by the Greeks and Romans and facilitated learning and ease of use on two levels. PMF shows how the beneficial features of Shavian can be retained in a script that sustains a connection with the past and to a new set of acrophonic letter names. Using letter names that are rich in imagery, suggest a shape, and start with the appropriate sound may be one of the best ways to enhance the script and make it easier to learn and use. Pictographic Monofon (PMF) demonstrates how it is possible to develop a an iconic or pictographic alphabet which uses the same single stroke simplicity of letter form found in Shavian without losing the connection to traditional letter shapes. PMF (Pictographic Monoline Fonetic) borrows 20 Shavian shapes and copies other Shavian features such as using similar shapes for similar sounds. PMF retains most of the benefits of Shavian while using simplified letter shapes that are much closer to traditional Roman, Greek, and Phoenician forms. This makes PMF immediately readable and ideally suited to be an easily remembered phonemic notation for English pronunciation. Ten of the 40+ PMF characters are direct copies of Shavian shapes and another ten or so are close. All of the PMF forms follow the Shavian practice of connecting similar sounds with similar shapes. The PMF characters differ from the ShawScript in two important respects: they usually resemble traditional Roman letter forms and they incorporate a mnemonic to enhance teaching, learning, and retention. As a consequence, PMF retains most of the benefits listed by Coleman for the Shaw alphabet while being more readable and easier to learn.5 Using traditional letter forms is not the only way to promote "learner friendliness." The earliest Semitic alphabets (e.g., Phoenician) incorporated a mnemonic strategy, borrowed from the Egyptians, that partially accounts for their rapid diffusion. The pictographic strategy was to use the letter name to link shape and sound. The earliest letters looked and sounded like their names. PMF revives this memory aid. The key to PMFs learner friendliness is its built in mnemonic hooks. Every character resembles a familiar object and the initial sound in the object's name is the sound to be associated with the shape. Can pictographic cues make an augmented alphabet easier to learn and retain? There are enough studies of imagery and learning to indicate that the cues found in PMF would work. There is enough data to indicate that meaningful pairings of name and shape are retained better than arbitrary pairings. Pictographic alphabets would be easier to learn and retain. However, there is no hard data to indicate how much easier pictographic alphabets would be in practice. Can the purported benefits of the Shavian alphabet be retained in a script that is close enough to the traditional script to be readable without a code book? PMF retains those asepcts of Shavian that prompted the claims but the relationships between those features and performance on particular dimensions have yet to be verified. The reader's success at deciphering the title block will provide some basis for evaluating PMF's readbility claims. To the extent that one can memorize the 40 letter names (pipe, boot, tip, digits, corner, goad, ...) and associated shapes, one can throw away the code book or crib sheet. Coleman claimed that Shavian would "cut us off from the past". PMF does an even better job of connecting to the past than the Roman alphabet. Learning and working with PMF is certainly easier than with Shavian or the constructed scripts devised by Pitman and Wilkins shown in the letter matrix. Is it easy enough? This question remains to be answered.
For more information, consult the web page at the following URL:
References Extended Bibliography Beech, John R. (1992) Adaptation of Writing to Orthographic Change. Jour. of Gen. Psych. 119 (2), 161-179. Beech, John R. (1983) The effects of spelling change on the adult reader. Spelling Progress Bulletin, 23, 7-13. Bett, Steve T. (1995) Logical Letters. (unpublished) Bett, Steve T. (1996) Pictographic Monofon. (unpublished but available on the web) Bett, Steve T. (1996) The Trouble with Spelling. Louisiana Middle School Journal. Brown, Bob. (1991) The Shaw Alphabet Competition-Some Background. SSS Publication Coleman, Alice. (1995) Graphology and Writing Systems: the case of the Shaw Alphabet. Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society. 1, 25-30. Dewey, Godfrey. (1971) English Spelling: Roadblock to Reading. New York: Teachers College Press. Drucker, Johanna. (1995) The Alphabetical Labyrinth: the alphabet in imagination. Thames & Hudson, London. Pitman, James and John St.John. (1969) Alphabets and Reading. London: Pitman Publishing. Shaw, G. B. (1941) preface to Richard Wilson's The Miraculous Birth of Language, New York: Philosophical Library. (available in HTML format) Shaw, G. Bernard. (1962) Androcles and the Lion (1st published in 1913) Reprinted with parallel text in the Shaw Alphabet. Includes notes on spelling by Peter MacCarthy and suggestions for writing in ShawScript from Kingsley Read. London: Penguin Books. Wilkins, Bishop John. (1668) An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language. London. Wood, George. (1883) A Popular Treatise on the History of Letters.
Hartford, CT. Yule, Valerie (1982) Shorter Words Mean Faster Reading. New Scientist. 9 December, 96, 656-657. Yule, Valerie. (1986) Design of Spelling. Harvard Educational Review. 56: 278-297
0. One of the features of Shavian which was rarely used by the Egyptians was shape rotation. This was probably because Egyptian could be written in just about any direction and because the character had to face the direction it was to be read. See example. 1. Brown (1991, p. 3) The reason for the low correspondence may have had something to do with the nature of the 1958 "new alphabet" competition that Read entered. Bernard Shaw had promulgated his ideas for a non-roman alphabet in a letter to the Times on 15 April, 1941, and in the preface of Wilson's book (1948). According to Bob Brown (1991, p.1), "Shaw came to the radical view that digraphic schemes like New Spelling, or proposals using diacritics or extra letters, just would not do..." According to Pitman (1960, p. 102f), Shaw became the most trenchant publicist for a complete rejection of the roman alphabet. "The new alphabet must be so different from the old that no one could possibly mistake the new spelling for the old." (1948, p. 39) The proposed British alphabet had to be non-roman and contain at least 40 characters which would enable the English language to be written without indicating single sounds by groups of characters or by diacritical marks. Shaw's preference was for a 42 character script with 18 vowels. (1948, 39). While changing the sound-shape pairings to bring them closer to TO might satisfy Coleman's desire for a more traditional shapes and correspondences, it may have disqualified the script as a contender in the new alphabet competition sponsored by the executors of the Shaw estate. 2. Most English sounds have four common spelling patterns in TO. Since there are 560 ways to spell the 40 sounds in English, the average is about 14 patterns per sound. If only one spelling pattern is allowed, 60% of the words are changed. If two patterns are accepted for some sounds (or some words), percentage decreases. Beech's regularized English changed 30% of the words.
According to Dewey (1971), World English Spelling (and New Spelling) normally
change about 60% of the words in a passage. An analysis of the percentage
of regularly spelled words in the Gettysburg address reveals the following:
3. The author was unable to locate any published research on the time required to adapt to Shavian or PMF. If Shavian had been part of the studies by Yule or Beech, the number of correct words per minute would have started out near zero. If PMF had been included in Yule's study, the reading rate for this script would probably have begun at 30% slower than TO or 20% slower than WES. 4. The literature on imagery, meaningfulness, and learning is substantial. The following books contain references to the many articles that have been published on "paired associate" learning and other experiments demonstrating the role of imagery in recall and retention.
5. There are only so many simple shapes and most of them were invented by the Egyptians. It could also be said that PMF borrows 30 shapes from Egyptian hieratic. The idea of using rotated shapes to represent similar sounds was pioneered by Wilkins (1668). Wilkins used 15 shapes to represent 30 consonants. Ten of the shapes are identical to those used by PMF. Review chart.
End |
Contact
at sbett@oecrc.org
Developed
at the ECRC at Lamar University,
Orange, TX. Send comments to ECRC.
Report any problems to the ECRC Webmaster
Yule (
There
is at least one constructed script based on Shavian that had ease of learning
as its primary design consideration. That script is known as pictographic
monofon (or 
PMF
presumes that the chief problem in learning any script is maintaining the
shape sound relationship. If I forget what sound /ae/ is associated with,
I have to consult an IPA code book. With PMF, every letter looks and sounds
just like its name. The IPA character "ae" doesn't
look like anything. Monofon shapes are iconic, they are supposed to look
like or represent something. The letter AX looks something like
an ax and from this any native speaker can reconstruct the appropriate
sound from the shape and the appropriate shape from the letter name..
Most
of the PMF characters are simplified versions of Roman characters. This
applies as well to the characters for the 18 sounds that are not represented
by a single character. Nine of these new characters are vowels. The four
A-like characters are avian, ax, hawk,
and up. Ox is also one of the sounds of the A, as
in *father, but unlike the other sound signs, it does not look like a traditional
A. It does look something like the horns on a 
.
to identify the brightness control on a TV, the set can be sold in any
country. Manufacturers avoid having to identify the control in any particular
language. While an explanation of the symbol can be found in over three
languages in the documentation, most people can figure out the connection
between the icon and brightness without consulting the instructions. Pictographic
scripts are a little different because the sun sign, ¤, which might
represent /b/ for brightness in English
is probably associated another sound in a different language. Phonographic
pictograms tend to be language specific.
Since
monofon shapes are abbreviated, the connection to the letter name is not
always obvious. The picture on the left, derived from an Egyptian wall
painting dated 2800 B.C., provides a more realistic
version of the letter "avian". Each letter in the PMF
script has a similar realistic picture (and also a gesture or sign language)
that would be used to connect each shape with the appropriate imagery.
Picture letters have often been used in beginning reading books to provide
an external association e.g., "a is for apple," "a is for
archer," or "c is for cat." They have not been used as an
internal or integrated mnemonic for nearly 3,000 years.
Figure 4 indicates
that while only 25% of the phonemes manifest irregular spelling, 60% of
the words in the address would have one or more sounds that would not be
spelled according to the most common spelling rule. This means that 60%
will look "funny" when converted to any phonemic orthography.
