Origins and advantages of written speech.

Kingsley Read.

We are grateful to Michael Twyman, Professor of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, for permission to reprint this memoir which was written for an exhibition in the university library in 1972. It subsequently appeared along with the photograph of Kingsley Read taken in the late 1940s, in 1983, in the catalogue to the Shaw Alphabet archive in the University's Department of Typography and Graphic Communication. We also have to thank Read's daughter, Mrs Mavis Mottram, for her encouragement in reviving her father's work. Subheadings and endnotes are added. The SSS previously published items on the Shaw Alphabet in its Newsletter N1 (Bob Brown, April 1991, pp2-3) and in JSSS J18 1995/1 (Alice Coleman, pp25-30).

Origins and advantages of written speech.

Neither words nor alphabets have always been used in records. Cave men recorded hunting exploits pictorially. The earliest crude symbols to be written were unrelated to words; they were 'pictographs', simple standardised drawings, hundreds of which were needed to convey imprecisely a very limited range of ideas. With more precision, Chinese writing employed thousands of 'ideographs', which only experts could read and write.

Then, 3000 or more years ago, came the highly economical, easily applied, exactly meaningful, writing with 'alphabets'. Given readers who spoke the writer's language, a few graphic symbols (now called 'letters') could serve to represent the few basic sounds with which a whole language was spoken. Words became visible as well as audible. The Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Latin languages were adequately represented by as few as 22 to 25 letters.

Roman civilisation and the Roman church made Latin the international language of writers in Britain and throughout Europe for roughly 1500 years. Although by 1400 AD Chaucer and Wyclif were using a form of English, it was not the English we now speak. To the Latin alphabet a letter W had been added. Later, U and J became letters with sounds distinguished from those of V or I. But as Latin C, Q and X have sounds otherwise represented (by S or K or KS or GZ), only 23 of our 26 letters could serve us for sound-matching, even if used consistently in our spelling. As there are at least 40 significantly differing speech sounds employed in speaking English, we lack 17 single letters for single sounds. To write these 17 sounds by means of couplets, triplets or quads of letters (such as SH, THE, CH, WH, TCH, OWE, AWE, EIGH, OUGH) is ambiguous, unmethodical and wasteful. While we continue to use the Latin alphabet with only three added letters, spelling largely depends on memory, not on method. An alphabet of some 40 or more simpler characters would eliminate the wasteof labour and materials caused by our traditional spelling irregularities. Writing and printing would occupy far less space. It is this resulting economy, still not fully appreciated, that Bernard Shaw grasped and fostered. His aim was not conceived as educational but utilitarian.

2. Sweet's approach to a desirable modern alphabet.

The story told in this exhibition begins with an unusual kind of alphabet concerned with economies in writing, published in 1892 by Henry Sweet of Oxford, a great authority on phonetics, the science which analyses speech into its few significantly different sorts of sound. Sweet's analysis of spoken English into some 40 sorts of sound was not original. Isaac Pitman among others had used 40 sound-sorts matched by as many characters, both for an abbreviated shorthand and for longhand (romanic) sound-writing.

The most distinctive feature of Sweet's Current Shorthand was that his characters always kept their appointed place on the horizontal 'writing line'; wheras Pitman's and other fast shorthands, by joining ends to beginnings in any sequence of characters, makes words wander variously from a ruled or imagined writing line - a wandering much exaggerated where long words are fully spelled. For typewriting and type-set printing the aligned sequence of lettering is essential.

Sweet's lettering, then, conforms to the traditional three main kinds of characters: Shorts, which stand on the imagined writing line with their tops aligned on an 'upper parallel' (like orthodox letters a e m n o u); Talls, which (like b d f h k l) stand on the writing line but ascend well above the height of Shorts; and Deeps, which (like g p q y) are top-aligned with the Shorts on the upper parallel but descend well below the writing line. This is a neat and familiar manner of writing: Talls and Shorts keep an imaginary writing line well defined, while Deeps and Shorts equally preserve an imaginary upper parallel.

Less happily, Sweet employed two more categories of lettering: one so enlarged as to be both Tall and Deep (like a script letter f), the other of less height than the Short letters: neither the too large nor the too little letters serving to preserve either parallel's level at all. Furthermore, Sweet's own writing distorted the small letters in order to link them fore and aft with larger letters. He held the too common belief that for fast writing the writer may only lift the pen between words.

In using Short, Tall and Deep lettering, Sweet conformed to tradition. Quite apart from any use of abbreviated spelling, he gained speed by enlarging his alphabet to spell all single sounds with single letters. That is, he used no 'digraphic' sound-spelling such as TH, SH, IE, AY. Moreover, Sweet's characters are among the simplest graphic shapes known to geometry: they are mostly single penstrokes, without dottings, crossings or 'diacritical' markings such as dictionaries use to define a letter's pronunciation. Such markings would involve pen-lifting and hand movements additional to any required in advancing from one letter to the next. Sweet's alphabet served to spell, to write, (and could have served just possibly to type) with simpler, as well as fewer, letters than are used in orthodox English. It was in this respect that it provided a crude model worth refining as recommended by Shaw: not to serve still as shorthand, but as an all-purpose modern alphabet.

Dr Abraham Tauber's book, George Bernard Shaw on language (London, Peter Owen 1965, p30) states that Shaw first met Sweet as early as 1879. It is well known that Sweet became in some measure a prototype for Henry Higgins, society speech trainer, in Shaw's Pygmalion, written in 1912, the year of Sweet's death.

3. Shaw's appeal for a wholly new alphabet.

Shaw habitually drafted his own writings almost fully spelled in the 40-letter alphabet of Pitman shorthand. He may well have found this unsatisfactory for re-reading and revision. It could spell sounds unambiguously, having an adequate number of letters. But as its script was unaligned, it certainly could not serve also for typing and type-set print. Moreover, Shaw was very knowledgeable and interested in fine typography. At the age of 85, he appealed to "type designers or artist-calligraphers, or whatever they call themselves, to design an alphabet capable of representing the sounds of the following string of nonsense quite unequivocally without using two letters to represent one sound or making the same letter represent different sounds by diacritical marks." The nonsense test-piece was intended to cover all English sound-sorts and to discover designers who truly recognised them. He then went on to recommend Sweet's alphabet as a suitable point of departure for his designer (see pp26-27 of Shaw's preface to The Miraculous Birth of Language, by Professor Richard Albert Wilson, London, Dent, 1941).

This Preface, dated February 1941 but not published till the autumn, gives Shaw's most precise instructions, though his public campaign opened with a long and important letter to The Times of 14 April 1941. Only years later was the letter to The Times made known to me, but while I was myself experimenting with a sound-spelling alphabet, my attention was drawn to Shaw's appeal in the Preface.

How many others responded seriously to his appeal I was never able to discover, though I tried. Shaw dissuaded me from contact with or influence by others. But from acknowledgement postcards he had printed, it would seem that there was no lack of misdirected proposals and gratuitous advice; for there he stated concisely what he sought and what he repudiated. Especially notable is his dismissal of all "schemes spelling English phonetically with the old ABC".
He sought a wholly new alphabet - "to be used and taught concurrently with the old alphabet until one or the other proves the fitter to survive". He would not consider tampering with orthodox English spelling or its traditional alphabet: these were to be left undisturbed - and unimproved.

What - beyond courage - qualified Shaw to demand a new English alphabet? Though an Irishman to the last, he certainly possessed authority on the pronunciation of English. From 1926 to 1939 he served on the BBC's Spoken English Advisory Committee. When Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate and first Chairman of the Committee, died in 1930, Shaw succeeded him as Chairman for the next ten years. The Committee included several exponents of phonetic writing. Bridges himself had with the help of the calligrapher Edward Johnston, produced a large and graceful alphabet. Daniel Jones [1] and A Lloyd James [2], both expert in phonetics, later became professors. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson was, among other things, the best Hamlet of his day. Logan Pearsall Smith, with Robert Bridges, inaugurated the Society for Pure English.

By 1936, the Committee had grown to 24 members, of whom seven were senior academics. Other advisers included well known speakers such as Lady Cynthia Asquith, Kenneth Clark and Alistair Cooke. It is therefore not surprising that Shaw developed a keen interest in creating an alphabet fully allied to speech. His association, on this Committee, with phonetic experts must surely have helped him to crystallize his own ideas for a modern all-purpose alphabet.

4. Read's early attempts.

What were my own qualifications to further Shaw's intentions? It may be enough to say that in my teens I went with a scholarship to Birmingham School of Art and there learnt lettering and designing under the headship of Robert Catterson Smith, a one-time Kelmscott craftsman; and that between the wars I designed and commercially supplied large lettering in various fashions and materials. On the phonetic side I had taken a course of speech training, and had studied several phonetic alphabets, including those of Bridges and Sweet. If I was particularly qualified at all, it was in having some practical experience, both graphic and phonetic. When, around Christmas 1941, I read Shaw's Preface, I was 54, old enough to back keen interest with long perseverance.

After a month's preparation I submitted to Shaw
(a) a tentative alphabet of 47 letters
(b) reasons for choosing them, and
(c) their transcription of his test-piece of nonsense.

To these I added
(d) a sheet of variously styled lettering to show how the alphabet might be adapted in writing, printing or display, to scribble a note or engrave a monument, to print books or make neon signs.

His printed acknowledgment postcard, dated 27 January 1942, bears an exceedingly kindly, almost excited footnote. He showed my first crude attempt to others. To my repeated enquiries for advice from him or others helping him, he only replied that I was better left to my own devices. I am aware of two or three cases in which he subsequently commended to recognized authorities my grasp of his intentions.

At his desire, in 1943 I prepared a manual with examples, entitled Sound-writing: a method and an economy in spelling. Shaw found it "admirably clear", though he disliked some "graceless lettering". His belief that "for handwriting the words must be written without lifting the pen" is one I cannot share. Schools no longer require it. His own signature to this letter shows three harmless liftings of the pen in his name "Bernard".

This letter begins with advice to consult Mr I J (later Sir James) Pitman [3], of shorthand and publishing fame, whose experience of phonetic alphabets is unrivalled. Mr Pitman dissuaded me from immediate publication and encouraged me in further improvements of the manual's alphabet.

5. Developments before Shaw's death.

In the autumn of 1944 Shaw announced in The Author (quarterly journal) his intention to make a Will promoting a new alphabet. He had already in a letter dated 19 July 1944, told Pitman " ... so I wash my hands of the business, and leave the field open to you to do the job with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee... " It is certain that no abler and better situated co-ordinator could have been chosen to see the task through, even if Pitman's personal leanings were more educational, less specifically utilitarian, than Shaw's.

Three years later, in 1947, Mr Pitman and Dr Daniel Jones visited Shaw to urge upon him the aims of the Simplified Spelling Society. Their reception is related fully by Pitman in his introduction to Tauber's Shaw on Language. Their Society's commitment to using none but our accustomed 26 letters of the alphabet - and consequently to digraphic spelling of sounds - was anathema to Shaw: he was adamant against it.

The Will, finally signed on 12 June 1950, does not specifically exclude the use of familiar letters of the alphabet, but it was evident to the Trustee from Shaw's published writings that he had intended the use of a wholly new set of between 40 and 50 characters. If further evidence were needed, it exists in Shaw's private correspondence quoting my grasp of his intentions as a guide.

The Will was wilfully made in language more Shavian than legal in so far as its Clauses 35-38 dealt with the alphabet. Beginning with Sub-section 35(1), it calls in effect for some estimate of the world's man-hours wasted in writing and printing English with an alphabet of 26 instead of 40 or more letters; and a valuation in money of those wasted hours. This impossible task was entrusted to Mr P A D MacCarthy who, having investigated, could only report that no reliable data exists for any meaningful estimate. Sub-section 35(2), also in Mr MacCarthy's care, deals with transliteration of Androcles, which presented a few problems mentioned in his Appendix to Androcles.

Although Shaw's letter to The Times, his Preface to Wilson's book, and his private correspondence refer explicitly to an alphabet for printing from type as well as for script, the Will makes no definite provision either for or against using printers' type in Androcles. Clause 35(2) provided funds "to employ an artist-calligrapher to fair-copy the transliteration for reproduction by lithography, photography or any other method that may serve in the absence of printers' type". In brief, the Will permits, if necessary, a departure from normal letterpress printing. It was agreed that no such departure was necessary.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 734