/01 Writing English in the Shavian alphabet
Shavian is a phonemic alphabet commissioned from Bernard Shaw's estate in the 1950s, designed to spell English by sound rather than by inherited convention. One letter, one sound — which removes the irregularity of English orthography at the cost of being unreadable to anyone who has not learned it.
Type or paste English and this transliterator converts it, using a pronunciation dictionary rather than naive letter substitution.
/02 Heteronyms and why alternates appear
English spelling hides pronunciation differences that a phonemic alphabet has to resolve. Read, lead, live, bow, tear and dozens of others are spelled identically but pronounced differently depending on meaning, and the correct Shavian differs for each.
Where a word is ambiguous, alternates are offered so you can pick the intended reading. Names and unusual words that fall outside the dictionary are handled heuristically, so check those by eye.
/03 The Shavian alphabet in brief
The Shavian alphabet was created for English by Ronald Kingsley Read, winner of a competition funded by the will of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wanted a phonetic replacement for traditional spelling. The alphabet was published in 1962 in a special edition of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion, printed with Shavian and conventional text side by side.
Shavian has 48 letters, each standing for one sound, so words are spelled the way they are pronounced rather than by historical convention. The letters are simple shapes grouped into tall, deep and short forms, and many come in pairs where related sounds, such as p and b, are mirror images of each other. It has its own block in Unicode, which is why Shavian text can be typed, copied and displayed like any other script when a font supports it.
/04 Converting English to Shavian
Because Shavian spells by sound, converting English into it means working out how each word is pronounced, not swapping letters. This transliterator uses a pronunciation dictionary to do that, so English text typed or pasted in comes out in Shavian ready to copy.
Some words cannot be decided from spelling alone. Read, lead and live each have two pronunciations, so the tool offers alternates you can choose between. Names, new words and unusual loanwords outside the dictionary fall back to a best guess worth checking, and a Shavian gloss is shown to help you learn the letters as you go.