Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Noo Alfabets


Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? - Steven Wright


When playwright George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, he bequeathed most of his fortunes to developing an alternative to the alphabet of the English language, an alphabet composed of at least forty letters to account for each of the possible sounds produced in English without all the crazy spelling variances. The resulting competition brought forth hundreds of new alphabet proposals. The Shaw Alphabet submitted by Kingsley Read was announced the winner. Another proposed alphabet, Unifon, was a close runner-up.


More interesting stuff on alphabets and their origins at Omniglot


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