The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters:
tall (with an ascender),
deep (with a descender) and
short. All
vowels but the consonant–vowel ligature
yew are short. Among consonants, the short letters are liquids (r, l) and
nasals (m, n); these, the semivowels (y, w) and the
heng letters (h, ng) are derived from each other through rotation or reflection. Tall letters are voiceless
consonants, excepting Yea and Hung . A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing the corresponding
voiced consonants (except Haha ). These rotation pairs, with the exception of the
heng consonants, are the same letters that are paired in
Pitman shorthand.
Affricates, several
diphthongs, and
rhotic vowels are ligatures. The alphabet is therefore to some extent
featural. There are no separate uppercase or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark
proper nouns, a "
namer-dot" (
·) is placed before a name. Sentences are typically not started with a namer-dot, unless it is otherwise called for. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography. However, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in spoken discourse. For instance, the noun
convict and the verb
convict can be spelled
ˈkɒnvɪkt and
kənvɪkt, respectively. Additionally, five common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words
the (),
of (),
and (),
to (), and
for () are written with the single letters indicated. == History ==