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Principles of the Shwa Script | Contents |
You may never have thought about it before, but written language doesn't have to be the written version of spoken language. In fact, the first writing was accounting : someone drew a stylized picture of a cow and then a bunch of tally marks showing how many cows were involved, say ∀|||. We would read that three cows , but a Spaniard would read it tres vacas and a Chinese would read it 三头牛 ( sān tóu niú) - the writing is independent of the language. That's what our numeric and arithmetic notation is like : people with no common language can still understand a written "sentence" like 3² + 4² = 5², even if they can't read it aloud to each other.
Written Chinese is like that, too - the characters represent meanings, not sounds. People from all over the Sinosphere can read the character 月 and know it means "moon" or "month", even though it's pronounced yuè in Standard Chinese, jyut in Cantonese, getsu in Sino-Japanese, tsuki in native Japanese, and wel in Korean. The funny thing is that many Chinese characters include phonetic elements, but the pronunciations have changed so much that the phonetics are useless.
But that's not what Shwa is like. Shwa is a system of phonograms for writing spoken language, with all its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages include the facts that you have to speak the language to read a Shwa sentence, that homophones are written alike, and that differences in accent or dialect can hinder communication. These aren't negligible problems, but they're far outweighed by the advantage of writing a language that you already speak.
In English, when t starts a stressed syllable, it's pronounced with a little puff of air - it's aspirated . You can feel this by holding your hand up to your mouth and comparing top with stop. In many languages, for instance Thai or the languages of India, those are two different sounds. We also sometimes pronounce t with a fricative release, as in catch, or with no release at all, as in "Look out!". But we consider all those to be variants of the same phoneme, and we write them all with the same letter t in the Latin alphabet. But in Shwa, the t in the word stop is written with the letter d, since it's unaspirated.
The phonemic letter is what we think we're saying, while the phonetic sound is what we're actually saying. This unconscious translation we do from a phoneme to one of its allophones is described by English phonology, and we all have to master it, subconsciously, in order to speak correctly and to interpret other speakers when they speak. But that doesn't work for a universal script, since we can't master all the phonologies of all the world's languages. So Shwa is phonetic, not phonemic : we write what we're saying, not what we're thinking. And that takes a little getting used to.
Here's another example : even in the Latin alphabet we write the plural of life with a v instead of an f. In Shwa, we also write the plural of house with a z instead of the s, and the plural of path with the dh letter (as in this, not thin). All three cases follow the same phonological rule, which states that unvoiced f th s become voiced v dh z between vowels.
It's funny that stress and the consequent reduction of vowels, one of the most important aspects of English pronunciation, isn't shown at all in our current spelling. English words with more than one syllable all have only one stressed vowel, and most of the other vowels are pronounced as eh or ih. For example, the word atom is pronounced aetehm, with the stress on the first vowel. The second vowel is pronounced as an eh because of our phonological rule that reduces unstressed vowels. But in the word atomic, the stress is on the second syllable, and it's the first vowel that's reduced. And every English speaker recognizes, at least subconsciously, that even though the words atom and atomic look alike and one derives from the other, they're pronounced differently.
But in Shwa, the two words look as different as they sound. Shwa's "phonetic spelling" shows both stress and reduced vowels, along with several other phonological changes. And that's a big help when reading foreign languages. For example, Spaniards pronounce b and v alike : both are pronounced as English b at the beginning of words and as English v in the middle of words. So Valencia is pronounced Balencia, and haber is pronounced aver (the h is silent), and that's how both are written in Shwa.
But phonetic spelling in Shwa isn't as detailed as, for example, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which can show many fine distinctions that only a trained linguist can hear. For instance, the sound of k as in cape moves slightly forward in your mouth in front of front vowels, so that keep is almost pronounced kyeep. The same sound moves slightly back in your mouth in front of back vowels, so that coop is pronounced at your uvula. But we use the same letter for all three English words, even though Russian distinguishes ky from k, and Arabic distinguishes uvular (or emphatic) q from k. It's sometimes a judgment call, but Shwa represents a broad phonetic spelling, not a deep one.
You know the little bird Woodstock in the Peanuts cartoons? When he speaks, it's all just vertical scratches. It's a very simple script to write, but very hard to read.
Shwa, on the other hand, has been developed to be easy to read. That's because text is normally read more than it's written. These days, we write text via keyboard more often than by hand, so it's even less important to make writing easy, relative to reading.
As you know, we don't read letter by letter - we read entire words at once. And we recognize words by their shapes, including their outlines, black vs white interiors, sharp vs smooth turns, and the general direction of strokes. All those factors have been optimized in Shwa, as we'll discuss below.
But Shwa writing is also easier than the Latin alphabet, usually half or fewer strokes per word, counting return strokes. Every Shwa letter is written without lifting the pen, and of course Shwa uses fewer letters per word than English.
The basis of any symbolic system is how to tell the symbols apart. In Shwa, some features are distinctive, and others aren't.
The most obvious distinction in Shwa is between tall and short letters. Tall letters are twice as high as they are wide - we say they fit in a domino. Short letters are half that height - they fit in a square. Shwa consonants are all written with tall letters, and vowels are all written with short letters. When a short letter hangs from the top line, we call it high; when it sits on the bottom line, we call it low. There are also tall letters whose top is a simple line sticking up - we call them slender letters. They're used for semivowels and suffixes.
No matter whether a vowel is high or low, it's still the same letter, like English A and a.
Another important distinction in Shwa is between sharp angles and smooth curves. Here are some examples :
For the four shapes below, it also matters whether a shape is on the left or right :
But the symmetry isn't across a vertical axis - that would make the letters too similar. Instead, tops that start at upper right begin a quarter of the way down the right side, and likewise bottoms that end at lower left move up the left side. The result is to exaggerate the difference between left and right : they're not just mirror images.
I'll summarize what each shape means on the Alphabet page, but you'll see the regularities yourself as you learn the letters.
What does it mean when we say that high and low vowels are actually the same letter? We mean that they look alike and represent the same sounds, even though they're not in the same vertical position on the page. But they are still in the same position in the sequence of letters, which we also call the one-dimensional or 1D form. But when they're displayed on a screen or a page, the two-dimensional or 2D form is different : one is written high and the other is written low.
All Shwa writing is composed of the same shapes in sequence. However, there are several different ways to lay the shapes out on a page. These are called gaits, a name which is meant to evoke the different ways letters can walk together. The different gaits are described in full on the Gaits page, but here is a brief introduction :
Here are the names of each gait spelled in that gait.
In all gaits, the writing is from left to right, in rows running downwards. In all gaits, tall letters are taller than short letters, and taller than they're wide. Each gait has its own rules determining which letters are connected, adjacent or spaced, but the one-dimensional order of the letters is the same in all gaits. All the other key dimensions: stroke weights, letter widths, space widths, line heights and so forth are left to the typographer. If he does his job well, the result is easy to read and pleasing to the eye.
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