High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as phonetic as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to sounds); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings".