George Bernard Shaw created a competition for a new English alphabet with at least 40 letters. His motivation was to ease and advance communication by providing new characters for specific sounds, thus erasing the many contradictions and anomalies in English spelling (think of the pronunciations of through, though, bough, and cough, for example).
The 48 characters in the chosen entry are written with just one stroke, similar to shorthand, ostensibly making it easier to write and learn.
There are some examples here. It is also known as The Shaw Alphabet.
Return to FunTrivia
"Ask FunTrivia" strives to offer the best answers possible to trivia questions. We ask our submitters to thoroughly research questions and provide sources where possible. Feel free to post corrections or additions. This is server B184.