- Quikscript
Quikscript (also known as the Read Alphabet and Second Shaw) is an alternate
alphabet for theEnglish language , designed to be phonetically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written. There are also adapted Quikscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English.George Bernard Shaw , famous writer, critic and playwright, was dissatisfied with the limits of currently availableshorthand methods. He was also mightily displeased with the vagaries of English spelling, and wanted a phonetic reworking of the written language. In his will, he provided for a competition, andKingsley Read won it with his "Shavian" script. After a lengthy public testing phase with about 500 users from around the world, Read decided to revise the alphabet and renamed it "Quikscript." In 1966 he published a manual for the new alphabet.There are about forty unique symbols in the script, plus some ligatures (characters formed of multiple characters joined together, much as "
æ " or "fi " are in someRoman alphabet scripts). The characters are designed so that many of them will flow into one another without the necessity of connecting links and while still maintaining readability. Furthermore, they are easy to write by hand. In the last few years, Quikscript computer fonts have been developed so that the alphabet can be used with computers and the Internet.Book two of the popular "Cole's Funny Picture Books", published in
Australia by E. W. Cole at the turn of the 20th century, was revised in1979 to include an article introducing Quikscript under the name Second Shaw.ee also
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Shavian alphabet External links
* [http://home.wanadoo.nl/uln/quickscript/quikscriptmanual.pdf Official Quikscript manual]
* [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm Quikscript page at Omniglot.com]
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20050206082314/http://quickscript.teraiten.vze.com/ Ewout Stam's Quikscript/Shavian page] atInternet Archive
* [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Read_Alphabet/ Read Alphabet Yahoo group]
* [http://home.earthlink.net/~sbartok1632/quik/quik.htm Online Quikscript tutorial]
* [http://home.earthlink.net/~sbartok1632/quik/quik-g.htm Quikscript History]
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