Writing Systems

Scripts proposed for writing a language day to day, rather than for transcribing it phonetically. Some were designed to fix an orthography their authors considered broken — Shavian for English, Unifon for early reading instruction. Some were built for invented worlds and then used in earnest by readers — Tengwar. Each guide covers who made the system and why, how it actually encodes the language, what happened when people tried to use it, and how to read it today.

Duployan — the shorthand that became a community orthography

Duployan shorthand began as a French stenographic system and ended up as something far more unusual: a script that First Nations communities in British Columbia adopted, taught each other, and used to read and write their own languages for three decades. Most shorthands stay shorthand — a private speed-writing tool that dies with the stenographer. Duployan is the one that crossed over into everyday literacy, and that crossing is the reason it is on this page rather than in a history of office technology.[^1][^2]

Shavian — Bernard Shaw's 48-letter alphabet for English

Shavian (the Shaw alphabet) is not a transcription system. It is a proposed *replacement orthography*: a set of 48 letters, sharing nothing with the Latin alphabet, designed so that English could be written with one symbol per phoneme. It was paid for out of George Bernard Shaw's will, designed by the Birmingham signwriter and letterer Ronald Kingsley Read, and published in exactly one commercial book — the bi-alphabetic Penguin edition of Shaw's play *Androcles and the Lion*, 1962.[^1][^2] That book is the whole of its official corpus. Everything since has been done by volunteers.

Tengwar — Tolkien's Fëanorian script, and the modes he never wrote

The Tengwar is a writing system devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, probably in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Its first published appearance is the Lonely Mountain jar inscription in *The Hobbit* (1937); its full description is Appendix E of *The Lord of the Rings* (1955).[^1] The single most useful thing to understand before you start is this: **Tengwar is not a language.** It is a script, and a deliberately flexible one — the same letters carry different sound values depending on which *mode* you are writing in.[^5] Quenya, Sindarin, Black Speech, Old English and modern English have all been written in it, by Tolkien himself.[^3]

Unifon — John Malone's 40-letter single-sound alphabet for English

Unifon is a Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English: 40 characters for what its inventor called the 40 "most important sounds" of the language, one symbol per sound, no digraphs. It was designed in the mid-1950s by **John R. Malone**, a Chicago economist and newspaper-equipment consultant, and it spent most of its life not as a spelling reform but as a *teaching aid* — a temporary alphabet children learn to read in, then abandon.[^2] Its most consequential afterlife was somewhere else entirely: in the 1970s and 1980s it was adapted as a practical orthography for four Native American languages of northwestern California.[^1][^2]