The Shavian Alphabet
Romanization and Custom Font
What is this?
The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright Bernard Shaw.
The cart contains:
- A custom 4x8 pixel font for rendering Shavian text in PICO-8
- A chart for the romanization scheme used to type Shavian
- An example text (the above paragraph) in standard English, Romanized Shavian, and proper Shavian
Why should I care?
If you are a Shavian alphahbet enthusiast, you can use it in your own carts by copying in the poke statement and using \14 in any string written in the Romanized to print in proper Shavian.
Otherwise, if you want a script to represent Elvish, Alien, or something else in your game, you can do the same!
How does Shavian work?
For details you can refer to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
Here's a chart which contains the Shavian letter, its Romanized version, International Phonetic Alphabet rendition, and the letter name (which showcases the sound the letter makes).
By convention, the words "to for of the" are represented with single letters. In the Romanization these are the letters "t f v D", respectively.
What about the ligatures?
This was as small as I could get the font and have it look good; the ligatures looked hard to do, and I'm influenced by speaking a rhotic variety of English and being lazy. If you really want them, feel free to add them and let me know how it goes :D
[Please log in to post a comment]
