Ronald Kingsley Read
Read won a competition inspired by playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist George Bernard Shaw's will, to design an alphabet to replace the "great waste of time, energy and paper" he saw in writing standard English. The competition was initiated by James Pitman, whom Shaw had asked to find the alphabet, and held with funding from Shaw's will and with a grant from the Public Trustee. 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 phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply misspellings. Shaw's play "Androcles and the Lion" was published in 1962 in a bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings.
