Brevian alphabet
The Brevian alphabet is a proposed alternative alphabet for typing English. Drawing inspiration from the Shavian alphabet, it is a phonetic alphabet which utilises letter pairs (tall/low letters for unvoiced/voiced consonants, and dotted and undotted letters for long/short vowels) to depict related letters. It was created by Brian Mansberger, and first published in 2021.
The alphabet has 40 core letters (22 consonants, 13 pure vowels, 3 diphthongs, 2 semivowels), and three extra letters to be used in Welsh and Scottish dialect words. Brevian thus has eight vowel letters less than Shavian; the reason is that Shavian has rhotic vowels as ligatures, while in Brevian they’re just written as a vowel followed by R. In neither alphabet is it strictly permissible for a speaker of a non-rhotic accent to omit the silent Rs in spelling. Brevian does also have a “ring” diacritic, used both under the first letter of proper nouns, and to show stress, if stress isn’t on the first syllable of a word (which is what’s assumed by default).
Compared to Shavian, I think Brevian has some neat ideas (like marking stress, and the vowel letters seem nicely systematic, for example) but the lack of rhotic vowel ligatures ends up being a problem, in my opinion. In particular, the sound /ɜː/ (as in work) gets spelt as if it was /ʌɹ/, which feels profoundly wrong. This would seem to be the result of the hurry-furry merger in American English (except that if you have that merger, the merged sound is /ɜɹ/, not /ʌɹ/!). Personally, I prefer a cross-dialectical system like Shavian’s over an American-centric one.
Being a very recent invention and also basically the hobby project of one guy, Brevian characters are not supported by Unicode 🙂 Instead, there’s a font. This font assigns Brevian glyphs to the standard Latin characters (plus some extras, because 43-letter alphabet); as much as is possible the most logical character is chosen, like for example the letter “p” will show up as the Brevian letter for the phoneme /p/. The capitalised form of a letter will result in the Brevian letter with the ring diacritic. Below is a chart, although it won’t display properly if you’ve disabled my stylesheet or are using a screenreader:
| Brevian | IPA | What to Type | Example | Brevian | IPA | What to Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| p | p | p | pea | b | b | b | bee |
| s | s | s | sea | z | z | z | zoo |
| t | t | t | tea | d | d | d | dad |
| þ | θ | þ | thank | ð | ð | ð | that |
| f | f | f | fast | v | v | v | vat |
| k | k | k | cat | g | g | g | get |
| x | ʃ | x | shark | ` | ʒ | ` | mirage |
| c | tʃ | c | chair | j | dʒ | j | joke |
| h | h | h | hawk | \ | ŋ | \ | fang |
| l | l | l | like | r | ɹ | r | read |
| m | m | m | mum | n | n | n | nice |
| i | ɪ | i | kit | í | i | í | fleece |
| u | ʊ | u | foot | ú | u | ú | goose |
| e | e | e | dress | é | eɪ | é | face |
| o | ɔ | o | thought | ó | oʊ | ó | goat |
| a | æ | a | trap | á | ɑ | á | palm |
| ; | ə | ; | comma | q | ʌ | q | strut |
| ò | ɒ | ò | lot | œ | ɔɪ | œ | choice |
| æ | aɪ | æ | price | å | aʊ | å | mouth |
| y | j | y | yes | w | w | w | west |
The only thing that bugs me about its assignments is that almost all the letters can be typed easily on a default English keyboard in macOS… except for eth and thorn. And /ð/ in particular is the eighth-most common phoneme in the English language 🙃 Just seems a shame to be almost perfect OOTB but not fully there. All the other assignments are fine from a macOS perspective.
The extra letters are found as follows: ñ /ɬ/ is on ñ, è /r̥/ is on è, and ç /x~χ/ is on ç.
See Also / References
- Brevian : This is the “home” website for the alphabet, outlining the letters and how to type them.