Shavian is an alphabet designed especially for English.
"So what's the point of that," I hear you ask, "why would we need another alphabet to write English if we already have one?"
The answer is quite simple. Shavian does a much better job.
Time to get slightly intellectual.
Our current alphabet, the Roman alphabet, was brought in by Latin-speaking monks a thousand or so years ago; it's much the same nowadays as it was way back then. Way back when the 26-letter Roman alphabet was first introduced, it suited English - as it was - fairly well, but it wasn't properly used in the following years. As English developed, the sounds of words were changed (often dramatically) and other new sounds appeared, so the spellings should have been changed and new characters included; of course neither happened. Despite the huge changes in the way the language was spoken, the spellings changed very little, which means that a thousand or so years later, we are left with a written system better suited to Middle English than the modern English we all speak today.
Because the Roman alphabet is such a bad match to the different sounds of our spoken language, it often relies on tradition to dictate the way words should be written. Take the word 'although'; say it, and you'll agree it consists of four clear sounds (paw, live, this, open), yet when written it uses up eight letters, four of those just for the the last sound!! Also, you should be able to take off the 'alth' from the word and be left with a word pronounced like 'oh', but we all know that isn't true; it could be pronounced as 'uff' (rough), 'off' (trough), 'oo' (through), 'aw' (thought) or even 'ow' (bough)!
When we were children, most of us were probably shouted at for not spelling 'Autumn' with an 'n'. As adults, many of us are branded 'fools' or 'uneducated morons' because we might spell 'definitely' as 'definately'. We are NOT the ones at fault here - it's the spelling system. But a simple spelling reform is not enough, because the Roman alphabet has simply not got enough letters to represent all the sounds that we use. A new alphabet is the only sensible solution.
Wouldn't it be nice to stop using all these stupid spellings? Wouldn't it be nice to just write words down more closely to the way we SAY them? Wouldn't it just be nice to have an alphabet that suited the language perfectly? Problem solved! There IS an alphabet that does not use stupid spellings, that uses word constructions that correspond precisely to the spoken sounds, and that does indeed suit the language perfectly: this dream alphabet is Shavian.
The famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was always against the use of the Roman alphabet in English, because of its sheer unsuitability; consequently, he wrote all of his famous plays using the more efficient Pitman's Shorthand system. Many of his plays (including the well-renowned Pygmalion) contained hidden messages, which included references to his dislike of English writing. When he died in 1950, it was found that he had left the whole of his estate to the creation of a new, phonetic and un-muddled English alphabet. Even though his will was disputed by various other parties (who managed to get some of the money for themselves), enough money was left over to make a good job of fulfilling Shaw's wish.
Soon after Shaw's wish was known, a competition was arranged by the Public Trustee (responsible for carrying out the instructions in the will) to find the best alphabet design possible; the sum of £500 was offered as a prize. By the closing date, over 400 entries had been received; out of these, four designs were considered worthy of the prize, and each designer received £125. One of the four winning designers was a designer and linguistic expert called Kingsley Read; his design was the most noteworthy of the four, and so he was dubbed the creator. The finished alphabet was named the Shaw Alphabet (after George Bernard Shaw), or Shavian (as it is more often called today).
After the alphabet had been designed, there was a sizeable amount of money left over; this was used to produce a copy of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion transliterated into the Shaw alphabet, which was distributed to thousands of libraries and bookshops so as to spread the alphabet amongst all the English-speaking countries.