Short
The alphabet was the winner of a competition inspired by playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist George Bernard Shaw's will, to find a solution to the "great waste of time, energy and paper" he saw in writing standard English. 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.
