Quikscript

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The front page of the Quikscript manual. The Quikscript text reads, "This is the way to do it."

Quikscript (also known as the Read Alphabet) is an alternate alphabet for the English language, designed to be phonetically regular, compact, and comfortably and quickly written. There are also adapted Quikscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English.

George Bernard Shaw, famous writer, critic and playwright, was dissatisfied with the limits of currently available shorthand methods. He was also mightily displeased with the vagaries of English spelling, and wanted a phonetic reworking of the written language. In his will, he provided for a competition, and Kingsley Read won it with his "Shavian" script. After a lengthy "beta testing" phase with about 500 users from around the world, Read decided to revise the alphabet and renamed it "Quikscript." In 1966 he published a manual for the new alphabet.

There are about forty unique symbols in the script, plus some ligatures (characters formed of multiple characters joined together, much as æ or fi are in some Roman alphabet scripts). The characters are designed so that many of them will flow into one another without the necessity of connecting links and while still maintaining readability. Furthermore, they are easy to write by hand. In the last few years, Quikscript computer fonts have been developed so that the alphabet can be used with computers and the Internet.

Yahoo! Groups has a group named "Read_Alphabet" which was started to promote Quikscript through the internet. It currently has about three hundred members. Read's Quikscript manual is available on the Read_Alphabet site. There is also an Ikonboard group for Quikscript users.

External links

• Official Quikscript manual
• Quikscript page at Omniglot.com
• Ewout Stam's Quikscript/Shavian page at Internet Archive
• Read Alphabet Yahoo group
• Online Quikscript tutorial