A Few More Shavian Notes
A few other things occurred to me.
A major benefit: Tragedeigh naming is basically impossible. Is it Cate or Kate? It’s 𐑒𐑱𐑑. I also kind of like that you can see visually the irritating rhyming of my daughter’s friends names: ·𐑧𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑛𐑰, ·𐑧𐑤𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑮𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑛𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩.
If you want to practice, there is a very nice addon for Firefox to convert a page to Shavian, in total or by replacing N (25, 50, 100, 200,… 500) common words. I don’t recommend trying to read a Wikipedia page about phonetics with “auto translate” enabled but otherwise it seems to be super useful.
In fact, a significant problem of learning another orthography like this is going to be that I have spent my entire life reading English text without sounding it out. My brain has a lot of experience. A more logical orthography might be a huge improvement, but beating decades of familiarity with another one is going to take time. This approach seems like a brilliant one, because you build up experience in a similar manner; as you get used to seeing common words mixed in with English text, hopefully you just get familiar quickly. Or maybe it backfires because your brain can fill in lazily from context. I guess time will tell.
The IPA/Shavian correspondences ʌ-𐑳, ʊ-𐑫 and u-𐑵 seem like a bit of a missed opportunity. I think IPA already had ʌ (Shavian 𐑳) before Read came up with the scheme, but I don’t know whether he was aware of it or cared. Not a huge deal either way.
There is actually a distinction which used to be phonemic that is not preserved in Shavian, which is the w/wh distinction, (in IPA, w/ʍ). Sometimes people exaggerate this (“a hwale is in trouble!”), but the distinction evidently still exists in some places, but probably not where Read was working on Shavian. So you can’t distinguish witch and which in Shavian writing.