Revisions of the Shaw Alphabet
The major revision of the Shaw alphabet from George Bernard Shaw's original concept, is to minimize the importance of the vowel sounds. The complexity of the vowel sounds in the earliest version of the Shaw Alphabet, prevented the average English speaker, unless he had specialized phonetic training and a clear familiarity with the Standard British pronunciation, from easily recognizing words written in the Shaw alphabet.

The primary objective of the Shaw alphabet is to enable the reader to read all the words quickly and efficiently. You should know the pronunciation from the spelling. You should not need to have to guess from the context, what word is actually meant and how it is pronounced.
This revision was designed to simplify the spelling, in particular, the vowel combinations.

Essentially, the revised Shaw strategy is that unless the vowel sound is the first letter of the word or syllable, we replace it with a vowel marker and just keep writing. The vowel marker, is a simple dot, dash, arrow or spiral which indicates the function and duration of the vowel. The reader knows approximately which vowel is being expressed. This impreciseness frees the reader from having to determine an exact pronunciation for a vowel sound, which might very well have multiple acceptable vowel pronunciations, in any case. The Vowel Marker also acts as a placeholder, so that if a higher level of preciseness is needed, the vowel marker can be annotated with one of the Mazor Vowel Signs to indicate the exact pronunciation of the Shaw vowel marker. 
 
Shaw Vowel Makers
Vowels because of their variability are only shown explicitly with the Shaw letters, when the vowel sound is combined with a glottal stop or a consonant sound and also when a vowel starts a syllable. In almost all other cases, one of 8 Shaw Vowel markers below is used instead, to indicate where the long or short or dipthong vowel would be inserted. 
Half size vowels Short vowels Long Vowels Dipthongs
(Schwa) (uh, e, a, i, oh, oo) (aw, ee, o, u) (ei, ai, ou, eu, oi, ui)

Practically, that means that only words starting with a vowel sound accentuated by a Glottal Stop,
will be written with a Shaw vowel letter. Less frequently, a Shaw letter will be used for the odd hybrid vowel sound. And even more rarely a secondary vowel letter is written to indicate a vowel sound, which starts a stressed syllable in the middle of the word.

Vowel Sounds are written differently based on their importance. Determining the vowel sound, and how it is to be written is the most sophisticated aspect of using the Shaw Alphabet. Fortunately, the rules are exact and easy to apply. And the Shaw reader, need not concern himself, as the pronunciation does not change, whether the vowel sound is written with a Shaw vowel letter or a Shaw vowel marker or even a combination of the two. Here are the rules.
  1. When a vowel sound has a primary function, It is written with one of the 9 Primary vowel letters. This occurs when a vowel sound begins a word. Invariably with a Glottal Stop.
  2. When a vowel sound has a secondary function, It is written with one of the 11 Secondary vowel letters. This is the exceptional case where a vowel begins a syllable within a word. Invariably, there is no Glottal Stop. The absence of a Glottal Stop makes it a secondary vowel, and it is written with different letter.
  3. In all other cases, the vowel sound has a tertiary function. It is written with one of the 8 Shaw Vowel markers or a Hybrid letter. The most common tertiary vowel sounds are the Schwa ending a syllable, which is called a Dot, and the short vowel sound connecting two consonants together into a syllable, which is called a Dash.
Shaw Hybrid Letters

So let us look at the remaining odd case where a Vowel sound is combined or merged with a consonant " l " or " r " sound, and is then written with a Shaw Letter. The "l " and "r " sound proceeding a vowel are considered as stand-alone consonants, but when the "l" and especially "r " sound follow a vowel, the vowel sound can merge with the consonant and create a hybrid composed of both sounds. Because these hybrids are so common, the Shaw alphabet includes letters representing these hybrid sounds.

These hybrid sounds will be grouped with the consonants, as part of an overall strategy of minimizing the number of categories of vowel sounds.

Lets list all the various "l" and "r" Shaw letters which are made from the " l " or " r " sounds.

Of "Resh ", "Er ", "Or ", "Are", "Ar ", "El ", and "Lamed " only "Resh" and "Lamed" are plain consonants. Actually the 5 variants on the "l " and "r " sounds are actually labial consonant sounds merged with the Schwa or one of the other soft short vowels to create a hybrid sound. Note that "Are" is pronounced as in the word "fare" or "air" in the word "fair".
 
Resh Er Or Are Ar El Lamed


Vowels merged into the "l" and "r" semi-vowels are written as Shaw letters, but all other consonant vowel merges will be represented by the addition the High dot Shaw vowel marker.

Additional information is available in the guide, "Teach Yourself to Read Shaw".  Click on Order Manual Page for more information.