{"id":243,"date":"2011-02-16T20:30:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T04:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=243"},"modified":"2018-02-24T16:53:19","modified_gmt":"2018-02-25T00:53:19","slug":"shorthand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/16\/shorthand\/","title":{"rendered":"Shorthands — <300 BC, Greece?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Pittman “th”<\/p><\/div>\n

Shorthands — forms of writing that sacrifices accuracy and\/or shared orthography for speed — are very old.\u00a0 The earliest example of shorthand comes from Greece, and was sort of an inverse abugida: the vowels were primary, and consonants were noted by decorating the vowels.<\/p>\n

English-speakers have been particularly keen on shorthand, for perhaps understandable reasons.\u00a0 Four different shorthand systems were published in the UK from 1588 to 1626.\u00a0 The latter, by Thomas Shelton<\/a>, became quite popular.\u00a0 This was sort of like an abjad, sort of like an abugida: each consonant had a glyph, and the arrangement of the consonants gave the vowel.\u00a0 Placing the second consonant above the first gave an “a”, below gave an “e”, etc.<\/p>\n

Several other Englishmen and one German came up with reasonably popular shorthands, including Samual Taylor<\/a>, who cut redundant consonants and most vowels.<\/p>\n

In 1937, Sir Isaac Pitman<\/a> published a shorthand which was popular enough that it still is used now and got him knighted then.\u00a0 Pittman, unlike his predecessors, was a phonetician, and his script is not only a phonetic script but took advantage of his phonetic knowledge.\u00a0 For example, voiced consonants (e.g. “s”) and unvoiced (e.g. “z”) differed by the thickness of the stroke; it uses straight lines for\u00a0 plosives<\/a> and arcs for fricatives<\/a>.\u00a0 Some glyphs are rotations or flips of glyphs for similar sounds.\u00a0 The result is that things that sound<\/em> similar, look<\/em> similar.\u00a0 Pittman also has some logograms — single glyphs that represent common words.<\/p>\n

In 1888, John Robert Gregg<\/a> published a shorthand which now pretty much shares the English “market” (and much of the non-English Latin-script market as well) with Pittman. Gregg shorthand is reputed to be the fastest shorthand. \u00a0 Both are phonetic, but where Pittman uses light weight as a dinstinguishing element, Gregg uses line length.<\/p>\n

Shorthand has been popular in Japan as well; no fewer than nine pen shorthands are in use there.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia (English)<\/a>, Wikipedia (French),<\/a> Pittman how-to<\/a>, Flavin’s Corner<\/a> (extremely long and detailed discussion of shorthands)<\/p>\n

Shelton borrowed heavily from his predecessors, especially Edmond Willis. Each consonant was represented by an arbitrary but simple symbol, while the five vowels were represented by the relative positions of the surrounding consonants. Thus the symbol for B with symbol for T drawn directly above it represented “bat”,<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shorthands — forms of writing that sacrifices accuracy and\/or shared orthography for speed — are very old.\u00a0 The earliest example of shorthand comes from Greece, and was sort of an inverse abugida: the vowels were primary, and consonants were noted … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,18,34,8,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abjad","category-abugida","category-alphabet","category-inventor-known","category-logograms-language-types","category-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}