I don't understand the fascination with these shorthands. Maybe helpful if you do a _lot_ of writing with a pen & paper, but if not, it would be more beneficial to practice more and get faster with touch typing or a chording keyboard.
The last time I had jury duty, I took a complete transcription of the trial proceedings with Gregg because of a general prohibition on computers in the courtroom.
I also get a fair amount of utility out of it for math lectures because, frankly, while I'm pretty fluent with TeX, I can reach 220 words/min and transcribe equations much more easily if I just use pencil and paper.
This strongly reminds me of a bit of humor attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mark Twain.
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For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Indeed; I'm a rhotic speaker but would even take a non-rhotic phonetic spelling over what we have today (things like cot/cart being spelled the same couldn't be more confusing that the current orthography)
If you go for the Southern English accent as the base for your non-rhotic phonetic spelling you don't even have to sacrifice distinguishing cot and cart -- they're different vowels because we don't have the father/bother merger :-)
Oh, I forgot about the father/bother merger because it is darn-near universal in the US. My mom is from one of the few places in the US that was non-rhotic and had avoided the caught-cot merger[1], thus resulting in "caught" and "cot" not being homophones, but "cot" and "cart" being homophones.
1: Past-tense because many kids seem to speak much closer to middle-american than even 20 years ago.
Bernard Shaw famously supported spelling reform, first merely reworking the standard orthography and later, in the form of the phonetic alphabets Shavian and later Quikscript by Kingsley Read. They're both obviously more consistent than Latin alphabet writing, and also often shorter so they might count as shorthand.
It'd be interesting to see if these shorthands reduce the time it takes to _prompt_ LLMs. So instead of writing a long paragraph, you send the same content in a couple lines.
It's possible to do that with ChatGPT 4, though it's not always consistent. You can even tell it to produce a compressed version of input text that it will understand and it usually works.
> sm cwhx szms atmw tis lrnx b usq krkws frm y ltn lfbt. sc nn-zngrfk szms hv ofn bn dskrbd s lfbtk, x przs mat klam yt sc szms rx tru cwhx. hvvr ys lfbtk szms dhv vlu f stdxs vo kx ddkt y irs nssri tmzr a stngrfk cwhx. lfbtk cthxs kx b rtn at y spds yretkli psbl vy smbl szms 200 ws pr mx r mr bt rkvr nl a frkc fytm t akvr a usfl spid f btvn 60 ws pr mx
That's not the correct transcoding. The end is missing "and 100": I take it the end needs to be "60 x 100 ws pr mx".
This system is quite similar to Briefhand, an alphabetic shorthand letter-omission at its core and augmented with abbreviations for common words. With practice, the core rules alone are enough to write at speaking-pace.
Over time you develop a personal set of abbreviations. My shorthand is a personal language. Probably anyone could decode my notes back to English with some effort, but my notes are more than text, they’re a mnemonic device: sometimes I only need but a glance to recall my mental formations at the time I was writing.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadI also get a fair amount of utility out of it for math lectures because, frankly, while I'm pretty fluent with TeX, I can reach 220 words/min and transcribe equations much more easily if I just use pencil and paper.
I think the biggest benefit is had by giving someone else your steno outlines and having them pinpoint where your strokes need work.
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For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
1: Past-tense because many kids seem to speak much closer to middle-american than even 20 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
More links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884.
Evans Basic English Code (uses English letters):
https://archive.org/details/evansbasicenglis00evan
Orthic (an alphabetic shorthand which replaces letters with more efficient characters):
https://orthic.shorthand.fun/
That's not the correct transcoding. The end is missing "and 100": I take it the end needs to be "60 x 100 ws pr mx".
Over time you develop a personal set of abbreviations. My shorthand is a personal language. Probably anyone could decode my notes back to English with some effort, but my notes are more than text, they’re a mnemonic device: sometimes I only need but a glance to recall my mental formations at the time I was writing.
Cute! Plays on that whole "Ye olde" misunderstanding of the thorn characters as being "y".