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A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

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Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#21

Post by pjc50 »

gumby wrote: post #18
pjc50 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. if you're right handed.

Woah, you're so right: I live my dexter privilege without even thinking about it My apologies to any sinister folks out there. And this reminds me to take let-handed single-handed operation into account when designing mobile UIs. (Although you still have to pull the fountain pen -- I assume you're talking about the speed increase of writing continuously rather than printing each character).

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "have to pull the pen"; It's been some years since I last used a fountain pen, but there are basically two options when you're left-handed. One is to mirror your hand horizontally, and the other is to mirror in the plane of the nib (which is at 45 degrees to the rules on the paper). So your hand ends up above and to the left of the letter you're writing. I found that much more natural and easy to do, but it requires having blotting paper under your fist to avoid smudging everything.

(The third option is the Da Vinci one of mirroring your hand and the writing, but that's no use if you want other people to read it.)

So if your hand is to the left of the nib and the writing is going from left to right, I think that counts as "pushing"?

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#22

Post by adiabatty »

PepeGomez wrote: post #13
falcolas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might interest you instead: http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm Relies entirely on phonetic representations, so it can represent just about anything.

You mean just about anything as long as it's in English.

If you want a fully generalizable script, use IPA; if you want something designed to be fast for a particular language, use a method designed for that language. Quikscript is great for mid-century Received Pronunciation, but if you want something that's fast for Spanish, you'll likely want to change things a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#23

Post by IshKebab »

gumby wrote: post #4

Just a side point from the last line of this article: shorthand (and "cursive") is specifically adapted to the fountain pen: the strokes are continuous and drawn (i.e. you never push the pen, only pull it). Even with a pencil or ball point/byro if you pull rather than push you end up with a much more readable handwriting. And a 10% improvement is YUGE when you have to write everything by hand and there are no copiers…

You do push the pen. Otherwise how would you write an O? like ()? Similarly there are upward strokes in h, b, d, k, m, n, r...

I would say that cursive ("joined up handwriting" as I know it) prefers downward strokes, and I don't think it ever begins a letter with an upward stroke.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#24

Post by jmcphers »

How often do you need to write down exactly what was said?

Studies[0] show that when students use laptops to take notes, they remember less than when they use a pen and paper. The suggested mechanism by the latter improves retention is that it forces you to understand and summarize the content due to limited output speed (thereby processing it more deeply); when you are able to produce output at near the speed of input you can simply transfer words with little processing. It seems likely that this would be a shortcoming of shorthand as well as laptops. If you're taking notes in a meeting for your own use, it seems as though "longhand" may actually be the better choice (excepting of course those situations in which it's important to know exactly which words were said).

[0] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/095679761452...

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#25

Post by taco_emoji »

> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”.

Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#26

Post by adiabatty »

panglott wrote: post #9

A couple years ago, I learned to read/write Quikscript, which was indirectly inspired by shorthand systems (George Bernard Shaw knew phoneticist Henry Sweet and Pitman shorthand, and endowed an effort at script reform in his will). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript It's harder than you might think to read English in a different script; we have learned through great effort how to read and write the conventional…

Are you up to as-fast-as-Orthodox (en-Latn) for either reading or writing yet?

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#27

Post by erikb »

falcolas wrote: post #5
tfm wrote: post #3

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385 Top comment starts "While Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much use for anything technical", which was a timely intervention to stop me running off and implementing a drop-in replacement for the Android keyboard!

This might interest you instead: http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm Relies entirely on phonetic representations, so it can represent just about anything.

I believe that this kind of stuff is a major step to "the vim of smartphones". One little step to make input incredibly fast.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#29

Post by mcguire »

taco_emoji wrote: post #25

> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

It does lead to collisions, context is usually enough to disambiguate, or there are many specialized abbreviations. I never played with it long enough to get the details, though.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#30

Post by [deleted] »

taco_emoji wrote: post #25

> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

[deleted]
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