Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type • Hacker News Board

Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

#71

Post by Asraelite » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 7:58 PM UTC

lifthrasiir wrote: post #9

sam_goody wrote: post #7

I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…

Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).

I remember seeing a study about the "information density" of different languages and of all the languages covered, English was #2 in terms of information per syllable while Vietnamese was #1.

A shorthand system is free to represent words phonemically instead of orthographically, and most languages have fewer phonemes per word than letters (or strokes/radicals/jamo if you're looking at Asian characters), so it would make sense to just always do that. So maybe Vietnamese would be the most compact if you used a phonemic system, but I actually think it's more complicated than that.

There are a limited number of different types of strokes you can include in a shorthand system before they become too similar to each other, so you are capped in how much information per second can be written regardless of the language. Different languages have different numbers of phonemes (Rotokas has just 11, while Taa has over 100). If you have very few phonemes, you can group clusters together into single strokes, whereas if you have many phonemes then you may need multiple strokes for a single phoneme.

So what you'd really want is the language with the greatest information per phoneme divided by the total number of phonemes, or another way of putting it, how well it fits into a .zip file :)

Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

#72

Post by dcminter » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 8:48 PM UTC

euroderf wrote: post #61

dcminter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish) Do you have a citation for that? I know some Swedish and often need to read documents in it and I don't get the impression that it's any more compact than English.

Any Estonian will tell you that Finnish is similar to Estonian except that it takes twice as long to say anything.

Finnish is not remotely similar to Swedish, and it's Swedish that I'm skeptical about.

Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

#73

Post by gyrovagueGeist » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:34 AM UTC

Night_Thastus wrote: post #67

wavemode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me a lot of the game TUNIC, where, similarly, a big part of the game is figuring out the language.

You're able to actually translate the language? I assumed it was not decipherable and you just have to figure it out from the parts that are translated, trial and error, and interpolating/extrapolating.

Yep, the language is consistent! Although you can usually always get by with the later.

Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

#74

Post by muraiki » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 12:02 PM UTC

sam_goody wrote: post #7

I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…

Try out Forker shorthand. You can learn it gradually, and the first steps are omitting vowels and simplifying some letters. You then progress to various abbreviations. Ultimately, it's based on the English cursive so there's nothing too exotic to learn in terms of orthography, although I guess if you are younger there is a chance you never learned a cursive style! I'm a novice but feel like it doesn't hurt readability that much, and it's quick to learn.

Quick intro: https://imgur.com/a/zYyON

Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

#75

Post by gxonatano » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

heads wrote: post #2

Looking at images of shorthand makes me remember how much I just enjoyed playing the 2023 game Chants of Sennaar : https://www.rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar/ The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the…

A similar game is The Expression Amrilato, a love story where you gradually learn the language Esperanto. After beating the game, you've learned a real language, and can now speak with people from around the world. You also learn, however, an idiosyncratic writing system which is only useful within the game.