2.9 KiB
id, aliases, tags, title
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Shorthand |
Shorthand
Shorthand is a form of handwriting using alternate glyphs designed to facilitate faster transcription.
It is known by many other names, and may be more accurately called stenography, but stenography is more widely understood as the method practiced by modern court stenographers, typing using a special chording keyboard.
Gregg Notehand
Gregg Notehand is a simplified form of Gregg Shorthand. It is described in the namesake Leslie_1968_Gregg-Notehand
Critiques
The lessons use sounds-like-(letter)-in-(word) type phoneme definitions, and generally suffer from a facile understanding of phonology. Totally unacceptable for a proposed alternative alphabet, but then the text does not understand that's what it's proposing.
Leslie_1968_Gregg-Notehand#2-8. Notehand principles Silent letters omitted. In the English language many words contain letters that are not pronounced. In Notehand these silent letters are omitted, and only those sounds in a word are written that are actually pronounced. For example, in the word say, the y would not be written because it is not pronounced; say would be written s-a. The word face would be written f-a-s; the final e would be omitted because it is not pronounced, and the c would be represented by the s stroke because it is pronounced s.
What letters in the following words would not be written in Notehand because they are not pronounced?
- day
- eat
- main
- mean
- save
- steam
Leslie_1968_Gregg-Notehand#2-8. Notehand principles Gregg Notehand is easy to learn---easier, actually, than longhand. Why? In longhand, there are many different ways of writing a given letter; in Gregg Notehand, there is only one way.
This is a baffling first paragraph. Without further clarification, the text seems to be implying that students learning longhand are expected to learn to read and write many forms of the same letter, where reality is the opposite.
In fact, it is plain to see from the lessons in the text that Gregg Notehand had far more individual character variation than is accepted of the English alphabet.
The text does not specify winding direction for circular forms (e.g. "a" and "e"), nor is the illustrator consistent between words. For many words, neither option is more intuitive, and the choice radically changes its form.
More damningly, in Lesson 26 we learn the "s" stroke is allowed to be written backwards.
It's a very strange choice, claiming that a shorthand is less ambiguous than the writing system it replaces. I'm sure its possible, but English doesn't have enough frills to cut off. Shorthand trades certainty for speed, that's the whole point.
Some words, especially those more than one syllable, I believe are illustrated incorrectly based on preceding text and examples. "Navy" is particularly egregious.