Introduction
This document describes a new shorthand designed for rapidly writing English by hand. In particular, it seeks a balance of attributes to encourage rapid but comfortable writing, and writing that doesn’t demand overmuch precision and fine motor control. To that end, it
- Is phonetic: it encodes sounds, not written letters;
- Is cursive: it tries to employ the most primitive elements of ordinary cursive handwriting;
- Is regular: it fills the basic space of those primitives in a way that’s as systematic as practical, in an effort to minimize the number of distinct forms and to make it easy to learn and remember;
- Uses both light and shaded strokes of the pen or pencil;
- Seeks not to encode too much difference in very fine distinctions: ****th…
Introduction
This document describes a new shorthand designed for rapidly writing English by hand. In particular, it seeks a balance of attributes to encourage rapid but comfortable writing, and writing that doesn’t demand overmuch precision and fine motor control. To that end, it
- Is phonetic: it encodes sounds, not written letters;
- Is cursive: it tries to employ the most primitive elements of ordinary cursive handwriting;
- Is regular: it fills the basic space of those primitives in a way that’s as systematic as practical, in an effort to minimize the number of distinct forms and to make it easy to learn and remember;
- Uses both light and shaded strokes of the pen or pencil;
- Seeks not to encode too much difference in very fine distinctions: ****there should be a relatively forgiving range of realizations of the forms.
Consonants
Core
The core of this shorthand is a phonetic system based around a systematic treatment of the downstroke: ****if we have three ways of entering a stroke—by making a sharp angle, by making a curving angle, and by making a loop—and then those same three ways of exiting a stroke, we are left with 9 ways to write that stroke.
We can then define 4 heights: short (or x-height), tall (or cap-height), low (the height of a lowercase letter with a descender), and full (a stroke that goes from the top of a capital letter to the bottom of a descender).
4 heights times 9 strokes produces 36 core signs.
Finally, we can write each downstroke either light or shaded.
We will default to light strokes and use shaded strokes to indicate voicing: the stroke for p, when written shaded, is read as b, and so on.
It’s important to note, however, that a downstroke isn’t the same as a straight line; it will often be more comfortable to write certain strokes as loops.
The short signs form the core consonant inventory, and the jumping-off point for the rest of the system.
<aside> 💡 The core signs are arranged roughly systematically, where the entering angle corresponds to a particular area of the table, as laid out in spatially by sound. Here the signs are colored by which of the three entering styles they have.
| | Bilabial | Labiodental | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | | | –––– | ———– | —— | –––– | —–– | —– | —–– | | Stops | p | | | t | | k | | | Fricatives | | f | θ | s | ʃ | | h | | Affricates | | | | | tʃ | | | | </aside> | | | | | | | |
By design, our definition of round and loop angles leaves a fairly wide scope for individual realizations.