Talk:Shorthand/Archives/2013

I came to this page from Peter Bales. How come there is no mention of him here? I hasten to add that I have no knowledge of the subject of shorthand. Jigsawpuzzleman 20:57, 14 March 2007 (UTC) Can I learn shorthand in 30 days? I am Intermediate passed student and want to learn short hand in short time so is it possible to learn short hand? If it is Possible then please help me. My E=Mail address is nhloverboy4862@yahoo.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.186.151.161 (talk) 15:41, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I have several Japanese websites with complete descriptions of the systems, but I cannot read Japanese very well. If someone could do this it would be much appreciated. http://sokki.okoshi-yasu.net/index.html http://www.geocities.com/steno/nyumon1.htm http://sokki.okoshi-yasu.net/sb-housiki.html http://www12.ocn.ne.jp/~sokkidou/t12/index.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.19.236.129 (talk) 18:32, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Is this shorthand or calligraphy? I asked because here the subject is treated as cursive style. When does it stop cursive calligraphy and becomes stenography? Any clear definitions? Gun Powder Ma 22:59, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

In imperial China, clerks used an abbreviated, highly cursive form of characters to record court proceedings and criminal confessions. These records were used to create more formal transcripts. One cornerstone of imperial court proceedings was that all confessions had to be acknowledged by the accused's signature, personal seal, or thumbprint, requiring fast writing. Versions of this technique survived in clerical professions into the 20th century C.E.

Calligraphy is writing a special way for artistic beauty, stenography is writing a special way for high speed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.98.58.121 (talk) 15:26, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

This cursive script looks more or less like Uighur script used by Mongols until today. It is really quick to write. (my login in Polish Wikipedia is flamenco108) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.219.142.84 (talk) 18:52, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

The Uighurs use several scripts but what are you thinking of is likely their Arabic script. Arabic doesn't have any relation to Gregg shorthand as far as I know but is pretty often mistaken for it despite being written in the opposite direction. I don't think Arabic has a tradition of shorthand that parallels modern shorthand. I don't even think shorthand sees much use in the Arabic world. I know of only one system devised for Arabic called Hammareas (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1743918&s=f2c24283cf12d3e00439cc07aa6f0b91&p=10217692#post10217692). One reason for this might be the fact that Arabic writing allows for all sorts of blending of consonants of letters--similar to what occurs in Gregg shorthand. People devise their own shortcuts in writing. It's still not as fast as the professional shorthands.

The situation with Chinese is similar to the one with Japanese; there are several modern shorthands inspired by the Western tradition that look like Gregg, and there are the traditional cursive ideograms, which can be nigh unrecognizable in their most highly simplified forms. This is the so-called 'grass script'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.19.236.129 (talk) 18:26, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

The most popular pen shorthand in the United States is Gregg Shorthand. However, its use has declined in recent years. Most court reporters use the Stenotype machine and offices bypass the entire need for shorthand by using either voice recorders or by typing memoranda personally. Shorthand is no longer taught in the overwhelming majority of schools. It is, however, a very handy skill, and it is perfectly learnable over the Internet. —Andrew

How fast is shorthand compared to "ordinary" cursive? See Talk:Touch typing. --DavidCary 05:22, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Having only a book on the history of stenography at hand, I don't have any numbers. A trained stenograph, however, is able to transcribe natural speech, which is impossible with Latin alphabet "ordinary" cursive. -- j. 'mach' wust | ‽ 08:12, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

But there's that wikipedia to look it up: The German article Stenographie says that 360 syllables per minute are expected from stenographers to be able to hold pace with natural speech (television news are said to have about 250 syllables per minute), and parlamentary stenographers are reported to achieve up to 450 syllables per minute. These numbers refer to the German language, of course, but since English and German are closely related and both have complex phonotactics, I expect correspondent numbers for English should not be too different.

The site of the Stenografenverein Berlin says that with normal Latin script you can achieve about 40 syllables per minute and with plain stenography (without additional abbreviations) about 120. -- j. 'mach' wust | ‽ 08:56, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I am a linguist with a reasonable knowledge of phonetics and none of stenography and I find this page hard to read. It would be nice to see a clearer demonstration of a sentence written in ordinary orthography and then one or two possible stenographic variants next to it, to compare - they way it is done on the stenotype page. Another thing: I can not make sense of this sentence under "commonly used English shorthand systems": "The system is phonetic as it is the word sounds that are written rather than the letters". Does this mean that it is closer to phonetic script than to orthography? "sound" and "letter" are too imprecise here, since a letter is, generally speaking, a representation of a sound. I don`t want to change it, since I may have misunderstood - can somebody help? Grape, 16 July 2006

In linguistic terms, it means that the shorthand records phonemes, rather than graphemes, which, in English, are two very different things! --67.249.199.167 (talk) 15:59, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

This is a good question. Gregg's books (I think there's one available somewhere online about this) talked about longhand being, at best, capable of writing down 30 words-per-minute (WPM) and Gregg being capable of 280 wpm. Well, what does that mean? Some words are easier to write than others. Gregg studied a large corpus of words and found that the average word length for English is 1.4 syllables. So for every 5 words there are, on average, 7 syllables. I believe the contentious claim for Pitman of a record max speed of 350 wpm may use an easier-than-typical text with a lot of short words, but I'm not very familiar with it. 280 wpm is something I have heard before when discussing contests with machine shorthand today, so it might well be a kind of upper limit in English (mental or spoken, I'm not sure -- see and listen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOBs25_g23s ). Other languages differ greatly. A decent clip in English might be 140-180 wpm, but the same speed of comprehensibility might be 320 wpm in say Japanese ( http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0wFQgRG8D28J:www.intersteno.it/materiale/Beijing2009/Conferences/KanekoEduRepo.ppt+waseda+shorthand&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi5g9mOKLjmpBYwrJBdnChhPYsyJGETPYORFlmLF8RG1vhQ-8SenUgCjn1Xn0iOabQ4iyN1gfT-nDQJ75sUJdzfL9kT1v-hF4aucYPwRBEYhStfh7XW_UAZNRIrkbj4dcBwmh9N&sig=AHIEtbQg7JA8L_WavE91bbxQO-ql4RTWlg -note the speed 320 wpm, which is considered proficient!) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.119.111.104 (talk) 20:41, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

This article needs to cite some sources to prove that shorthand is still in use, that is if it is still in use. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.34.239.79 (talk) 16:57, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

This sentence:

- 'Although Pitman's method was extremely popular at first (and is still commonly used, especially in the UK) its popularity has been superseded (especially in the United States) by a method developed by John Robert Gregg in 1888.'

Seems verifiably false to me. It basically says Gregg replaced Pitman, which is more like wishful thinking 'cos facts indicate that Gregg is all but dead and Pitman is still being taught all around the world (UK, Commonwealth, India, etc), and is still in print publication, and also is coming up to 200 years of use. Pitman also holds the current shorthand speed record (at 350wpm). I can't find any current formal Gregg trainings and the books stopped being published shortly after the system was 100 years old (was that over a decade ago?).

So overall, I think it would good if the article lent a little less towards Gregg and a little more towards Pitman as a system. It would be good if someone rewrote the article to reflect this, and not confuse readers into believing Gregg is more alive than it actually is. Even though Gregg might still be more popular in the US than any other system, Wikipedia is meant to be an International Encyclopedia isn't it? 58.179.171.12 06:30, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

When "internationalism" is brought into the discussion, notice how it always indicates sour grapes, a/k/a UK-centrism.JGC1010 (talk) 02:34, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Even though I prefer Pitman, myself, Gregg is far from dead: just look up "shorthand" generically. You'll get far more Gregg results than Pitman results, which, as I stated above, doesn't please me. I'm probably right in assuming you're a fellow Pitman enthusiast disgruntled by this. Also, remember that the US population's greater than that of the Commonwealth. --67.249.199.167 (talk) 15:58, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

The Pitman shortahnd page says it is the most popular in the UK, but this article says that Teeline is. Which is it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.185.117.174 (talk) 06:56, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Hello,

I am currently trying to have a diary entry written in shorthand translated to standard English for some research I'm doing concerning a wikipedia article. Is there anyone out there who might be able to help out with this matter? You can contact me on my talk page. Many thanks. Goatboy95 20:34, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Do you know the system? --67.249.199.167 (talk) 15:58, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Why does the article for "Stenographer" redirect to this one? This article doesn't mention the word "stenogapher" at all. Either the article "Stenographer" should explain that profession or this article should. --Lance E Sloan (talk) 12:57, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I have removed "handywrite" from the list of shorthand systems as it is an unpublished invention of Eric Lee, see his website: [1]. Including a link in the article fails WP:SPAM and WP:RS.—Ash (talk) 08:33, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I believe handywrite should be included for the following reasons:

1. The number of hits on the website (over 1,4 million) indicate that there is great interest in the system.

2. It is a fully working shorthand system that is used by people, even though it is not supported by any official organisation.

In short, the article should treat the topic of shorthand systems, not merely those systems that are endorsed officially. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.232.75.208 (talk) 10:34, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree. The inventor's web-site is a valid primary source for information on it, not for profit, and very informative. He is descibing his own system -- not making disputable claims about historical facts or something. IMO therefore it does not fail WP:RS and on the contrary is the *most* reliable source available on the subject -- on equal footing with books written by inventors of other "notable shorthand systems". Handywrite is well-suited to beginners, one of the only such systems with self-learning materials available via the internet, and a growing and important modern modification of Gregg. I feel it warrants a passing mention here, or its own article (which apparently existed and was also deleted). Doctorcolossus (talk) 13:08, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

See WP:PSTS for an explanation of why a primary source is insufficient. Ash (talk) 00:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

WP:PSTS says: "A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source."

Therefore, a primary source is entirely legitimate for the purpose of describing the Handywrite system. DanielC

I have removed Naked Science Shorthand as this is not a shorthand system that is either published, recognized or in use. This fails WP:SPAM, WP:RS, etc... - Naked Science Shorthand (Michael Curtis)—Ash (talk) 09:19, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

How can those be transcriptions of the Lord's Prayer when there are fewer characters in each one than words in the entire prayer? .froth. (talk) 01:47, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

(a) Depends how far into L.P. the transcriptions go; (b) a single mark might correspond to multiple spoken words. L.P. has been a favorite "demonstration vehicle" for new writing systems since at least 1668 (see John Wilkins, An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language).

At least Gregg and Pitman versions contain the whole prayer. (I don't know the others enough to be sure.) As said above, one outline may correspond to multiple words, e.g. in Pitman, the first outline means Our Father, the second which art and the third in heaven. Ryhanen (talk) 14:45, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Again, yes: in shorthand systems, a single stroke often corresponds to an entire word, and groups of strokes (which to an untrained eye may seem like "characters") are often entire phrases. Shorthand is not ridiculously concise, rather, traditional writing is ridiculously inefficient. --163.1.150.29 (talk) 00:14, 17 June 2011 (UTC)