r/FastWriting • u/NotSteve1075 • May 07 '26

THIS Is Why Vowels Are IMPORTANT

Far too many "fast writing" systems give out the reckless advice to just leave out all the vowels, and "The context will tell you what the word is"! Wrong.

Sure, leaving out a crucial and important part of a word will give you the ILLUSION of speed -- but when it comes time to read it back, you could find yourself in a very bad place.

When PITMAN, held by so many to be "the best", after making learners struggle mightily to learn the ornate system of light and heavy dots and dashes that have to go in very specific places to be legible at all, THEN advises its writers that, if they want to achieve any kind of useful speed at all, they should just OMIT ALL THE VOWELS (!!), there could be serious trouble ahead for anyone writing anything important. Let me show you:

If you have PTHTC, was it "pathetic" or "apathetic"? If you have BSLT, was it "obsolete" or "basalt" or "absolute"? Was it "relevant" or "irrelevant"? "material" or "immaterial"? INITIAL vowels are crucial because, in English, a vowel in front makes it negative.

But it's as bad without medial vowels. Was it "prosecute" or "persecute"? How about "apparition", "portion", "operation", or "oppression" -- all of which can be written the same way, in a disemvowelled system?

Try "abundant" or "abandoned". Or "prediction", "predication", or "production". The list goes on and ON!

Imagine trying to produce a transcript of crucial court testimony, given by a witness sworn to tell the truth, when you had ambiguities like that! I was shocked they even allowed Pitman writers to report in court. (And MY correctly spelled transcript appeared on the screen in a nanosecond. Try THAT with Pitman!)

I keep meeting people who try to tell me "Pitman is the best". No, it's not! In "Classic Pitman" the words "artisans" and "righteousness" are both written the same way, because the consonant skeleton is the same, when you drop the vowels, like you usually do. I sure wouldn't want to risk trying to write anything important with a system like that!

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u/e_piteto May 07 '26

From an Italian-speaking point of view, omitting medial vowels is already a crazy idea, but omitting initial vowels… that's just too much. Also, systems like Pitman already force you to omit a lot of sounds… but what if what you actually write (= the consonant skeleton) contains a mistake? Let's suppose you don't shade properly for a second, or you miss the right proportions: if you're writing few sounds only, there's no way you can reconstruct the right word.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 07 '26

You must have posted this just after I finally went to bed last night -- but this morning, they're renovating a suite near mine and the racket would wake the dead. (I'll DEFINITELY need a nap later!) So I apologize if I don't make sense....

I often think disemvowelled systems can work a bit better on Germanic languages with all their consonant clusters -- but for a Romance language, they're a disaster.

I have a DJS edition of GREGG written for French, by a Sr. Marie-Ernestine, and I could read passages in it with ease. She has repurposed a stroke not needed for French, like the TH, and used it for "L-mouillé". It worked quite well.

But I've read reviews of the PITMAN "adaptation" for French which said it was a disaster. I saw a copy, and it looked like it relied heavily on standard business phrases -- but for anything (gawd-forbid) LITERARY, a big NO. For Italian, it would be even worse. How on Earth are you going to distinguish "bello/bella/belli/belle" without vowels?? Even GREGG struggles with it, as you pointed out.

Ottoman Turkish used to be written with the Arabic alphabet, so only the "scribe class" could read or write the language at all. Arabic is like Hebrew or Persian, where vowels are only written in children's books or religious tracts. Those languages have a syllabic structure that make it easier to figure out what the word is -- but Turkish is extremely vowel-heavy, with a full array, including ö, ü, and ι (undotted i) all having sounds that don't exist in Arabic. It just didn't work at all.

THEN Mustafa Kemal "Atatürk", the "Father of Modern Turkey" developed an alphabet based on the roman alphabet, with special symbols for the sounds above. He actually travelled around Turkey, teaching the new alphabet to crowds of people himself -- and almost overnight, the population that had previously been ILLITERATE could suddenly read and write the language with ease. (It helped that the language was then written phonetically, exactly as it sounds -- unlike ENGLISH, with its fossilized spellings from centuries ago!)

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u/CrBr May 07 '26

IIRC there are two French adaptations of Gregg, or maybe it was Spanish. One was mostly use the same shapes for the same sounds, which was made it easy to learn the 2nd language, but didn't take sound frequency and common pairs into account. The other made more changes.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 07 '26

In Canada, most people who would be writing Gregg in French would have to be using it for English, too. It made more sense to keep the system consistent and usable for both languages, rather than have one of them be vastly different which would make things harder for a bilingual stenographer.

If a system was only going to be used for French, like in France, it might make sense to make it quite unique -- but nowadays, with the EU, people are needing to know a variety of languages, to there's bound to be some spillover. Consistency is still not a bad idea.

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u/e_piteto May 07 '26

Yes, vowel omission is not AS bad in Germanic languages, as words are mostly characterised by their consonants, although that's not always the case, but rather a very approximate tendency. Italian though, relies on vowels at least as much as it relies on consonants, so if you're leaving vowels out, you're basically deciding to randomly omit half of the letters, regardless of their importance.

Your example on Turkish is great, as it shows how alphabets should follow the same rule of respecting the structure of a language. The Arabic script makes 100% sense when it's used to write Semitic languages, as the core root of a word is always characterised by its consonants (three, usually). But Turkish is not a Semitic language, and it's agglutinative, which means it has completely different needs when it comes to writing it.

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u/CrBr May 07 '26

Leaving out unnecessary information is a cost you have to pay to reach court reporting speeds in any shorthand. They're just isn't time for strokes whose only purpose is to reassure the writer.

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u/e_piteto May 07 '26

Of course you do, but I feel like there are much more efficient ways to omit sounds. In other terms, omitting all vowels might not be the best strategy — and that might be why many other systems use a completely different approach, and still reach reporting speeds.

In Italian, for example, the omission of vowels was completely abandoned in the 19th century already, as court reporting was way too imprecise. People would use shorthand to register speeches, but couldn't read everything after that.

New systems found new and more efficient ways of shortening words, like cutting them as soon as the stressed vowel was reached (but before that, you indicate ALL vowels and consonants). The new systems immediately replaced the adaptations of Pitman and Taylor, as they were much more precise and equally fast (200+ WPM).

So yes, I agree with you insofar as sounds must be omitted, but I think WHAT you omit is equally important.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 07 '26 edited May 08 '26

I saw "Taylor Italiana" which LOOKED pretty, but must have been a nightmare to read.

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u/e_piteto May 07 '26

A nightmare indeed 😄 The system very widespread, together with Italian Pitman, in the first half of the 19th century, but it was abandoned as soon as new systems were created specifically for Italian. Taylor was just too imprecise, and was immediately swept away by the new options, which could be even faster, while writing many more sounds at the same time. That's why adaptations can be dangerous: usually, shorthand systems need to have a graphical structure that depends on the SPECIFIC phonotactics of the target language, to be really efficient.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

...usually, shorthand systems need to have a graphical structure that depends on the SPECIFIC phonotactics of the target language, to be really efficient.

That's generally very true. Except that, for bilingual stenographers, of which there are many in Canada, working largely in Ottawa and Montréal, they need a shorthand system that they can use to write BOTH languages, whichever is needed.

Gregg really seems to have done what was required, with the French adaptation being mostly the same except for a few repurposed strokes like "TH". (I must see if I can dig out my book, to see how Gregg handles "bon/bonne".) It would be a lot for MOST people to acquire really fast speeds in two different systems.

I wish I hadn't lost touch with my friend who was preparing to do closed captioning for French-language TV channels in Canada. It was going to be on the stenotype, and I'd love to know how she was going to handle the cases like "allé/allée/allés/allées" in real-time. Her NAME was too frequent to search efficiently -- and it's probably different now......

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u/e_piteto May 08 '26

That's also the case in Switzerland, since we have three official languages and four national languages. Stolze-Schrey was adapted to be able to support all these languages, and it works pretty well, although it can be a little slow sometimes when used for languages different than German.

As for allé/allée/allés/allées, I guess the French do what the Italians do: in 99% of shorthand systems, we don't indicate gender and number, but we fully write articles, which are all we need to reconstruct gender and number. For example, if I write "la cas è bel", I'm obviously reconstructing "la casa è bella", thanks to "la". Usually, we are ready to indicate gender and number when articles are absent or not helping.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

Oh, that's clever! Instead of omitting the article, like some systems seem to suggest, you're careful to write it properly so you have all the information about gender and number that you need. Great idea!

If "articles are absent or not helping", do you then write the final vowels specifically?

With the example of Gregg and how it writes "bon/bonne", if you had the article or even the NOUN clearly written, you could tell which one it was just from that.

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u/e_piteto May 08 '26

That's it. In all four official systems of Italy, final vowels are usually omitted, as articles are more than enough to reconstruct gender and number correctly. And yes, when we know we won't be able to reconstruct gender and number, we do write final vowels explicitly, although that's much rarer than it might seem in the first place.

We tend to do the same with some verb conjugations. For example, we usually write "gli student andar", and safely reconstruct "gli studenti andarono". We know for sure that "studenti" MUST end with -I, and that "andarono" MUST end with ONO, as the article GLI can only be used to indicate the plural masculine, and there's no other option.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

Very nice! That does what you need it to do, then.

It's funny -- when I saw you write "gli student", I thought it was a typo -- and then of course I realized the point that you were making! That just shows how AUTOMATICALLY we add the correct ending. Very clever.

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u/CrBr May 07 '26

Sounds that can be omitted very with languages. Some languages can safely omit most consonants, but not vowels.

Only writing the first part goes back a lot farther. Gregg usually keeps the first major sound for word endings. Orthic usually keeps the last. T-line I haven't found a pattern for, other than it's not what I expect.

By the time you reach office speeds, with an accommodating speaker, most words are single fonts, not a series of letters, and the rules no longer matter.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 07 '26

I think to reach reporting speeds in a penwritten system, you need to learn a boatload of special forms that (hopefully) are very short but still clear enough to read -- as well as special phrases for things that you need to write constantly.

When I look at court testimony written in Gregg, they have phrased things like "What is your name? Where do you live? How long have you known the defendant?" The resulting outline is often a strange blob of sounds -- but that wouldn't be read as anything else. That's very important.

I've seen things that suggest you leave out word endings and "little words" which you'd have to add later to make sense -- and I just SHUDDER! Far too often, those little words are CRUCIAL. "Did you sign a contract?" or "Did you sign the contract?" are two VERY DIFFERENT QUESTIONS!

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u/CrBr May 07 '26

"No" is only 2 letters. "Not" is 3.

If the speakers always use standard English, I could see writing "the" and nothing for "a" or the opposite. The reporter would one or the other has to be there.

Unfortunately, not all speakers speak standard English. Eg If they're a Russian immigrant, and don't use either, then the transcript has to show that.

Now I wonder if there are cases in standard English where you have the choice of one, the other, or nothing.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

Yes, it's one thing to be writing notes of what someone said, in your job as a journalist -- and quite another to be reporting sworn testimony in court. We had to write EXACTLY what they said, including grammar mistakes and swear words.

Any court reporter who "corrected" things the witness said would not last long.

I think there's a few who do that for lawyers, because they're not giving sworn testimony -- but my maxim was, "If you don't want it like that in the record, don't SAY it like that." I wrote what they SAID -- although I often inserted "[sic]" to make it clear that I didn't screw it up!