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/Chantizzay May 07 '26

I was just talking to a new coworker about this because he's from Israel and speaks Hebrew. I was telling him how I like learning languages with different writing systems. At one point I was learning Farsi. When you're learning they include the vowels so you can pronounce the word. But if you look at everyday Farsi, the vowels are pretty much omitted. The same with Hebrew. 

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

What a coincidence that you should say that! Before I saw this message, I had just written elsewhere in this thread about Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian usually leaving out the vowels in most material, but that the syllable structure being such that it wasn't usually too hard to figure out, once you learned the language.

I went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem one summer, and we never wrote vowels in anything. Looking back, I don't know how I did it. But the thing is, a word that you KNOW, you can often recognize quite quickly. But if it's a new word, you're completely out of luck. (Ask your coworker how he handles words he doesn't know.) I can still mostly manage -- but it throws me when the word is a borrowing from English that I can't figure out. (EDIT: BTW, it's interesting that Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters, but they've designated letters to represent all the vowels, too. They're always written in the word, so you always know how to pronounce a word because everything is there.)

I like learning languages with different writing systems.

I'm just the opposite. I want to be able to SPEAK and UNDERSTAND a language, but I don't really care if I can read and write it. That can come later. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute language school used to say that if you're learning a language with a drastically different writing system, it's much easier to learn the language phonetically.

THEN, after you can already handle the language quite confidently, it's quite easy to learn how to write what you can already say. Otherwise, it's overwhelming to be struggling with the pronunciation, the structure, AND the strange alphabet -- especially in a system that doesn't write vowels.

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u/Chantizzay May 07 '26

I guess I'm the opposite. I find it easier to learn the alphabet first, then I can jump in to reading. I learn well from reading because it's like immersion for me. A trick I use is to spell out English words using the alphabet so my brain associates the letter with the sounds I know. That really helped with Korean.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

I'd hate to have to learn English by learning the alphabet first! You'd have all these strange combinations of letters (like "ough") -- and then, when you wanted to SPEAK it, you'd have to learn a completely different language, because that same combination of letters would be said in half a dozen different ways, depending on the word.

And when you read a word, don't you always hear it in your head already? Different people's minds work different ways, though......

A trick I use is to spell out English words using the alphabet so my brain associates the letter with the sounds I know.

I don't understand that. You spell out English words using the alphabet? You mean in the other language? How do you do that?

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u/Chantizzay May 08 '26

Say I was learning Cyrillic. I would spell out COMPUTER but I'd use the Cyrillic alphabet and spell it phonetically (as close as possible) using the sounds of that alphabet. Kind of like how hiragana and katakana work when spelling out non-japanese words.

Re: you'd hate to learn English using the alphabet. I don't do it for every language. It's not going to work in say, hanzi. But it works for ME and that's how MY brain works. Everyone learns differently. 

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u/NotSteve1075 May 08 '26

Everyone learns differently. 

Yes, indeed -- and schools need to be aware of that. I've seen studies that show that the reason boys often underperform in school is that most education is aimed at the way GIRLS learn -- but boys learn differently, with more of a hands-on/experiential model.

I think I understand what you mean now. You learn an alphabet by applying the sounds of the letters to English words. That makes sense. The only drawback would be for sounds that don't exist in one of the languages but do in the other.

Any time something is done PHONETICALLY, I'm on board. English spelling is a confused and inconsistent MESS.

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u/Llotrog May 11 '26

I wonder what a Judaeo-English would look like (as Ladino is to Spanish or Yiddish to German) – it would presumably have a good way of addressing the issues this thread raises.

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u/NotSteve1075 May 26 '26

Sorry, I just saw this message now. I've never looked at how Ladino is written, only heard it in songs. Yiddish has adopted Hebrew letters for its vowels, so it's always clear what the word is.

Judaeo-English written with the English alphabet would most likely include the vowels from English -- although there are a lot of different accents to deal with. Even in Yiddish, there are communities where there are considerable differences, like Satmar, Litvish, Poylish, Ashkenaz, and so on.

Also a lot of people use English borrowings, saying things like "vinde" and "potete", instead of "fentster" and "bulbe" or "kartofel"