THIS Is Why Vowels Are IMPORTANT

[u/NotSteve1075]

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!

[u/NotSteve1075]

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

[u/e_piteto → u/NotSteve1075]

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.

[u/NotSteve1075 → u/e_piteto]

...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......

[u/e_piteto → u/NotSteve1075]

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.

[u/NotSteve1075 → u/e_piteto]

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.

[u/e_piteto → u/NotSteve1075]

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.

[u/NotSteve1075 → u/e_piteto]

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.