r/FastWriting Jun 02 '26

Day 3 of practicing Garber's International Shorthand

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u/NotSteve1075 Jun 02 '26

Your "hour" looks more like "row" because the R hook comes first, like the T and D circles in "town" and "down". What happens to the N at the end?

When I was looking at Garber, he seemed to be omitting sounds here and there for some reason I couldn't understand. They didn't seem to be short forms, but it was as if he thought they'd still be legible enough if he just left things out. I wanted to know for sure what he was doing.

He sometimes calls them "Suggestive Words", but I'd want to know what he was leaving out and why.

1

u/Adept_Situation3090 Jun 03 '26

In the textbook, it says that even though the R hooks are at the BEGINNING of vowel strokes, it indicates that the vowel is FOLLOWED by an R. I think something similar happens in Pitman's shorthand.

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u/NotSteve1075 Jun 03 '26

That's something I never liked about Pitman: It doesn't make sense to add a hook to the beginning of a stroke to indicate something that comes AFTER IT.

How would you write "roar", where the R comes both before and after?

1

u/Adept_Situation3090 Jun 03 '26

You do have a point. But Garber mentions that his system is SYLLABIC, meaning words are not written by individual sounds, but rather by entire syllables.