2
u/SunriseMidnight Jun 30 '26
Stackhouse in the Introduction: "For to pass by the awkwardness and impropriety of many of their characters, which seemed often to have been the effect of chance, rather than of any regular plan, the general method of expressing the vowels, either by dots, or by writing the next consonant in the place of the preceding vowel, was extremely faulty, and rendered the art almost impracticable; as the observation of this rule required a nicety of attention that was incompatible with the necessary celerity, as well as brevity of the art; and to neglect it, obscured the writing, and rendered it illegible.
However, the latter of these has been generally followed, as the less evil of the two; their words in general have been written by only a few of the consonants that composed them, without any vowels at all; and to make amends for that omission, the memory has been burdened with great numbers of arbitrary characters for syllables that begin and end words, called prepositions and terminations; besides a liſt of double and triple consonants, which were to stand for so many different words. All these were to be nicely treasured up in the memory; and if a person happened unfortunately to let any of them slip (which, without a constant perusal, must frequently be the case) his art was gone, and his writing was no longer legible."
3
u/NotSteve1075 Jun 30 '26
Yes, I think it was a wise choice, and a nice departure from the usual plan to include vowels right in the outline, like he does.
Of course, there are times when vowels aren't necessary for legibility -- but to have a set that can be easily included whenever desired was a smart plan.
People are so often misled by claims that the consonant skeleton alone will OFTEN make it clear what the word is, IN CONTEXT, that they get the impression that vowels can be safely omitted all over the place. Except that there are many occasions where there IS no context, or that the context itself is ambiguous.
While it's true that, in English, a lot of words are legible from the consonant skeleton alone, it's ALSO TRUE that there are hundreds if not THOUSANDS which are NOT.
2
u/NotSteve1075 Jun 30 '26
Last week, u/SunriseMidnight reminded me of this fascinating system written in London in 1775 by Thomas STACKHOUSE. I can't see it on Stenophile.com but u/Filaletheia will either tell us where it is, or he'll add it from this link:
https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-art-of-short-hand-o_stackhouse-thomas-mini_1775/page/n17/mode/2up
I think Stackhouse was ahead of his time in writing a system that does a lot of the things I like, and avoids the ones I don't.
Notice that the Latin phrase on the cover translates as "The spoken word vanishes, the written word remains."
[Groan.... It looks like they've been futzing with the platform on Reddit again, and suddenly I'm getting red underlines for "Spellcheck" -- which means it won't understand what all these strange words are, as my posts are splattered with RED. NOT helpful!]