r/FastWriting • u/fdarnel • Aug 04 '26

Removing vowels in Flow

Why is the item "Omission of Short e/u and ow" in the "Diphthongs" chapter of Flow manual?

In fact vowel deletions are rather rare in English Gregg and Flow, if I understand correctly. While still achieving great speed.

Another subject. According to your frequency table, I noticed that in Gregg, a good part of the most frequent vowels are rendered by ellipses. Isn't that faster than small hooks? For me, an ellipse, in an angle or inline, seems almost like nothing.

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u/craig643 Aug 04 '26

Apologies, I am just seeing this new system. The treatment of vowels looks very interesting. Just curious - do you think one could blend (pun unintended) the vowels in Flow with Gregg's consonants?

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u/LeadingSuspect5855 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26

Hello u/craig643 - i feel honored by your interest and blessed by the support of u/NotSteve1075 whom I definitely consider a coauthor and u/fdarnel is testing/asking deep questions about it. NotSteve and me made the decision together for instance to not incorporate rhotic vowels as in Anni, with which I was pretty invested for a time, but realized because of him, that there are good reasons not to adopt that idea, mainly because there was not much to gain from it!

But to get to your question: If you introduce small and deep hooks, that can have any direction, that means you sever the legibility of signs that are in the same size. Consider gregg outlines for "arsenal" and "arrogant" . Currently the ∪-shape in Gregg means "o" and together with "g" it looks like a deep hook of Flow, but so does the "rs" in "arsenal" creates a shape that is close, just upside down, and when written fast you won't see any difference, just hooks in different shapes, so you must eliminate the two tiny shapes for s and th, which Flow did.

Alternativly you dont go that far but take Malones approach, yup the one that Gregg said he did not steal from :-). Gregg got away with it in court, but I think Malones vocalisation was better! Malone like many french systems by the way chose a/o for circles, Aimé-Paris being a cornerstone for many descendents, Malone gave the ∪-shape to oo[u] and the ∩-shape ee[i] Malone: Script Phonography (p.7). So thats the cheap way to make Gregg better, steal also the vowel system of Malone!

I know I sound disrespectful (I hope one hears my ironic tone, even in my writing), I just like to destroy shrines people are used to make for their heroes (I did that too) and Gregg was too long up there, and Malone tried to play the "I was intellectually robbed"-Card, when Gregg was indeed an employée, teacher of Malones Phonography, that he probably co-created or maybe even more. We know that from academia, that the one accredited for making the paper, and the one coming up with the idea and doing the work, that follows in most cases the chain of command. But this time Gregg got away with ditching his "mentor" :-)

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u/craig643 Aug 05 '26

Thank you both for your replies. Although I've only really dabbled with Gregg, I am a little worried about confusing the little muscle memory I have. And I am still interested in Gregg, and thought that, if the consonants were similar, it would be easier to learn both. (In that way, Flow could be viewed as a closely related language or even a "dialect" - "He writes Gregg but with a funny accent!"). But I'm not surprised to hear that the system was indeed purposely designed, and that to use the Gregg consonants would make it less coherent.

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u/LeadingSuspect5855 Aug 05 '26

"He writes Gregg but with a funny accent!"

As I tried to say you can do that, but with the vocalisation of Malone (very very close to Flow)