I imagine it's possible someone would have eventually cracked it that way. From my experience learning a few shorthand techniques though, I can see how it would

I imagine it's possible someone would have eventually cracked it that way. From my experience learning a few shorthand techniques though, I can see how it would be difficult regardless. - many shorthands, especially phonetic ones, are abjads and lack the full metadata around vowels which make context extremely important to understanding meaning. - It's typical for a shorthand writer to make have unique markings for words they write frequently which may not match the phonetic pattern (if that's even being used) which are hard to guess - shorthand is hard to parse in general because the strokes typically value flow over precision, so secondary and third strokes are usually are formed in relation to the prior ones rather than any absolute positioning scheme But really, I just don't think there are many people actually working on trying to solve old short hands with modern statistics + ML techniques. Maybe I'm wrong though and someone gave it a good go but something here really was particularly hard to solve.