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This is really fascinating. It reminds me of Chinese characters. Sure, you could use latin characters to represent a word or phrase. OR you could write a tiny
by umvi 6y ago
This is really fascinating.
It reminds me of Chinese characters. Sure, you could use latin characters to represent a word or phrase. OR you could write a tiny little pictogram that captures the same thing in a fraction of the time and space.
The only problem is that you now have to memorize thousands of unique symbols instead of just ~26. I imagine stenographers must go through a similar process and memorize the "shape" of thousands of words and phrases.
- sombremesa 6y agoMost Chinese characters are not pictographic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classifica...
- HeavenFox 6y agoAs someone who went through Chinese grade school where I had to copy each character many, many times, I have to say those pictograms are a PITA to write :) But I did get curious. I just tried to copy a few sentences from a UN document in both Simplified Chinese and English, and the time I spent are surprisingly similar. I imagine Traditional Chinese would be worse though.
- pessimizer 6y agoShorthand and stenotype have short codes for the most commonly used words, and individual practitioners often make up their own. edit: also, written Chinese has been traditionally thought of as the widespread adoption of a stenographic script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_script