32 ms·
Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
- heads 3y agoLooking at images of shorthand makes me remember how much I just enjoyed playing the 2023 game Chants of Sennaar: https://www.rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar/ https://www.rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar/ The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun! Pittman shorthand: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABIHo/z2B5waJnM4AUHAjIpgCvOH2w0_uzBZAPwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Pitman%2BShorthand%2B-%2BLearning%2BPitman%2BShorthand-780935.png https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABI... Sennaarian writing: https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/games/chants-of-sennaar/images/18042023_98f60811cd414ed4a34de9ed5e3c655a.png https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/g...
- tnel 3y agoI prefer Gregg shorthand to Pittman because Gregg doesn't require variable stroke width and thus it's easier to write with a ballpoint pen.
- jodrellblank 3y ago(Pitman doesn't require variable stroke width, but variable stroke darkness/pressure - important nitpick because you can vary pressure with a normal pencil, but need a fountain pen or uncommon carpenter's pencil for varying stroke width).
- Wistar 3y agoMost ballpoints aren’t very good at delivering variable stroke darkness, either.
- wavemode 3y agoThat reminds me a lot of the game TUNIC, where, similarly, a big part of the game is figuring out the language.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoYou're able to actually translate the language? I assumed it was not decipherable and you just have to figure it out from the parts that are translated, trial and error, and interpolating/extrapolating.
- gyrovagueGeist 3y agoYep, the language is consistent! Although you can usually always get by with the later.
- gxonatano 3y agoA similar game is The Expression Amrilato, a love story where you gradually learn the language Esperanto. After beating the game, you've learned a real language, and can now speak with people from around the world. You also learn, however, an idiosyncratic writing system which is only useful within the game.
- kfarr 3y agoThis looks like a super hard version of the old school palm pilot shorthand.
- riffraff 3y agoMy mom went to a professional school for "company secretary" or something like that in the 70s and learned shorthand notation (and typing). I recall trying to learn from her books as a kid, it's not that hard. But she never seemed to actually use it later in her life (she still touch typed tho!). I wonder how useful shorthand is in these days when cheap recording devices are available in everyone's pocket. Maybe people who keep hand written diaries still use it?
- kstrauser 3y agoI keep a handwritten journal. I definitely do not use it.
- flandish 3y agoFunny but I do use it. My license signature is even in Gregg
- Steve44 3y agoMy mother-in-law was taught shorthand in the 1960s UK and still uses it regularly. We work together in a family business and any meetings we go to she'll jot notes down using it, the amazing thing [to me anyway] is that she can read it afterwards! It's a fantastic skill but so rare to see these days, it was mainly used by secretaries dictating notes to then type up I think. Now we are our own typists, it's largely relegated to history.
- sam_goody 3y agoI learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long. Bt, nowadays we need the opposite - a "shorthand" which, once you have learned, can be consumed quickly. I know from experience that it takes much less time to read Hebrew than to read the same text in English (even though my mother tongue is English), since the vowels are assumed and abbreviations are extremely common - the actual text is shorter and quicker to read. I can scan a long article quickly, but I wish there was a way to convert that to a writing system that was quicker to intake.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoUse other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
- shiroiuma 3y agoJapanese isn't compact. It generally uses fewer characters to convey the same meaning (unless the sentence is full of loanwords from English), however the problem is that the characters are usually written significantly larger than Latin characters, simply because they're so much more complex, so the amount of actual space on the page comes out roughly the same.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoHan characters are of course much larger than Latin characters, but the resulting space usage is more nuanced AFAIK. My data about the relative compactness of languages mostly comes from localization researches [1], and I believe CJK is generally more compact even when such differences are accounted for (but the actual expansion ratio can greatly vary). [1] Search for "text expansion translation" to get the general idea. I've mainly referred to the guideline from https://eriksen.com/language/text-expansion/ https://eriksen.com/language/text-expansion/ but many other guidelines agree. See https://www.w3.org/International/articles/article-text-size.en.html https://www.w3.org/International/articles/article-text-size.... about the general phenomenon.
- csa 3y agoI can’t even read my own cursive, so I can’t imagine how illegible my shorthand cursive would be. Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive? One can always hope…
- bathyspheric 3y agoI have found my cursive hand getting much better after spending some time with Gregg shorthand. The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.
- karmajunkie 3y agooh interesting, i had the opposite experience. my handwriting has always been barely legible and after i started experimenting with gregg it became so much worse!
- supersrdjan 3y agoI use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am getting better though.
- supersrdjan 3y agoOh yes, and it takes up way less space, so it is very economical, you can cram a lot of notes into a single page of a pocket-sized notebook
- Omin 3y agoI have some experience with a German shorthand style (DEK) and it is more important to write clearly. Shorthand removes most of the redundant information that is present in regular alphabets and words. With regular writing, a small error somewhere can be error corrected using the surrounding context. When I wasn't being careful, I could often read the text shortly after I wrote it, but after a few hours or days it became illegible to me. There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly). Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that. One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.
- TurboHaskal 3y agoAh, finally I will be able to understand my doctor's handwriting.
- maksimur 3y agoThey kind of resemble Arabic writing. Especially the words "adder", "fed", "hit" or "city".
- LAC-Tech 3y agoIsn't there a theory that writing medium effects scripts? IE the angles of Runes lended themselves well to carving. And something about left-to-right scripts was to avoid smudging. So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel. Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.
- silversmith 3y agoThere might be some stretches of imagination there, but the base is solid - cuneiform writing was definitely formed by the medium (pressing a cut reed into clay).
- bradrn 3y agoI don’t think it’s a myth at all. Arabic was written with a reed pen or ‘qalam’ [0], and that can certainly be seen in the modern script (e.g. [1], to take the first random example I found). But its ‘joined-up’ nature seems to have been a regional style — it’s also found in scripts like Syriac, Avestan, Mandaic, Manichaean, and even the delightfully bizarre Bactrian Greek (there’s some nice samples in [2]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalam [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mppajQ7TLGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mppajQ7TLGs [2] https://greekasia.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bactrian-language-and-its-greek.html https://greekasia.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bactrian-language...
- Roark66 3y agoThe best shorthand for onscreen writing is the way SwiftKey keyboard supports. Basically you swipe your finger in one continuous path between letters stopping between words. It let's one write in comparable speed to typing on a smartphone onscreen keyboard.
- Semaphor 3y agoWhile it’s nice (nowadays, many keyboards actually support "swiping), it still gets so much wrong, and accuracy plummets for bilingual writing (For myself, I decided that the annoyance of getting nothing right because I’m in the wrong language is better than introducing more subtle errors). For those reasons, I still wish there were phones with full physical keyboards.
- donogh 3y agoYou might like Clicks in that case: https://www.clicks.tech/ https://www.clicks.tech/
- Semaphor 3y agoEven if I were to ever use an iPhone (which I won’t), it bulks up phones even more. I already find modern phones far too large. I was thinking more of something like the Nokia E71 [0] or for a bigger screen, a slide out like the HTC Desire Z / T-Mobile G2 [1], both phones I had before, and loved at the time. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z
- aidenn0 3y agoYou might like the Unihertz Titan series. The Titan Pocket is very similar to the E71: https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan-pocket https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan-pocket
- 3y ago
- 1f60c 3y agoSee also: Shavian alphabet https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/ https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/ Which has similar goals
- marttt 3y agoAnother one is Teeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!
- ossicones 3y agoI tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.
- sswezey 3y agoAlso Shavian was designed around British sounds that makes using for Americans cumbersome
- sieste 3y agoTrading off writing speed for legibility seems wrong to me. Writing fast is a skill that can be learned by regular practice. If you spend half the time to learn an illegible code like orthic on simply practicing your usual handwriting you'll end up writing quite a bit faster while increasing legibility. I would try that first.
- flandish 3y agoIt’s legible to those who know it.
- josephg 3y agoRight. And 90% of the writing I do today is writing out notes to myself while I plan or work through problems in my notebook. That kind of writing doesn’t need to be legible to anyone else.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoShorthand was never a commonly used technology by "normal" people and as I understand it even proficient users would not use it for their personal notes. It was used in situations where minimizing writing time was important, and then transcribed into standard writing shortly afterwards, while it was still fresh in their minds. It's not a replacement for writing, it's a replacement for a tape recorder.
- smeej 3y agoIt's meant to be decoded into regular text later. Main usage is taking notes or dictation. Trying to write as fast as an average person speaks makes it very hard to do anything else, like be an attentive conversation partner, but scribbling some notes down in shorthand so you can return to them later is really useful.
- supersrdjan 3y agoOrthic has a much greater economy of strokes, so it's as much about convenience as it is about speed. That is, you can write quite quickly without actually rushing. It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines. And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.
- Sakos 3y agoHonestly, I'm more interested in keyboards that use vowels or other combinations to write over something like this. It's interesting, but I never need to write anything anyway. But the ability to type much faster would be helpful in certain situations.
- argiopetech 3y agoIf you haven't seen it one of the many dozen times it's been here, Plover - Open Steno Project https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/ https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/, allows machine stenography (write a letter, syllable, word, or phrase with one chorded stroke) on your phone or computer. It's definitely faster, but it's a steep learning curve. For a slightly easier learning curve, I suggest ASETNIOP - https://asetniop.com/ https://asetniop.com/. The are/were keyboards built with a single row (maybe + thumb keys) that speak ASETNIOP, but I can't seem to find any at the moment.
- patch_collector 3y agoIs anyone aware of any good iPad apps for writing notes in shorthand, then converting to text? I currently use an app called Nebo to write notes and journal entries, then convert them to text before uploading into other systems. It works well, and I really appreciate being able to get away from a keyboard, but I'm a much slower writer than typist.
- jbosh 3y agoImagine the rennessaince in shorthand if this became a thing. It feels like the best of both worlds (writing and typing).
- gumby 3y agoBut much worse for reading. If the system can translate it into text though (conceptually no different from the dictation button) then I agree it could be a big win.
- gumby 3y agoI like the idea of a faster handwriting script. I've actually found the old Graffiti script pretty good (fast and clear) for writing notes. I remember I used to see it on whiteboards when MBAs were writing -- probably showing off. Unfortunately if I write on my ipad (my main use of it) the OS does a pretty good job of OCRing it so I can search my notes. The same thing isn't possible with anything abnormal like Graffiti. Classic shorthand has never worked for me as it records the sound rather than the semantics. This is reasonable as a way to time delay dictation (when you read the shorthand you hear the sound in your head, so you type as if you were hearing the person speaking in realtime). But when I read I don't hear any sounds, so this would be like listening to the person speak, which defeats all the advantages of reading.
- lelandbatey 3y agoJust for context, the word "Graffiti" is talking about the proprietary single-stroke writing system from Palm, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
- dartharva 3y agoInventing an entire writing script was not what I expected "shorthand" to mean.
- drewcsillag 3y agoOne of the things I like about Gregg is that similar sounds p/b f/v t/d have similar shapes so when reading, if it’s ambiguously or wrongly written, by pronouncing what’s there, I can figure out which one was meant. Also, since Gregg is phonetic, I don’t have to worry about how to spell either. Orthic has some of that, but not to the extent of Gregg.