I wanted to mention something interesting. It seems Gregg must have studied Indian scripts, since his organisation and some of his theory is similar. For instance, the Brahmi-family of scripts which birthed, among others, the modern Bengali, Hindi, and of course Sanskrit scripts, are organized in the world's most sophisticated and perfect system of sound organisation, specifically ordering the way in which we produce sounds using our tongues (it's very much in tune with modern linguistics, paying attention to retroflex, palatal, dental, etc.) Anyway, my point is just a small fun tidbit for all you enthusiasts. The Sanskrit alphabet goes like this "k, kh, g, gh, nya, ch, CH, j, JH, N, t, TH, d, DH, t, TH, d, DH, n, p, PH, b, BH, m, ya, ra, la, va, sh, SH, s, ha
And a few other more difficult-to-transcribe sounds. But this is the ordering of the Indian script, and you will notice that Gregg clearly takes some of these aspects and transports them, very successfully, to his English shorthand. Most of you have already connected the dots, I'm sure, but just to show some of the basics, in Gregg the pairings of sounds follow the same pairings that they do linguistically in Sanskrit, "k & g", "r & l", "p & b", "ch & j" etc. I've also been finding some similarities between (besides the visuals) Gregg and Arabic-Persian-Urdu script, primarily the basic notion of connectives.
There's a lot to be found in this beautiful and extremely utilitarian system. I can't wait for the day I can at least hit 100 wpm and truly call myself a shorthand writer (I plan to hit 200 in two or three years, in preparation for senior year and grad school). I'm excited, and promise that my posts hereafter will not be this long and rambling.
(by sephardicjew for everyone)