Just something interesting I ran across today in my college's library... it's a method of shorthand from I think the 70s. It's alphabetic, but the tome has so many rules that I was immediately reminded of Pitman. It claims speeds of 150wpm.
The way this system works is simplifying alphabetic strokes and omitting most vowels: dog/dig/dug are all written the same way. Some letters like S are a dot on the line with Z being a dot above the line. There are lots of word endings and beginnings (more than Simplified as far as I could tell) for everything from commun- to -ivity, some of which had their own shapes as modified capital cursive letters, or different-shaped ticks. It has short forms too like "e" for "the", "a" for "that", etc.
It's a disjointed system except for some letters which are connected to the previous letter, like n (a short line) or m (like G in Gregg). It's also phonetic.
It seems to be a somewhat rare book, but I found one copy on ABE Books as well as two used copies on Amazon.
The things about the system that put me off were the enormous quantity of affixes and some of the strange rules (like a slightly differently shaped "a" representing something completely unrelated). It ends up having a few more strokes than a Simplified sentence (on average about 20% more from my observations).
It's interesting as a curiosity at least :)
(by erik for everyone)
Labels: general