HandyWrite - the Ultimate Shorthand System

It's time for an app that understands shorthand. It's time to bring shorthand back.

Check this out:

http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm

This guy designed what looks like a near-optimal shorthand system:

1. He started with Gregg shorthand. Note that just using Gregg letters alone you'll speed up your note-taking significantly. The downside is that the notes themselves are often abbreviations, so you have to transcribe soon after you've taken the notes or else it becomes a bit opaque.

2. He extended it to represent the full range of English pronunciation. Now you have 1:1 sound-correspondence to English. You can read back what you wrote years later. i.e. It's a full writing system.

3. He then added a symbology for just 100 of the most common English words. Not at all as extensive as classical shorthand, but all you need is to be able to record notes as fast as they're spoken.


Ok, the best thing about it in my opinion is that it honors and re-uses prior art in simply extending Gregg shorthand. That alone is worth something in my book -- and not just for sentimental reasons: Gregg is a thoughtful and elegant system.

I've jotted down the letter forms, and will be practicing them little by little as I have time. My goal is to be able to record meetings with it.

Actually, my real goal is to write an app that will let me take notes with it.

[Interspel] "Instant English"

As none of you-all know, I am a proponent of Interspel, a proposal by Valerie Yule to standardize the subset of English spelling which even literate native speakers have perpetual problems with. I'll link to Interspel's Wikipedia entry below.

Anyway, I recently heard a comment about how Instant Message English -- I'll call it Instant English -- tends to be far too "cooked down" to be much use beyond vapid grunts. The example given was:

u r, u no (i.e. you are, you know)

It's quite terse. Too terse, too ambiguous beyond very simple replies. However, the principles are sound: remove useless letters. And if the vocabulary grows, perhaps it will grow alongside 20th-Century English Spelling, or even replace some of it.

Hopefully for the better.

Interspel entry in Wikipedia