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This migration has reignited my interest in Quikscript.
I wonder if any others in the group have experience with both Quikscript and shorthand? If so what are your thoughts? Which did you use first? Did you continue to use both or did you settle on the one or the other, and if so on what grounds. If you use both do you use them in equal proportions or does one, and in that case which, predominate?
Also what use do people find for Quikscript and/or shorthand in today's digital world? I find myself using handwriting of *any* kind less and less. Usually I will want to work on anything I write on the computer sooner than later, and when away from the computer I'll find myself typing on my phone because getting the file from the phone to the computer is much less of a hurdle than transcribing paper notes.
I used to be an avid user of shorthand — Melin's Swedish Shorthand[^1], a cursive stegnography in the German tradition — although my shorthand use has fallen of a bit in recent years since I don't regularly attend lectures, seminars and the like anymore, and because of the advent of handheld devices; not that I type on a phone as fast as I write shorthand or even longhand, but it is easy to send files between different devices, and transcription is a barrier because it is tedious! Over the years I experimented with several variations of my own adaptation of Melin's shorthand to English. I never liked the official adaptation to English which essentially transcribes a heavily Swedish-accented pronunciation of English, like conflating {Th} "thaw" with {T} "tea", {Dh} "they" with {D} "day", {J} "jay" with {Y} "ye" and {Zh} "j'ai" with {Sh} "she", writing {Sh} with a letter which has the {Kh} "loch" sound for most contemporary Swedish speakers while using the letter for the Swedish sound which is closest to {Sh} for {Ch} "cheer" — reflecting a Swedish pronunciation which is about a century outdated and treating {Uh} "utter" and {Ah} "calm" as a short/long pair, marking "short" vowels with pressure on the letter for the following consonant and conflating all of {Ow} "owe", {U} "foot" and {Uw} "ooze" with each other, all unacceptable to me since I learned my English from my grandmother who spoke an excellent American English, having lived in the US and Canada in the 1920's and afterwards having had frequent interaction with native speakers at a young age. In my adaptation I assigned as many English vowel sounds as possible to their own letters, and when I had to conflate vowels I conflated such vowel pairs which actually are merged in some native English accent like {O} "ox" and {Oh} "awe" or {U} and {Uw}. I also assigned Melin's similar-looking vowel signs — which actually are short and long pairs graphically speaking — to those vowels which are written with the same roman letter, like {E} "et" and {Iy} "eat". This last may seem like a heresy to QS users, but the point was that the word shapes for Latinate words with the {Iy} vowel became similar to those for cognate Swedish words with an {E} vowel, which helped word shape recognition, which is so important when reading shorthand, for native Swedish speakers (although I paired {U(w)} with {Aw} "out", due to such Swedish : English cognate pairs like _hus : house_). Also I chose to use the Swedish {Kh} letter — graphically an enlarged version of the Swedish {J/sv} letter — for {J/en} "jay", while using the small Swedish {J/sv} letter for its English phonetic counterpart {Y/en} "ye", and what was graphically a {SkH/sv} contraction for {Sh/en} — which makes sense since English _sh_ usually corresponds to _sk_ in cognate Swedish words — and a {KH/sv} contraction for {Kh/en} "loch" when needed.
I got interested in QS as an alternative to shorthand because of the well-known problem that shorthand isn't very linear in the "line of text" sense: it tends to "climb" upwards or downwards according to the prevalence of (long) upstrokes (vowels) and (long) downstrokes (consonants and consonant clusters), and because I wanted a separate letter for each English vowel sound. Melin's has eleven letters usable as vowels, which is twice as good as English longhand but still inadequate, with four too few compared to the QS analysis with which I would agree.
Inevitably I also made my adaptation of QS to Swedish, using not only pairs like "it" : "eat" and "et" : "eight" as short : long pairs but also e.g. "at" : "I" for Swedish short and long [a] {Ah} like sounds since Swedish doesn't really have any diphthongs, but has 9 vowel qualities which occur both short (clipped) and long (drawn out).
However I found myself returning to shorthand if only because I couldn't really achieve the same speed in QS as in shorthand — better than traditional longhand but not as fast as shorthand.
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Also what use do people find for Quikscript and/or shorthand in today's digital world? I find myself using handwriting of *any* kind less and less. Usually I will want to work on anything I write on the computer sooner than later, and when away from the computer I'll find myself typing on my phone because getting the file from the phone to the computer is much less of a hurdle than transcribing paper notes.
I have a couple paper journals/diaries in addition to more task-focused computer-based things.
It takes…something to divert a slice of life to all-Quikscript paper journal that’s slow to write and no faster to read. No, I mean that — it seems like I write Quikscript no more slowly than I read it. I should read more, but my journal entries are snoozefests.
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I got interested in shorthand first, and I think that's what led to my later discovery of QS. I was fascinated by shorthand, but never got much into it. The thing I disliked about it was that it was not phonemic, that is, one letter could represent more than one English phoneme (unlike QS, which goes quite to the other extreme of phoneme representation).
You have a point about less handwriting being done in today's digital world. I used to take notes in QS, and while it was great for writing quickly, it really slowed me down when it was time to scan the text and review it for tests and such. I guess you could say my QS writing skills are better than my reading skills.
I actually do a fair bit of typing in QS on my computer, but here again there isn't much advantage because I can type faster in orthodox than in QS. Whether typed or handwritten, I'd say the main advantage of QS for me right now is that I can write things that no one else can read, which I know wasn't its original intended use, but it works!
This discussion reminds me of Chinese, oddly enough—my understanding is that Chinese speakers recognise most characters, but may not know how to write the more complex ones. We might say they should switch to a phonemic alphabet to make their lives easier, but with technology, typing Chinese and conjuring up even the really complex characters is a breeze. One purpose of QS is to avoid wasting time with all the extra strokes of the standard Roman alphabet, but my point is that in both Chinese and English, people don't have much incentive to change because technology makes typing fast and easy despite the complexities of the writing system.
Ipan ne 8 tonali tlen metstli 11 tlen xiuitl 2019, ipan 14:20 horas, BP Jonsson <bpjonsson@...> kiijkuilo:
This migration has reignited my interest in Quikscript.
I wonder if any others in the group have experience with both Quikscript and shorthand? If so what are your thoughts? Which did you use first? Did you continue to use both or did you settle on the one or the other, and if so on what grounds. If you use both do you use them in equal proportions or does one, and in that case which, predominate?
Also what use do people find for Quikscript and/or shorthand in today's digital world? I find myself using handwriting of *any* kind less and less. Usually I will want to work on anything I write on the computer sooner than later, and when away from the computer I'll find myself typing on my phone because getting the file from the phone to the computer is much less of a hurdle than transcribing paper notes.
I used to be an avid user of shorthand — Melin's Swedish Shorthand[^1], a cursive stegnography in the German tradition — although my shorthand use has fallen of a bit in recent years since I don't regularly attend lectures, seminars and the like anymore, and because of the advent of handheld devices; not that I type on a phone as fast as I write shorthand or even longhand, but it is easy to send files between different devices, and transcription is a barrier because it is tedious! Over the years I experimented with several variations of my own adaptation of Melin's shorthand to English. I never liked the official adaptation to English which essentially transcribes a heavily Swedish-accented pronunciation of English, like conflating {Th} "thaw" with {T} "tea", {Dh} "they" with {D} "day", {J} "jay" with {Y} "ye" and {Zh} "j'ai" with {Sh} "she", writing {Sh} with a letter which has the {Kh} "loch" sound for most contemporary Swedish speakers while using the letter for the Swedish sound which is closest to {Sh} for {Ch} "cheer" — reflecting a Swedish pronunciation which is about a century outdated and treating {Uh} "utter" and {Ah} "calm" as a short/long pair, marking "short" vowels with pressure on the letter for the following consonant and conflating all of {Ow} "owe", {U} "foot" and {Uw} "ooze" with each other, all unacceptable to me since I learned my English from my grandmother who spoke an excellent American English, having lived in the US and Canada in the 1920's and afterwards having had frequent interaction with native speakers at a young age. In my adaptation I assigned as many English vowel sounds as possible to their own letters, and when I had to conflate vowels I conflated such vowel pairs which actually are merged in some native English accent like {O} "ox" and {Oh} "awe" or {U} and {Uw}. I also assigned Melin's similar-looking vowel signs — which actually are short and long pairs graphically speaking — to those vowels which are written with the same roman letter, like {E} "et" and {Iy} "eat". This last may seem like a heresy to QS users, but the point was that the word shapes for Latinate words with the {Iy} vowel became similar to those for cognate Swedish words with an {E} vowel, which helped word shape recognition, which is so important when reading shorthand, for native Swedish speakers (although I paired {U(w)} with {Aw} "out", due to such Swedish : English cognate pairs like _hus : house_). Also I chose to use the Swedish {Kh} letter — graphically an enlarged version of the Swedish {J/sv} letter — for {J/en} "jay", while using the small Swedish {J/sv} letter for its English phonetic counterpart {Y/en} "ye", and what was graphically a {SkH/sv} contraction for {Sh/en} — which makes sense since English _sh_ usually corresponds to _sk_ in cognate Swedish words — and a {KH/sv} contraction for {Kh/en} "loch" when needed.
I got interested in QS as an alternative to shorthand because of the well-known problem that shorthand isn't very linear in the "line of text" sense: it tends to "climb" upwards or downwards according to the prevalence of (long) upstrokes (vowels) and (long) downstrokes (consonants and consonant clusters), and because I wanted a separate letter for each English vowel sound. Melin's has eleven letters usable as vowels, which is twice as good as English longhand but still inadequate, with four too few compared to the QS analysis with which I would agree.
Inevitably I also made my adaptation of QS to Swedish, using not only pairs like "it" : "eat" and "et" : "eight" as short : long pairs but also e.g. "at" : "I" for Swedish short and long [a] {Ah} like sounds since Swedish doesn't really have any diphthongs, but has 9 vowel qualities which occur both short (clipped) and long (drawn out).
However I found myself returning to shorthand if only because I couldn't really achieve the same speed in QS as in shorthand — better than traditional longhand but not as fast as shorthand.
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(I sent this from the wrong address the first time so it was rejected. I hope this works!) Den lör 9 nov. 2019 05:37Benjamin Bruce < benjamin@...> skrev: I got interested in shorthand first, and I think that's what led to my later discovery of QS. I was fascinated by shorthand, but never got much into it. The thing I disliked about it was that it was not phonemic, that is, one letter could represent more than one English phoneme (unlike QS, which goes quite to the other extreme of phoneme representation).
I see. I guess you used Gregg, and the way it conflates vowels can probably be outright annoying. You usually stay within the same word family — say _serene, serenity_, which is probably an advantage, but then if you truncate it to _seren_ you have no clue which is meant. I don't have that problem with Standard Swedish written in Melin, which is fully phonemic, representing all nine vowels of Standard Swedish uniquely, except that if you write carelessly — and who doesn't ever do that in shorthand! — pairs like {U} and {Y} or {E} and {Ä} get hard to distinguish, but just like Gregg it is built into the system in the sense that you mostly stay within the same word family, e.g. _nu : ny_ are 'now : new', and /ɛ/ is written _e/ä_ half of the time anyway; the distribution in standard orthography isn't even etymologically correct. Its actually worse with consonant/cluster pairs like {K} and {Sk}, e.g. _kam_ is 'comb' and _skam_ is 'shame', but such word pairs seldom occur in the same contexts. My accent has more vowel phonemes than Standard Swedish, but that is true when writing longhand too, so that's not actually a problem, and my adaptation of QS to Swedish of course also assumes the Standard vowel system — which is good because it would be hard to squeeze our 24 rather than 18 vowel signs (I already use {W/en} and {Wh/en} for vowels!) The last iteration of my adaptation of Melin to English uses the same letter for {Ay} "line" and {Oy} "loin", and while that merger does occur in native English accents (and was far more widespread between the 17th and 19th centuries than now) it is far from ideal.
You have a point about less handwriting being done in today's digital world. I used to take notes in QS, and while it was great for writing quickly, it really slowed me down when it was time to scan the text and review it for tests and such.
Which is doubly true of shorthand! I guess you could say my QS writing skills are better than my reading skills.
My writing skills are certainly better than my reading skills in both shorthand and QS. It also seems like reading skills fall of quicker than writing skills after a period of disuse. It actually seems like muscle memory (so celebrated by users of the Vim text editor!) is better than visual memory.
I actually do a fair bit of typing in QS on my computer,
I used to do that too, and QS being *possible* to write on the computer is actually a major advantage over shorthand. I made my own fonts for QS which mapped At to {a} and Eight to {A} and so on, which I found easier to read in the absence of the QS font. It would be quite unusable for native English speakers: it mapped {J} to Ye, {y} to Utter and {Y} to Out! At one time I wrote a program (using MetaPost[^1] under the hood) which would generate a PostScript or SVG image of a shorthand word/phrase or even text from a phonemic transcription in roman letters, but it never looked quite natural and didn't have the advantage of immediate visual feedback.
but here again there isn't much advantage because I can type faster in orthodox than in QS. Whether typed or handwritten, I'd say the main advantage of QS for me right now is that I can write things that no one else can read, which I know wasn't its original intended use, but it works!
Both are true of me too. Occasionally you will run across someone who can read shorthand — usually an elderly lady — but QS is virtually unheard of in Sweden!
This discussion reminds me of Chinese, oddly enough—my understanding is that Chinese speakers recognise most characters, but may not know how to write the more complex ones. We might say they should switch to a phonemic alphabet to make their lives easier, but with technology, typing Chinese and conjuring up even the really complex characters is a breeze. One purpose of QS is to avoid wasting time with all the extra strokes of the standard Roman alphabet, but my point is that in both Chinese and English, people don't have much incentive to change because technology makes typing fast and easy despite the complexities of the writing system.
That's true. I chatted with a Syrian student at the school of odontology where I do my dental work, and he said that he now types Arabic much faster than he writes it, but when he started using computers in the eighties you still often had to hit different key combos for different contextual variants, which slowed down typing. People would type in French or in a homegrown roman transcription.
Ipan ne 8 tonali tlen metstli 11 tlen xiuitl 2019, ipan 14:20 horas, BP Jonsson < bpjonsson@...> kiijkuilo:
Nahuatl?
This migration has reignited my interest in Quikscript.
I wonder if any others in the group have experience with both Quikscript and shorthand? If so what are your thoughts? Which did you use first? Did you continue to use both or did you settle on the one or the other, and if so on what grounds. If you use both do you use them in equal proportions or does one, and in that case which, predominate?
Also what use do people find for Quikscript and/or shorthand in today's digital world? I find myself using handwriting of *any* kind less and less. Usually I will want to work on anything I write on the computer sooner than later, and when away from the computer I'll find myself typing on my phone because getting the file from the phone to the computer is much less of a hurdle than transcribing paper notes.
I used to be an avid user of shorthand — Melin's Swedish Shorthand[^1], a cursive stegnography in the German tradition — although my shorthand use has fallen of a bit in recent years since I don't regularly attend lectures, seminars and the like anymore, and because of the advent of handheld devices; not that I type on a phone as fast as I write shorthand or even longhand, but it is easy to send files between different devices, and transcription is a barrier because it is tedious! Over the years I experimented with several variations of my own adaptation of Melin's shorthand to English. I never liked the official adaptation to English which essentially transcribes a heavily Swedish-accented pronunciation of English, like conflating {Th} "thaw" with {T} "tea", {Dh} "they" with {D} "day", {J} "jay" with {Y} "ye" and {Zh} "j'ai" with {Sh} "she", writing {Sh} with a letter which has the {Kh} "loch" sound for most contemporary Swedish speakers while using the letter for the Swedish sound which is closest to {Sh} for {Ch} "cheer" — reflecting a Swedish pronunciation which is about a century outdated and treating {Uh} "utter" and {Ah} "calm" as a short/long pair, marking "short" vowels with pressure on the letter for the following consonant and conflating all of {Ow} "owe", {U} "foot" and {Uw} "ooze" with each other, all unacceptable to me since I learned my English from my grandmother who spoke an excellent American English, having lived in the US and Canada in the 1920's and afterwards having had frequent interaction with native speakers at a young age. In my adaptation I assigned as many English vowel sounds as possible to their own letters, and when I had to conflate vowels I conflated such vowel pairs which actually are merged in some native English accent like {O} "ox" and {Oh} "awe" or {U} and {Uw}. I also assigned Melin's similar-looking vowel signs — which actually are short and long pairs graphically speaking — to those vowels which are written with the same roman letter, like {E} "et" and {Iy} "eat". This last may seem like a heresy to QS users, but the point was that the word shapes for Latinate words with the {Iy} vowel became similar to those for cognate Swedish words with an {E} vowel, which helped word shape recognition, which is so important when reading shorthand, for native Swedish speakers (although I paired {U(w)} with {Aw} "out", due to such Swedish : English cognate pairs like _hus : house_). Also I chose to use the Swedish {Kh} letter — graphically an enlarged version of the Swedish {J/sv} letter — for {J/en} "jay", while using the small Swedish {J/sv} letter for its English phonetic counterpart {Y/en} "ye", and what was graphically a {SkH/sv} contraction for {Sh/en} — which makes sense since English _sh_ usually corresponds to _sk_ in cognate Swedish words — and a {KH/sv} contraction for {Kh/en} "loch" when needed.
I got interested in QS as an alternative to shorthand because of the well-known problem that shorthand isn't very linear in the "line of text" sense: it tends to "climb" upwards or downwards according to the prevalence of (long) upstrokes (vowels) and (long) downstrokes (consonants and consonant clusters), and because I wanted a separate letter for each English vowel sound. Melin's has eleven letters usable as vowels, which is twice as good as English longhand but still inadequate, with four too few compared to the QS analysis with which I would agree.
Inevitably I also made my adaptation of QS to Swedish, using not only pairs like "it" : "eat" and "et" : "eight" as short : long pairs but also e.g. "at" : "I" for Swedish short and long [a] {Ah} like sounds since Swedish doesn't really have any diphthongs, but has 9 vowel qualities which occur both short (clipped) and long (drawn out).
However I found myself returning to shorthand if only because I couldn't really achieve the same speed in QS as in shorthand — better than traditional longhand but not as fast as shorthand.
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