[HN Gopher] Yash: Yet another short hand
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Yash: Yet another short hand
        
       Author : behnamoh
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2023-09-19 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (opsahl.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (opsahl.github.io)
        
       | paularmstrong wrote:
       | I don't understand the fascination with these shorthands. Maybe
       | helpful if you do a _lot_ of writing with a pen & paper, but if
       | not, it would be more beneficial to practice more and get faster
       | with touch typing or a chording keyboard.
        
         | sublinear wrote:
         | These things are not mutually exclusive.
        
         | nrr wrote:
         | The last time I had jury duty, I took a complete transcription
         | of the trial proceedings with Gregg because of a general
         | prohibition on computers in the courtroom.
         | 
         | I also get a fair amount of utility out of it for math lectures
         | because, frankly, while I'm pretty fluent with TeX, I can reach
         | 220 words/min and transcribe equations much more easily if I
         | just use pencil and paper.
        
           | teeray wrote:
           | Do you have any recommendations on learning Gregg?
        
             | nrr wrote:
             | Not really. My mother still had her materials from school
             | (and could still read it), and I drilled the alphabet a
             | lot.
             | 
             | I think the biggest benefit is had by giving someone else
             | your steno outlines and having them pinpoint where your
             | strokes need work.
        
       | TacticalCoder wrote:
       | > sm cwhx szms atmw tis lrnx b usq krkws frm y ltn lfbt. sc nn-
       | zngrfk szms hv ofn bn dskrbd s lfbtk, x przs mat klam yt sc szms
       | rx tru cwhx. hvvr ys lfbtk szms dhv vlu f stdxs vo kx ddkt y irs
       | nssri tmzr a stngrfk cwhx. lfbtk cthxs kx b rtn at y spds yretkli
       | psbl vy smbl szms 200 ws pr mx r mr bt rkvr nl a frkc fytm t akvr
       | a usfl spid f btvn 60 ws pr mx
       | 
       | That's not the correct transcoding. The end is missing "and 100":
       | I take it the end needs to be "60 x 100 ws pr mx".
        
       | mkagenius wrote:
       | I couldn't help but notice that "opsahl" is upside-down reverse
       | of "I yash o" .. probably a coincidence
        
       | sudobash1 wrote:
       | This strongly reminds me of a bit of humor attributed (perhaps
       | erroneously) to Mark Twain.
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
       | to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no
       | longer be part of the alphabet.
       | 
       | The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch"
       | formation, which will be dealt with later.
       | 
       | Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would
       | take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y"
       | replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali
       | wonse and for all.
       | 
       | Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
       | with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears
       | 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist
       | konsonants.
       | 
       | Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
       | ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the
       | maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th"
       | rispektivli.
       | 
       | Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev
       | a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
        
         | avgcorrection wrote:
         | I would take absolutely any phonetic spelling of English over
         | the current spelling of English.
        
           | imglorp wrote:
           | Bernard Shaw famously supported spelling reform, first merely
           | reworking the standard orthography and later, in the form of
           | the phonetic alphabets Shavian and later Quikscript by
           | Kingsley Read. They're both obviously more consistent than
           | Latin alphabet writing, and also often shorter so they might
           | count as shorthand.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
        
           | cpfohl wrote:
           | Whose phonology? English is a delightfully diverse language,
           | spoken by delightfully diverse people!
        
             | avgcorrection wrote:
             | That's why I said _any!_ Australian, Anglo-Sikh, doesn 't
             | matter to me.
        
           | aidenn0 wrote:
           | Indeed; I'm a rhotic speaker but would even take a non-rhotic
           | phonetic spelling over what we have today (things like
           | cot/cart being spelled the same couldn't be more confusing
           | that the current orthography)
        
             | pm215 wrote:
             | If you go for the Southern English accent as the base for
             | your non-rhotic phonetic spelling you don't even have to
             | sacrifice distinguishing cot and cart -- they're different
             | vowels because we don't have the father/bother merger :-)
        
               | aidenn0 wrote:
               | Oh, I forgot about the father/bother merger because it is
               | darn-near universal in the US. My mom is from one of the
               | few places in the US that was non-rhotic and had avoided
               | the caught-cot merger[1], thus resulting in "caught" and
               | "cot" not being homophones, but "cot" and "cart" being
               | homophones.
               | 
               | 1: Past-tense because many kids seem to speak much closer
               | to middle-american than even 20 years ago.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | As HN user D-Coder pointed out a few years ago, that joke
         | wasn't Twain but an author in the September 1946 issue of
         | Astounding Science Fiction:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
         | 
         | More links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | sudobash1 wrote:
           | Thanks dang. I've always been pretty suspicious of the
           | attribution to Twain. Nice to know where it actually came
           | from.
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | It'd be interesting to see if these shorthands reduce the time it
       | takes to _prompt_ LLMs. So instead of writing a long paragraph,
       | you send the same content in a couple lines.
        
         | crooked-v wrote:
         | It's possible to do that with ChatGPT 4, though it's not always
         | consistent. You can even tell it to produce a compressed
         | version of input text that it will understand and it usually
         | works.
        
       | xkcd-sucks wrote:
       | , in which the author re-invents the Welsh language.
        
       | bagful wrote:
       | This system is quite similar to Briefhand, an alphabetic
       | shorthand letter-omission at its core and augmented with
       | abbreviations for common words. With practice, the core rules
       | alone are enough to write at speaking-pace.
       | 
       | Over time you develop a personal set of abbreviations. My
       | shorthand is a personal language. Probably anyone could decode my
       | notes back to English with some effort, but my notes are more
       | than text, they're a mnemonic device: sometimes I only need but a
       | glance to recall my mental formations at the time I was writing.
        
       | 4726155 wrote:
       | Also worth checking out:
       | 
       | Evans Basic English Code (uses English letters):
       | 
       | https://archive.org/details/evansbasicenglis00evan
       | 
       | Orthic (an alphabetic shorthand which replaces letters with more
       | efficient characters):
       | 
       | https://orthic.shorthand.fun/
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-09-19 23:01 UTC)