Gabelsberger shorthand, named for its creator, is a form of shorthand previously common in Germany and Austria. Created c. 1817 by Franz Xaver Gabelsberger, it was first fully described in the 1834 textbook Anleitung zur deutschen Redezeichenkunst oder Stenographie and became rapidly used.
Gabelsberger shorthand has a full alphabet with signs for both consonants and vowels. The consonant signs were made by simplifying the features of cursiveLatin letters. The vowel signs are used mainly when a vowel stands at the beginning or the end of a word. Vowels in the middle of words are represented symbolically, mainly by varying the position and the impact of the following consonant signs. Contrary to the practice in many English shorthand systems (e.g. Pitman Shorthand), vowels are never entirely omitted.
Most German shorthand systems published after 1834 are ultimately based on Gabelsberger's system. Modern German shorthand, Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift, retains most of the consonant signs of Gabelsberger's alphabet but has a modified system of vowel representation.
Gabelsberger shorthand was adopted into many languages and was particularly successful in Scandinavia, the Slavic countries, and Italy. A host of shorthand systems has since appeared that build on the graphic principles laid down by Gabelsberger.
An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include: partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.
An abugida, sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional.. The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants and vowels.
Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth vowel letter of the English alphabet. In the English writing system, it mostly represents a vowel and seldom a consonant, and in other orthographies it may represent a vowel or a consonant. Its name in English is wye, plural wyes.
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein. It has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys (short), and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys, depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal.
Dutton Speedwords, transcribed in Speedwords as Dutton Motez, is an international auxiliary language as well as an abbreviated writing system using the English alphabet for all the languages of the world. It was devised by Reginald J. G. Dutton (1886–1970) who initially ran a shorthand college promoting Dutton Shorthand, then offered a mail order (correspondence) self-education course in Speedwords while still supporting the Dutton Shorthand. The business was continued by his daughter Elizabeth after his death.
Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897), who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds, and words are, for the most part, written as they are spoken.
Sarati is an artificial script, one of several scripts created by J. R. R. Tolkien. According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion.
The history of the alphabet goes back to the conwriting system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew and later Aramaic, four closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
Franz Xaver Gabelsberger was a German stenographer; the inventor of Gabelsberger shorthand.
A defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the Italian language has seven vowels, but the alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes close and open is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian consonants, both and are written ⟨s⟩, and both and are written ⟨z⟩; stress and hiatus are also not reliably distinguished.
In a featural writing system, the shapes of the symbols are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes that they represent. The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson to describe the Korean alphabet and Pitman shorthand.
Bezenšek Shorthand is a shorthand system, used for rapidly recording Bulgarian speech. The system was invented by the Slovene linguist Anton Bezenšek c. 1879. It is based on the Gabelsberger shorthand, so it is often referred to as the Gabelsberger–Bezenšek Shorthand.
Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift is a German stenography system. DEK is the official shorthand system in Germany and Austria today. It is used for word-for-word recordings of debates in the Federal Parliament of Germany.
Stiefografie, also called Stiefo or Rationelle Stenografie, is a German shorthand system. It was invented by Helmut Stief (1906–1977), a German press and parliamentary stenographer, and first published in 1966.
Samuel Taylor was the British inventor of a widely used system of stenography.
The Duployan shorthand, or Duployan stenography, was created by Father Émile Duployé in 1860 for writing French. Since then, it has been expanded and adapted for writing English, German, Spanish, Romanian, Latin, Danish, and Chinook Jargon. The Duployan stenography is classified as a geometric, alphabetic stenography and is written left-to-right in connected stenographic style. The Duployan shorthands, including Chinook writing, Pernin's Universal Phonography, Perrault's English Shorthand, the Sloan-Duployan Modern Shorthand, and Romanian stenography, were included as a single script in version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard / ISO 10646
The system of geometric shorthand published in Britain by Samuel Taylor in 1786, under the title An essay intended to establish a standard for an universal system of Stenography, or Short-hand writing, was the first shorthand system to be used across the English-speaking world. Taylor shorthand uses an alphabet of 19 letters of simplified shape. His book was translated and published in France by Théodore-Pierre Bertin in 1792 under the title Système universel et complet de Stenographie ou Manière abrégée d'écrire applicable à tous les idiomes.
The Shan alphabet is a Brahmic abugida, used for writing the Shan language, which was derived from the Burmese alphabet. Due to its recent reforms, the Shan alphabet is more phonetic than other Burmese-derived alphabets.
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