Personal Shorthand, originally known as Briefhand in the 1950s, is a completely alphabeticshorthand.
There are three basic categories of written shorthand. Best known are pure symbol (stenographic) shorthand systems (e.g., Gregg, Pitman). Because the complexity of symbol shorthands made them time-consuming to learn, a variety of newer alphabetic shorthands was created, with the goal of being easier to learn– e.g., Speedwriting, Stenoscript, Stenospeed, and Forkner shorthand. These systems used normally written letters of the alphabet, but also some number of symbols, alphabetic characters changed in shape or position, or special marks for punctuation and so they are more accurately described as hybrid shorthand systems. In contrast, Personal Shorthand uses only the 26 letters of the alphabet, without any special symbols, positioning, or punctuation, and it can therefore be written cursively, printed, typed, or even entered in a computer without special typefaces or graphics.
Given years of practice, symbol shorthand writers could sometimes acquire skills of 150 or even 200 words per minute, which might have qualified them for demanding positions such as court reporting typically dominated today by machine shorthands. Due to the extensive time necessary, few achieved such a level. Most symbol shorthand writers in secretarial positions wrote between 80 and 140 words per minute. Hybrid shorthand systems with higher symbol content generally could be written faster than those with fewer symbols. In common with most hybrid shorthands, Personal Shorthand cannot be written as fast as symbol shorthands. However, like some hybrids, learning time is drastically reduced. Students of Personal Shorthand can acquire a useful shorthand skill (50 to 60 wpm) in a single school term, compared to the year or more for symbol system students to reach that same level.
Without the complexity of symbols to memorize and practice writing, Personal Shorthand theory is relatively simple. There are six Theory Rules. Slightly more than a hundred high-frequency business vocabulary words are represented by a single written letter known as a Brief Form ("a" for "about", "t" for "time", "v" for "very", etc.). High-frequency letter groupings within words ("g" for "-ing", "s" for "-tion", etc.), known as Phonetic Abbreviations, are also written with a single letter. In most Personal Shorthand textbooks, the entire Theory is presented in just ten lessons, after which review and practice can lead to writing speeds of 60 to 100 words per minute.
An abugida – sometimes also called 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, like a diacritical mark. 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 – in less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.
Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone devices. Braille can be written using a slate and stylus, a braille writer, an electronic braille notetaker or with the use of a computer connected to a braille embosser.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression. The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Sc.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes".
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of the early developers of the system adopted for electrical telegraphy.
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.
The Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System, commonly referred to by its acronym SATTS, is a system for writing and transmitting Arabic language text using the one-for-one substitution of ASCII-range characters for the letters of the Arabic alphabet. Unlike more common systems for transliterating Arabic, SATTS does not provide the reader with any more phonetic information than standard Arabic orthography does; that is, it provides the bare Arabic alphabetic spelling with no notation of short vowels, doubled consonants, etc. In other words, it is intended as a transliteration tool for Arabic linguists, and is of limited use to those who do not know Arabic.
The Shavian alphabet is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright Bernard Shaw.
In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters, pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing the inverse substitution process to extract the original message.
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.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
Scribal abbreviations or sigla are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse.
Teeline is a shorthand system developed in 1968 by James Hill, a teacher of Pitman Shorthand. It is accepted by the National Council for the Training of Journalists, which certifies the training of journalists in the United Kingdom.
Speedwriting is the trademark under which three versions of a shorthand system were marketed during the 20th century. The original version was designed so that it could be written with a pen or typed on a typewriter. At the peak of its popularity, Speedwriting was taught in more than 400 vocational schools and its advertisements were ubiquitous in popular American magazines.
Forkner Shorthand is an alphabetic shorthand created by Hamden L. Forkner and first published in 1955. Its popularity grew through the 1980s as those who needed shorthand every day began to favor the easier learning curve of alphabetic systems to the more difficult symbol-based ones. Forkner was taught in high-schools and colleges throughout North America along with comparable shorthands such as AlphaHand, Speedwriting, Stenoscript and Personal Shorthand.
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication based on a script and an orthography or set of rules regulating its use.
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.
English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as ⠡⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print.
Stenoscript or Stenoscript ABC Shorthand is a shorthand system invented by Manuel Claude Avancena (1923–1987) and first published in 1950. Encyclopædia Britannica, perhaps erroneously, claims it was based on a system published in London in 1607. An unrelated project also called Stenoscript was written by George A.S. Oliver and published in London in 1934.
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