Re: notelangs

On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 01:43:04AM -0500, Nokta Kanto wrote:
> Through my college years, my note-taking strategies have nearly evolved
> into a conlang of their own. My notes contain generous amounts of
> foreign and invented words and symbols.
Same here, though I've largely stuck with English, with a smattering of
math and computer-speak (due, of course, to my training as a computer
science student).

> I abbreviate and even prefer consonant-heavy abbreviations to short
> vowel-carrying words.
That's because consonants, at least in English, constitute the most
distinguishable part of a word.

> I have acquired a fairly consistent set of words that I use in
> note-taking. I still mostly use English SOV word order, yet when I write
> a word out of order I prefer to add a postposition to it. I'm so used to
> note-taking that I can abbreviate new words on the fly and not have
> trouble decoding them later.
Yep.

> I'm curious, what tricks do you use in your private writing?
[snip]

My system is arguably rather inefficient, but being the perfectionist that
I am, I can't just dispense with vowels without risking ambiguity. So what
I've done is to abbreviate sequences like ake, eke, ..., etc, by dropping
the final e (since these are so common in English they're almost
redundant), and using a diacritic on the consonant (k in this case) which
takes less strokes to write than the vowel itself. For example, "live"
becomes "lv" with a dot over the 'v' (since the dot is representative of
'i'); "love" becomes "lv" with a circle on the 'v' (obviously resembling
the 'o'), "shave" becomes "shv" with a caret (^) over the v, imitating the
shape of a capital A.

Then I have a whole bunch of abbreviations for common word endings, like
an underlined n for -tion, so "nation" becomes "nan" with an underline on
the second n. I believe this is a common abbreviation; but I took the idea
and extended to many other endings as well. So -ing is underlined g, which
turns "singing" into "sgg" with the 'gg' underlined; -ence and -ance are
underlined c (I found that usually there's no need to distinguish between
-ence and -ance); -ess is a superscript s (for words like process,
prowess, etc.); -ment is overlined m (m with a dash on top); and so on.

I also liberally drop letters when it won't introduce ambiguities; so
"language" becomes "langg" (caret over the second g), even though it's
technically "langug" (g caret) instead. Then there are "calcified"
shorthands like "reg" for register, "exp" for experience, "expr" for
expression, "diff" for difference, etc., to which I can add one of the
abbreviated endings to indicate various forms of the word. E.g., regn (n
underscore) = registration, reg'r = registrar, regg (g underscore) =
registering; diffc (c underscore) = difference, difft (t underscore) =
different, difft (t caret) = differentiate, and so on.


T

--
My program has no bugs! Only undocumented features...