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Re: conlanging and journaling

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 12, 2008, 17:53
(Stenography dept.)
Carsten Becker wrote:
>>I think those who have the calling, or the language-making >>gene or whatever, are often triggered (usually during >>adolescence) by _some_ external thing[, e.g.] seeing >>your mom/sister's stenography notebook from school, or >>bceoming aware of Esperanto or Tolkien's languages. >
I'll have more to say on this topic in general-- but wanted to mention that Gregg shorthand always fascinated me-- back in the 40s-50s a widely used notepad had a summary of its symbols on the back cover (without explanation, however). Over two summers back then, my sister and I learned typing and shorthand from an aunt who always came for the summer-- she taught the subject in a Milwaukee high-school. Shorthand was supposed to be a big help to us when we went to college... but I hardly ever used it (no need to take down an entire lecture verbatim, after all), and I doubt my sister ever took notes anyway :-)))) Typing, OTOH, is with me to this day. I think that learning Gregg might have given me a little pre-linguistics idea of English phonology and word structure-- it is sort-of phonemic, after all. And it might have influenced a script I developed for Conlang #2 (Thenian), where some symbols represented entire syllables.
>Funny you mention that. In fact, I have had a look into stenography >(Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) before the conlang flea bit me. Never >learned it though, but I still sometimes think I might want to, because >Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift is quite nifty actually in how it works. [1]
From a quick look at those sites, the script _appears_ to be quite alphabetic, though I see there are symbols for combinations like "str" etc. Are there symbols for common endings, like "-ung, -en, -es" etc? (I didn't look at everything....) Are common words abbreviated-- e.g. "should" in Gregg was written with "sh+d" symbols, (homonyms, I think, would have to be more fully specified), "the" was just "th"symbol, etc. When transcribing, context was important. However I don't think it's usually taught anymore
>(unfortunately), so the percentage of adults who actively use it or who at >least know how to read it is quite low I think, and among people in my age >the percentage should be near zero.
I suspect it's a dying art here too; in the Army in the mid-50s, we used little tape recorders, which could be slowed down or reversed as needed. And court reporters for years have used a little typing machine-- I suppose they abbreviate a lot.
> >[1] Pictures and official regulatory act (in German) ... > Consonants: http://urkunde.stenografie.com/HTML/wu21.htm > Vowels: http://urkunde.stenografie.com/HTML/wu31a.htm > For more examples just click your way through the menus.

Replies

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>