Re: conlanging and journaling
| From: | ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, February 12, 2008, 17:53 |
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(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.
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