I have been fascinated by shorthand for a long time, there are a lot of systems for fast writing by hand, and I have spent time learning them for fun. I do still often write notes in it when I know they are only going to be read by me anyway, it’s a fun little thing to do for myself.

What I personally use is a Norwegian system of shorthand called Wang-Krogdahl, it’s a nice looking system that is fun to write, and at least for me personally easy to read back.

For other systems that I’ve played around with and used for varying lengths of time, Gregg, Teeline, Orthic, Melin and some others that I was just shortly doing some things with.

I’ve been doing some things like creating an English version of the Swedish Melin shorthand which was a fun little experiment, in the end though I found that to not really be the best way, and for a while was just using orthic for most English writing, and a scandinavian system better suited for writing in Norwegian, with the many vowels that it has, English doesn’t really like vowels that much, and just reduce evenything down to schwas anyway.

I also played around with some typed shorthands, like keyscript and some other ones, and I even ended up with creating my own one which was quite fun, in the end I ended up not really using it, because I found that it just fights all my typing muscle memory too much to be faster than actually just writing stuff out fully, and that way I wouldn’t have to transcribe stuff back into full text either.

The main part of this blog is going to be a short explanation of my old system, even though I don’t really use it anymore, I’m proud of how simple and nice it actually is.

Yash; Yet another shorthand

The basics and alphabet

Written English is chaotic, it has so many ways to write words that it gets confusing, so we’ll reduce the alphabet to the letters that we actually need, and then we’ll write words phonetically, this way we have freed some letters for other use, and we have already compacted our writing a bit. The letters that we use in yash are:

a b d e f g h i k l m n o p r s t u v 

We’re left with some letters that will get their own use later, namely:

c j q x y w z

None of these letters are used often enough, or can’t be replaced with combinations, so here are the ways we’d write the letters that are missing:

 c | Is replaced with an s or a k according to the sound it makes 
 j | Is mostly replaced with i                                    
 q | Is written k or kv                                           
 x | Is written with ks                                           
 y | Is written with i                                            
 w | Is written with v
 z | Is written with ts 

So now we have a reduced alphabet, and we also have some free letters. These letters are given new meanings in yash, mostly combinations of 2 letters or a sound that occurs often, so that it’s worth replacing it.

 c | Is used for sh like should in (sh)ould                
 j | Is the harder j/tch sound like in ju(dge) and ca(tch) 
 q | Is used for ng/ing                                    
 x | Is used for nd/nt                                     
 y | Is used for th                                        
 w | Is used for rt/rd/lt/ld/td                            
 z | Is used for st                                        

This allows us to shorten down words quite a bit, so with these two basic things out of the way we have a couple of principles left.

Omission of vowels

Most of the times words are pretty easy to read without vowels, so we’ll mostly leave them out writing yash, with a couple of exceptions:

• Diphthongs are written with the main vowel, great for example would be written gret
• When one feels that the word would be unclear without the vowels one can put in vowels to make it clearer

Phrasing

We will phrase together short words and phrases so that we won’t need to push the space bar after every single letter. This way something like “it will be” will be phrased together to tlb, we’ll also phrase the (y) together with the word that it describes, and also do the same with a, this way we can cram our text together a bit more, and it will be quicker to write.

Examples

I’ll write some examples here to try and show that yash can shorten down texts quite a bit, and it’s still not that complicated to figure out what it’s supposed to be.

Some shorthand systems attempted to ease learning by using characters from the Latin alphabet. Such non-stenographic systems have often been described as alphabetic, and purists might claim that such systems are not ’true’ shorthand. However, these alphabetic systems do have value for students who cannot dedicate the years necessary to master a stenographic shorthand. Alphabetic shorthands cannot be written at the speeds theoretically possible with symbol systems—200 words per minute or more—but require only a fraction of the time to acquire a useful speed of between 60 and 100 words per minute.

sm cwhx szms atmw tis lrnx b usq krkws frm y ltn lfbt. sc nn-zngrfk szms hv ofn bn dskrbd s lfbtk, x przs mat klam yt sc szms rx tru cwhx. hvvr ys lfbtk szms dhv vlu f stdxs vo kx ddkt y irs nssri tmzr a stngrfk cwhx. lfbtk cthxs kx b rtn at y spds yretkli psbl vy smbl szms 200 ws pr mx r mr bt rkvr nl a frkc fytm t akvr a usfl spid f btvn 60 ws pr mx