The other day, I finally got around to taking all the words I had jotted into the margin of my notebook during the week-long Esperanto course in March and look them up the dictionary and make Anki flashcards out of them.

Two of the words I got that way were ebeno and ebenaĵo.

They were defined in my eo-de dictionary as something like “(Geometrie ( Read more... )

Now, in addition to my Stiefografie shorthand userpic, I also have two in Teeline shorthand. This is the one that says “Philip Newton”-or at least, that’s what it’s supposed to say :) The proportions may be a bit off.

I got a letter in “Stiefografie” shorthand from my teacher the other day-seven pages long! So that took a bit of slugging through.

Now I wonder how best to respond.

In the letter, me touched several points that I would like to respond to… and my natural inclination, from email, would be to quote the relevant portion and then to append my comment ( Read more... )

Duployan shorthand has been proposed for encoding in Unicode-primarily, I suppose, because it was used for writing Chinook Jargon and certain Native American languages, sometimes to the exclusion of other (e.g. Latin-based) writing systems.

I think it’s nifty that at least one form of shorthand might be encoded in Unicode.

Duployan is geometric, ( Read more... )

The card that I had sent, addressed in shorthand, actually arrived!

I got a letter from my shorthand instructor, in which he mentioned that fact; here’s the relevant excerpt:


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I just listened to some dictation passages I had made for myself at rising speeds and tried to take them down in shorthand, to see what my speed is like.

I think 60 syllables per minute (about 45 wpm at 1 word = 1.4 syllables) is the limit of what I can do more or less comfortably. I was able to get down much of the 70, 80, 90 spm (50-65 wpm) ( Read more... )

Today, I sent a postcard to my shorthand teacher, addressed entirely in shorthand. Edit 2010-09-10: it arrived!


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So I’ve decided to start teaching myself Level II of Stiefografie (a shorthand system for German) now, using the self-study materials that cover Levels I and II. (I did Level I together with a teacher to whom I sent my exercises for marking, not least because I wanted feedback on my handwriting before I form bad habits.)

The actual abbreviations ( Read more... )

In my shorthand course, once you go beyond the basic note-taking script (which I’ve finished now) and onto the advanced, dictation script, your goal also changed from “make the shapes as precisely as possible” to “practise writing more quickly”.

To that end, there are several suggested dictation texts, which you can dictate to yourself at an ( Read more... )

I’m amused to find out that the same shape represents Aug’ (eye; a slightly poetic form) in Stiefo and Ohr (ear) in German Unified Shorthand. (Or you can modify it slightly and get the standard Auge and the slightly-poetic dative Ohre.)