Subset Park: Smith Shorthand

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2024-10-05 17:30:07

In late 2019, I wrote about a new shorthand system I was designing. Less than six months later it was in the bin, neither fully developed, nor learned, nor used. Instead I embarked on four-or-so happy years of consistent use of Henry Sweet’s Current Phonetic Shorthand, which was my regular choice for any and all note-taking.

A few times over that period I tried to learn Oliver’s Stenoscript, purely for fun: there were a few qualities it had that weren’t present in Current and which I wanted to try my hand at.

Stenoscript never stuck. There are some things I like about it but I find it basically too fiddly: there are too many distinctions that are meaningful in its signal space but far too fine for me to comfortably make when writing by hand.

Designing a shorthand, or a writing system of any kind, is quite like designing a programming language, in this way. The trick is to encode your signal as densely as possible—but not denser, as the adage goes. It’s trivial to make up maximally efficient encoding systems; but a shorthand needs to be simple and regular enough to be learned by heart, it needs to be made up of strokes that are comfortable for the human hand to write, and it needs not to be so densely encoded that natural variations and discrepencies result in dramatically different meanings.