A Curriculum of Current Phonetic Shorthand

2020-04-05

Henry Sweet’s Current Shorthand¹ is a historical curiosity twice over: once because very few people today need to learn shorthand at all or even know what it is; twice because as shorthands go, it’s completely obscure. I learned about it because the surprisingly active and enjoyable Shorthand Subreddit is populated by people who seem to really enjoy spelunking in digital archives for self-published books from the late 19th century, the heyday of shorthand, when there was actual money in designing and publicising a shorthand system of one’s own.

Nevertheless, insofar as one is already interested in learning a shorthand², it’s quite worth taking a look at. I think it has a combination of qualities that make it very recommendable:

• it is efficient, compressing quite a bit of writing into a small number of strokes;
• it is (relatively) cursive, visually and mechanically resembling longhand writing more than simple ellipses or geometrical shapes;
• by means of the second fact, it is, visually, fairly resistent to ambiguity (I’ve talked about this before).

It’s also got some marks against it. In addition to being very complex (or at least involved, or at least deep), it is doubly inaccessible: once because the only extant text that I know about is a scanned PDF of Sweet’s own handwritten (!) manual from 1892, and twice due to the fact that the manual is, frankly, not well-laid out.

Part of it is that Sweet was a phonetician before phonetics was a thing; his vocabulary around different sounds is not the same as we would use. More difficult is that the signs are actually quite systematic but Sweet often leaves the system implicit; there are a few places that his choice of symbol names in fact obscures their relationships to other symbols.

I’d like to try to lay out some of the same information contained in the manual in a more systematic and searchable way. Let’s see if it works out.

Some preliminary remarks

Like other phonetic shorthands, the basic principle of Current is to represent spoken or written language with a sequence of written symbols. The symbols are more numerous, and each one simpler, than the letters of the alphabet, so that more can be written, more quickly, than if you spelled the equivalent language out. The symbols making up a single word (or sometimes group of words) are written together, without taking the pen off the page (as in cursive writing), as that speeds things up as well.

Generally speaking, especially at first, Current can be approached word-by-word. And since we’re dealing with the phonetic variant, the outline for a word can be the symbols for all of its sounds written together.

Finally, to write more quickly, a number of other techniques will be used. These include:

• leaving out certain sounds;
• using distinct symbols for common sequences of more than one sound;
• using distinct symbols for common words.

We’ll start with the most basic part of the symbol inventory: the symbols that make up the basic sounds of spoken English³. Anyone who knows them all will be able write (and read back) any English whatsoever; everything that comes afterwards will simply make the process of writing more efficient.

The basic sounds can, of course, be divided into consonants and vowels.

Consonants

Consonants, generally, are represented by full-letter-sized symbols.

Heights

Full symbols have four heights:

• short, as in the height of a lower-case x;
• high, as in the height of a lower-case l or upper-case I;
• low, as in the height of a lower-case y;
• tall, which extends from the top of an l to the bottom of a y.⁴

Stroke Consonants

The atom of current shorthand is the connected vertical downstroke. Because Current mimics normal handwriting, it’s pretty tolerant of different degrees of slant, so “vertical” here is a relative rather than absolute term.

A vertical stroke is connected by the upward stroke that leads into it and the upward stroke that leads from it. There are two ways to connect into those strokes: with a curve, and with a sharp angle.

\[2 \text{ points of connection} × 2 \text{ ways to connect} = 4 \text{ styles of stroke:}\]

	starting from an angle	starting from a curve
leading into an angle
leading into a curve

Constructing a matrix of heights and styles gives us the most basic strokes.

\[4 \text{ styles of stroke} × 4 \text{ heights} = 16 \text{ strokes:}\]

	stroke	curve-stroke	stroke-curve	curve-stroke-curve
short	t	d	n	r
high	p	b	m	kw
low	k	g	ng	ly
tall	tsh	dzh	ny	ry

Arranged thus it’s hopefully evident that there’s an order to what sign goes with what sound. Sweet is particularly hot on the correspondence between where in the mouth a sound is articulated and where it’s placed, vertically, on the page (the man was a phonetician), which I think is less helpful; however, especially in the upper-left of the matrix, it hangs together ok.

The basic strokes stand for unvoiced sounds, and the curve-strokes stand for their voiced counterparts. It’s hopefully useful and intuitive that /t/ goes with /d/, /k/ with /g/, and so forth.

Similarly, /tsh/ (usually written “ch”, like “cheer” and “cheek”) and /dzh/ (one of the sounds made by “g” or “j”, as in “George”) go together.

The third column is the nasals; in English there isn’t a voiced/unvoiced distinction for them.

The fourth column hangs together less cleanly. A short curve-stroke-curve stands for /r/, which is obviously very common in English; the rest of the column is left over for certain consonants followed by glide vowels.

So we can give a rough phonetic reading of the same matrix:

	unvoiced	voiced	nasal	liquid
dental	t	d	n	r
labial	p	b	m	kw
velar	k	g	ng	ly
palatal	tsh	dzh	ny	ry

Loop Consonants

The second basic element of the vocabulary is the loop, which as a term is hopefully self-explanatory.

Loops can have the same heights as strokes; however, there are only two types of loop:

• regular, where the pen starts from the bottom-left, forms a loop, and continues to the bottom-right:
• inverted, where the pen starts from the upper-left, forms a loop downwards, and continues to the upper-right:

\[2 \text{ styles of loop} × 4 \text{ heights} = 8 \text{ loops:}\]

	loop	inverted loop
short	s	z
high	f	v
low	zh	sh
tall	nzh	nsh

The loops are used for what Sweet calls hiss sounds but what we’d call fricatives, and mostly sibilants. The voiced/unvoiced relationship of orientation is in place, which is very helpful.

Less helpful is the fact that it swaps midway through. In the first two rows, the left side is unvoiced and the right side is voiced. In the bottom two, we swap over. Sweet’s rationale for this is that /sh/ is more common, and that the low inverted loop is easier to write. I’m sure he’s right, but I don’t know if it’s worth the added cognitive load.

The tall loops are left for blends involving /n/ + /the sound made by their low counterparts/. These are more useful than they seem at first glance, since in practice /nsh/ also works for /ntsh/ (as in “inch”) and /nzh/ also works for /ndzh/ (as in “change”).

Rings

We’ve covered nearly all the consonants under the above two theories, but there are a few stragglers that don’t fit neatly.

The “canonical” form of /h/, so to speak, is an elongated low ring.

There are two sounds, voiced /th/ and unvoiced /dh/, represented by “th”. They are both short.

All three are written starting from the top.

	ring	half ring
short	th	dh
low	h

It’s important to note, however, that /h/ is much more commonly written as a long diagonal stroke beginning below the line of writing, like so:

Semivowels

The semivowels (or glides) are both written with what Sweet calls the “flat curve”:

These are also started from the top.

	flat curve
high	w
low	y

As we’ve already seen, though, there are some blends with /w/ and /y/ that are useful to know as these symbols are a bit awkward to write in the middle of a word.

Wave

The final consonant to cover is /l/, which is written with a “wave”, or what we might now call a tilde: . It’s hard to classify it by height, though I suppose technically it’s short. But in reality it’s the only consonant whose overall height is less than that of an x.

One result of this is that it can be comfortably written on the line or at around x height. The former generally is used when /l/ is not preceded by a vowel, while the latter is generally used when it is.

Vowels

The vowels of Current are… numerous. The principle of their general use is the same as most other phonetic shorthands: in writing, leave them out whenever possible. A word written like fnctshn or cmptr is often completely intelligible, especially written in context.

This principle is particularly important in light of one of Sweet’s basic principles of writing vowels: “medially, all weak vowels are expressed by the stroke.” That is, the short upward connecting stroke between two consonants should be the standard way of representing an unstressed vowel in the middle of a word.

This is perfectly sensible and more-or-less the default, as I say; however, some of the more finicky elements of the shorthand arise when Sweet tries to ensure that principle’s inverse: the presence of a short, connecting stroke should imply the presence of an unstressed vowel in the middle of a word. This would require that we strictly draw two consonants without any intervening stroke if there’s no vowel (or otherwise use a consonant blend, which are very plentiful and pretty crucial in practice). I say good luck: in order to make your outlines intelligible, you’ll sometimes have to have some space between two consonants even if there’s no vowel between them. Don’t sweat it.

This is an area where there won’t be a very satisfactory way of representing the sounds: Sweet’s notation for vowels is pretty straightforward but archaic; but then again, it’s not very practical to require the interested reader to know IPA as well. I’m going to try to represent them with words that obviously demonstrate them, after John C. Wells.

Positions

While consonants are some kind of letter-form of at least x height, vowels are generally smaller: roughly half x-height. Ordinarily, all vowels live within the x space, and therefore have two positions:

• “low-mid”, which sits at the baseline of writing: ;
• “high-mid”, which sits at the top of the x: .

Hooks

The most basic form of vowel sign is the hook, which is just a single horizontal curve: .

Hooks have two orientations:

• up, with the two ends of the curve pointing up:
• down, with the two ends of the curve pointing down:

Hooks have two lengths:

• short, about half the width of an x:
• long, about the full width of an x (or longer, as is useful):

Generally speaking, the long versions of the symbols are the “longer” of the pair.

\[2 \text{ positions} × 2 \text{ orientations} × 2 \text{ lengths} = 8 \text{ hooks:}\]

low-mid hooks

	hook	long hook
up	PRICE5	PALM
down	TRAP

high-mid hooks

	hook	long hook
up	KIT5	FLEECE5
down	DRESS6	FACE6

Double Hooks

Double hooks can vary along all the same dimensions as single hooks; they just consist of two curves written together.

\[2 \text{ positions} × 2 \text{ orientations} × 2 \text{ lengths} = 8 \text{ double hooks:}\]

low-mid double hooks

	double	long double
up	FOOT	GOOSE
down	POOR

high-mid double hooks

	double hook	long double hook
up	UNITE	USE
down	FUEL

Both the down and the high-mid versions deserve a little explanation:

• double down-hooks represent the same sound as their up-hook counterparts, but with a schwa /ə/ at the end.⁷
• high-mid double hooks represent a /u/ sound, just like the low-mid ones, but with a /y/ in front.

The distinction between the short /yu/, like the first vowel in “unite”, and the long /yuu/, like the vowel in “use”, is often subtle enough to be disregarded when writing.

Vowel loops

The next class of vowel symbol is the (little) loop. It’s about the size of an up- or down-hook; however, instead of a horizontal curve it’s a completed circle.

Just as with their full-size consontantal counterparts, loops can be regular or inverted. To help distinguish them from the bigger versions we will say:

• up, where the pen starts from the bottom-left, forms a loop, and continues to the bottom-right:
• down, where the pen starts from the upper-left, forms a loop downwards, and continues to the upper-right:

If a loop is the first symbol in an outline, we need to be able to distinguish up from down since obviously there will be no connecting stroke to connect from. Therefore up loops are not closed if they’re the first part of any outline: . This principle will hold for any of the up-loop variants.

\[2 \text{ positions} × 2 \text{ orientations} × 2 \text{ lengths} = 8 \text{ loops:}\]

low-mid loops

	loop	long loop
up	MOUTH5	GOAT5
down	STRUT	SQUARE

high-mid loops

	loop	long loop
up	CLOTH5	THOUGHT5
down	A(ROUND)6	NURSE

To come: Arbitraries, Consonant Groups, Rising Consonants, Finals, Implied Characters, Contraction, Word Omission, Limbs, Signs

The foregoing, insofar as curricula go, is demonstrably not much of a curriculum at all. For one thing, there are no samples of full outlines at all. This document is at very best a supplement to Sweet’s original manual. Hopefully it presents a more systematic introduction to the core elements, which are themselves the most systematic of the overall theory.

Needless to say, there are many elements in the latter part of the section that are arranged systematically and demonstrate productive principles (rather than just being bags of arbitrarily drawn words). In time I hope to get those together too.

this article has been amended based on feedback from the kind folks at r/shorthand.