{"id":15406,"date":"2012-04-10T06:28:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T10:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2012\/04\/10\/switching-shorthands\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:14","slug":"switching-shorthands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2012\/04\/10\/switching-shorthands\/","title":{"rendered":"Switching shorthands"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve started over, and am learning Evans shorthand after spending about two years learning Gregg shorthand.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a lot of work, taking new shapes for sounds and pasting them into my head over old ones, but the groundwork I did in learning Gregg has been extremely helpful. My mum sent me a scan of a page in her Pitman book, and I could immediately spot the similarities and differences: all of these systems are trying to do the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>What I like about Evans, why I&#8217;m ultimately choosing it over other systems, is that it&#8217;s compact. Here&#8217;s a sentence in Gregg, then in Evans:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1279\/switching-shorthands0.jpg.webp\"><br \/><em>This vitally important piece of communication is &#8220;Do not meddle with the hot metal.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>My handwriting has always been small and controlled, and when I make notes I tend toward what&#8217;s called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.core77.com\/blog\/sketchnotes\/sketchnotes_101_the_basics_of_visual_note-taking_19678.asp\">sketchnoting<\/a>&#8220;. My frustration with Gregg is that it&#8217;s so big and loopy that, to my hand, it felt like going down stairs on roller skates. And it didn&#8217;t fit into call-out boxes beside illustrations; it wanted to escape off to the other side of the page.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>So hello, Evans, and thank you.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>The thing I find most confusing about it so far is that Gregg was rigidly phonetic (with diphthongs spelled out in full&#8221;&#8221;&#8221;white&#8221; becoming &#8220;oo-i-te&#8221;&#8221;&#8221;tedious!) whereas this sometimes switches and honours the double sounds of Roman letters, so C can be a K-sound or an S-sound. To my Gregg-conditioned mind, that&#8217;s heretical. But it has Xs and Ws and Ys, for which I am very grateful.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>\/end of shorthand geekery. Thank you for your patience.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>EDIT: Mom sent me the same phrase in Pitman&#8217;s:<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Phrase in Pitman's\" height=\"132\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1279\/switching-shorthands1.jpg.webp\" width=\"356\"><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve started over, and am learning Evans shorthand after spending about two years learning Gregg shorthand. It&#8217;s a lot of work, taking new shapes for sounds and pasting them into my head over old ones, but the groundwork I did in learning Gregg has been extremely helpful. My mum sent me a scan of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}