Humans have always written too slowly for thought. Cultures across history have solved this problem in their own unique ways: Tiro’s word endings in ancient Rome, Chinese draft script, Pitman’s phonetic system, and Gabelsberger’s cursive “speech-sign art,” among many others.
Nowadays, fast writing often comes down to text speak. But most people will admit that writing “u” instead of “you” doesn’t actually save that much time. Let’s explore older systems of unusual approaches to writing and word forms that reveal something important about how cultures throughout history have understood language, speed, and the value of capturing the fleeting.
Ancient Rome: Tiro and Cicero
Latin’s highly inflected grammar made it perfect for abbreviation. Cicero’s secretary, Marcus Tiro, took full advantage of this when he created the Notae Tironianae, a collection of symbols that represented common words, syllables, and most importantly, word endings. In Latin, relationships between words are tied to their endings rather than their order, so maintaining the ending fragments was often enough to convey meaning.
This, paired with the cultural role of Roman oratory, brought Tiro’s methodology into the mainstream. In many cases, this shorthand was used within the context of public speeches. Culturally, such speeches relied heavily on predictable grammar and cadence; in other words, the form of the speech was just as important, if not more important, than the content.
In this sense, the Romans conceived of language as a function unto itself. So when Tiro created a shorthand to capture words at unprecedented speed, the predictability of the utterances was an integral part of the process. This demonstrates the value Rome placed on eloquence, persuasion, and the need to capture language quickly so as not to forget its “performance.”
Han China: Cursive and Draft Script
Unlike Latin, the Chinese alphabet was not as conducive to abbreviation. Each character corresponded to an individual morpheme with its own inherent meaning. That’s thousands of characters that needed to be written stroke by stroke.
To overcome this feature of the language and write more quickly, administrative workers shifted to a progressively more cursive style that culminated in caoshu, or draft script. Rather than fully drawing the characters, writers would reduce them to their essential motions, which flowed together.
In this sense, reading draft script was more like reading without truly paying attention. The eyes would gloss over the shapes, parsing the meaning by presumption and context based on characters that were “close enough.” This worked because while Western shorthand tends to transcribe speech by sounds, Chinese draft script stuck to meaning-bearing characters, which could condense more information in less space. Over time, because of the cursive nature of this script, this elegant movement became tied to the personality and artistry of the writer until it became one of the highest forms of artistic expression.
Pitman: Victorian Sounds, Not Spelling
The 19th century produced two radically different approaches to writing English and German quickly. Isaac Pitman’s shorthand, introduced in 1837, was based on English sounds rather than spelling. Consider words like “through,” “though,” and “tough.” They’re spelled nearly the same, but they sound very different. Pitman bypassed these inconsistencies by reducing speech to its phonemes. Consonants were represented by straight and curved strokes, and he used line thickness and position to indicate differences (such as voiced and unvoiced sounds). To most, the script simply looks like squiggles in ascending and descending shapes.
The focus was entirely on the “rationality” of the language. This reflects the Victorian emphasis on scientific analysis of the humanities, which was seeing an upsurge at the time.
Gabelsberger: Speech-Sign Art
Conversely, Franz Gabelsberger used phonetic representation to create a cursive system he called Redezeichenkunst, or ‘speech-sign art.’ Consonants are represented with strokes, while vowels are often simply gestured at relative to the consonants around them. They may also be noted by techniques such as shading or line thickness. It is essential to remember that at the time most of these shorthands were used, people were writing with implements that could consume more or less ink depending on how a person angled the pen (e.g., quills) or how hard they pressed (e.g., brushes).
Speech-sign art (SSA) is called “art” because of its attention to beauty and shapes. Despite its artistry, it functions without compromise; in fact, SSA allows the writer to take notes at nearly speech-level speeds. Gabelsberger’s view reflects a philosophy different than Pitman’s. Where one sought a scientific approach, the other focused on how the writing flowed with the natural movements of the hands.
As the world grows ever faster-paced, it may be reasonable to expect that more shorthands could arise to keep up. This most likely includes within the digital realm, where meme language and even developments such as leet (1337) evidence the desire for more truncated communication.
