Shorthand Words

Writing is an unbelievably useful tool to record and communicate ideas. It is cheap, the paper it is written on can travel large distances and is lightweight, printing allows a single book or tract to reach a large number of readers, and the written word can even survive to find generations of new readers across centuries of time. Writing and books survived even after the invention of film, radio and TV, which are much more expensive to produce for the same quantity of ideas. Only computer storage and the Internet have turned out to be faster, cheaper and easier to reproduce and spread than the printed word.
However, written languages were not developed with the emphasis on speed. Writing was initially the craft of a distinct class of people, the scribes and the upper class, and they tended not to care how cumbersome their symbols were. Even the streamlined modern shapes of the Latin alphabet, developed for printing and a mass readership in the literate West, are not compact enough.
With ordinary, cursive handwriting the best speed of writing is about 35 words per minute (wpm). People, however, speak at about 150 – 180 wpm, so the scribes who needed to record important speech were faced with a physical problem of keeping up with what was said. As a result they developed alternative, quicker forms of writing, parallel to the usual full-blown form of writing (which is sometimes called longhand.)
The scribes of the Roman Empire attempted to solve the problem by making heavy use of abbreviations in their notes together with special symbols, based on the method of Tiro, scribe to the orator Cicero. Even Julius Caesar knew this system himself. To this day we still use their most common abbreviations such as e.g. (Latin for “for example”), i.e. (“that is” or “in other words”) and etc. (et cetera, Latin for “and so on”. The & symbol also comes from the form of the word “Et”). They also used simplified strokes which were faster to write than conventional letters. A system which uses simple symbols for letters is usually referred to as a shorthand or stenography (a word which comes from the Greek words for “close writing” or “compact writing”). If the symbols are simplified but still- recognizable letters of the alphabet, the system is more properly referred to as a system of speed writing.

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