The Shorthand Alphabet and the Reforming of Language
Author(s): Daniel Wolford La Rue
Source: The Scientific Monthly , Sep., 1922, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 1922), pp. 271-281
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6553
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THE SHORT'HAND ALPHABET 271
THE SHORTHAND ALPHABET AND THE
REFORMING OF LANGUAGE
By DANIEL WOLFORD LA RUE
EAST STROUDSBUJRG STATE NORM AL SCHIOOL
j5VERY writer of shorthand-and there are now leogions of
them-must have wished, not only that others coutld write
with as miuch ease anid rapidity as himself, but also that there could
be as short and accurate a systemn of printing as he has of writing.
Why should we not make use of the shorthand alphabet not only
for short writing, but also for short priniting (eitlher by hand or
press), and a short, direct means to the correct pronunciation of
new words ?
Isaac Pitinan, who invented the systemn of shorthand n1ow most
generally used among English speaking peoples, entert, imed this
idea, and approved it, but niever applied it. This paper presents
an original plan for adapting the shorthand alphabet to printing,
summarizes the results of an experiment in teaching children to
read matter printed in this new form, and points ouLt the tremen-
dous educational and social advantages that would accrue if this
new type of paper-language were in genieral use.
According to Isaac Pitman's analysis, there are forty sounds
in the English language, twenty-four consonants, twelve simple
vowels, and four diphthongs, or double vowels. Adopting (sub-
stantially) the Pitmanic symbols, we may represent these sounds
as below.
CONSONANTS VTOWELS (SINGLE)
\ p as in pop (The vertical line is not a part of
-b as in bob the vowel symbol, biit is used to rep-
t as in tat resent any consonant stroke. A vowel
d d as in did symiibol, as a heavy or light dot,
chIas in liurch stands for different sounds acc
/ =eh a"s in church
J as in judge to its position.)
/_ j as in judge
-k as in kick a as in pa
g as in gig . =aas in may
f as in fife e as in we
v as in vivid a as in all
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272 TTHE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
( th as in thick o as ill go
( = th as in that oo as in too
) =zs as in sit a as in that
) = z as in zoo e as in pen
sli as in ship -i as in is
) = zh = z as in azure o as in not
- m as in mum u =i as in mluch
w n as in noon oo as in good
ng as in sinig DIPHTI-10N
=l as in lily
/=~r as in rare v i as in lie
c= w as in will K - oi as in boil
u- y as in yes K - on as in foul
h as in hay eu as in feud
This gives us a perfect alphabet, neither redundant nor de-
fective.
In writing shorthand, the consonant characters of a word or
phrase are joined together, and the vowels are placed in a certain
relation to the consonianlt strokes, that is, at the beinning, middle
or end of them. The vowel sign has a different sound according to
its position. The plan here preseinted for adapting this alphabet
to printing introduces two variations: the consonants are kept dis-
joined; and the vowels are placed, not at the beginning, middle
or end of consonant strokes, but in high, middle, or low position
with regard to the line of print. This adapted alphabet, and
matter printed in it, will be referred to as Fonoline.
An illustration will make the matter thoroughly clear. Figure
1, which presents three charts used in teachin(g fonoline to chil-
dren, shows the symbols used in the fonoline alphabet, and the
appearance of words printed in fonioliine.
Although various experiments have been made in teaching read-
ing by means of a phonetic alphabet, it appeared worth while to
teach a group of beginners to read fonoline, partly to find the
degree of effort necessary to learn it, partly to discover whether
there would be any difficulty in passing from fonoline to a-b-c
Ernglish. Should we as a race ever wish to chanige our alphabet
(as the Chinese are doing), this latter question would probably
become very important.
Accordingly, fonoline was taught to a group of twelve pu-
pils in a first grade, whose Stanford-Binet initelligence quotients
ranged from 75 to 127, with a median of 87.5. In physique and
power of application, they were probably somewhat below the
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THE SHORTHAND ALPHABET 273
\\ I I /1/--- I
_ I
K o (a( )- ) J
s I w
Fig. 1. Three Tharts, reduced in size,
used in the teaching of fonoline. The
c v Chart at the upper left shows the fonoline
alphabet, omitting the symbol for the
sound of zh, which was not used in the
v ~~~~~~~~first grade vocabulary. The worde on the
Yv( 'f | other charts are as ehlown below, and in
the same order.
t ) I _ t Wor(16___ on Char at U oer Rlight,
at ran
> ~~~ ~ ~ ~~~~~aat canr
t ) F t(Y| fat Dan
hat ra n
rat fan
sat man
that than
Words on Chart at Left.
vine of
7VK vviolet love
visit give
voice lived
very lives
KvK ) thave over
hive clover
five seven
average. They were taught, in the East Stroudsburg State Normal
Training School, by two cadet teachers and myself, no one of us
hlaving ever before taught a child to read. There was some diffi-
culty also in procuring the necessary type an-d other materials
for keeping the experiment going.'
At the end of a month (spending a little over an hour a day
on the subject), twenty-three sounds had been introduced, and
the pupils were attacking new words with fair success. A week
later, the brighter pupils were separated from the rest and began
'In reporting this experiment, I wish to make acknowledgment of the
receipt of financial aid by means of which it wvas promoted from the Aim-er-
ican Association for the Advancement of Science.
Acknowledgment of substantial assistance of a different kind is due to
Mrs. La Rue, without whose he]p the necessary reading material could not
have been composed, illustrated and printed.
VOL. XV.-18.
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274 TEi SCIENTIFIC IONTIILY
reading such stories as " The Little Red Hen" withont the aid of
the teacher. At the close of eleven weeks, onr advanced class had
learned all the symbols, had read abont one hnndred fifty pages
of the Foonoline Primer, and could readily master, independently,
any new word of not mnore than five or six symbols (that is, five
or six sounds when spoken), nunless it involved sone pecnliar diffi-
culty. As few words in the flrst grade vocabulary ireach this lngth,
THE CAT AND THEMOUSTE
F -J I1 (- 'oA)
A wee mouse was eating.
C. cl-')
A cat saw her.
The cat said,
"I must have that mouse."
-) 0 ~~( I ^A)
Then away she went.
The. 2. Showing fonioliuie used interlineally to aid inv the introduction to a-b-c
Englisl. The words that have no fonolinie beneath them had already been
mastered by the pupils before reaching this story.
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THE STIORTHAND ALPHABET 275
we thought it best to pass from this grade of attainment to the
study of a-b-c English. At the end of fifteen weeks, the slower
section also (containing, it will be remembered, some retarded
pupils) having coovered all their symbols and read over one hun-
dred pages of the Primer, proceeded to the study of a-b-c English.
Passing from fonoline to ordinary English introduced prac-
ticallv no neew problems except those which are always incident to
the teaching of reading in English, and we of course used our
"perfect" phonetic alphabet to aid in the mastery of the imnper-
feet, partially unphonetic one. The first means employed was
that of interlinear printing, placing the a-b-c English above and
the corresponding fonoline just below as a key to pronLuLciation,
as shown in the figure. As soon as a word had appeared in the
a-b-c type a few times, it was left without the folnoline aid to
pronunciation beneath it, whereupon the pupil either remembered
it or was foreed to go back and find it where it had last appeared.
At the close of the year, our pupils had accomplished, so far
as we were able to judge, substantially the same amount of work
in a-b-c English, after spending the first ten or fifteen wveeks on
fonoline reading, as they woiould have done had they spenit the whole
year on a-b-c English; that is, their achievements were on a level
with those of preceding classes, the time devoted to reading re-
maining unchanged. Our advaneed class won the special comn-
mendation of the State examiner, who had no knowledge of how the
grade had been taught.
We are inclined to believe that fonoline forms a good introduc-
tion to a-b-c English, and that if it could replace the usual system
of diacritical marking, time would ultimately be gaiined through its
use. We consider it quite safe to assert that if a pupil of average
intelligence anld application were given a year of instruction in
reading fonioline (especially if there were devoted to reacling the
twvo hours per day commonly assigned to it in our city schools),
such a pupil would then be able to read anything (printed in that
alphabet) which he was capable of understanding. Beyonid re-
views, no further work in reading would be necessary for one so
taught except to train him in the apt expression of those thoughts
aiid feelings which would come to him with matur,ity. And he
would not only know how to read: he would be able to fiild in the
fonoline dictionary any ordinary word that he could pronounlee.
Further, he could "spell," both orally and in writing (fonioline
characters) any word that he could turn his tongue to.
Let us now give our attention to the edueatioi al and social
advantages that would be ours if such an alphabet as fonoline
were brought into common use. Let us keep in miiid, too, that
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276 THE SCIENT'IFIC MONTHLY
fonoline is advantageous beyond any other phonetic alphabet; for
it bears a unique relation to Pitmanic shorthand, the most speedy
and efficient means yet devised by the human brain for passing its
thoughts down through hand and pen and so recording them on
paper.
First, then, does fonoline present an alphabet which adequately
represents the sounds of spoken English? We can sum up this
matter admirably by quotations from Max Muller: "What I
like in Mr. Pitman 's system of spelling is exactly what I know
has been found fault with by others, namely, that he does not at-
tempt to refine too much, and to express in writing those endless
shades of pronunciation, which may be of the greatest interest
to the student of acoustics, or of phonetics, as applied to the study
of living dialects, but which, for practical as well as for scientific
philological purposes, must be entirely ignored . . . . Out of
the large number of sounds, for instance, which have been cata-
logued from the various English dialects, those only can be recog-
nized as constituent elements of the language which in and by
their difference from each other convey a difference of meaning.
Of such pregnant and thought-conveying vowels, English possesses
no more than twelve. Whatever the minor shades of vowel sounds
in English dialects may be, they do not enrich the language, as
suich; that is, they do not enable the speaker to convey more minuik
shades of thought than the twelve typical single vowels
If I have spoken strongly in support of Mr. Pitman's system, it is
chiefly because it has been tested so largely and has
stood the test well. v 2
Next, if the number of our characters is correct, is their form
satisfactory ? As to the advantages of simplicity, perhaps the work
of Broca and Sulzer can be accepted as authoritative. These imi-
vestigators concluded that both our letters and the words of which
they are composed would be more easily recognized and quickly
read if they were simplified in form. "Practically," they report,
"the recognition of a letter demands an expenditure of energv
that is greater as its form is more complex. Thus we read a V,
a T, or an L more easily than an E or a B. From the standpoint
of speed of reading and also of the cerebral fatigue caused by the
act it would be better to employ simpler letters than those now
used. We have thus been led to seek the least complex possible
forms, and we have concluded that, for capital letters, they are
those shown in Figure 3. For the small letters, where there
2 Fromii an article in the Fortntightly Review of April, 1876, as quoted in
The Life of Sir Isaac Pitman, by Alfred Baker, p. 206.
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THE SHORTHAND ALPHABET' 277
00 0 e o0
< >AV
< > AV
E U LJ u
L 1
FIG. 3. Showing the simiiple capitals p)roposed by Broc,L and Sulzer.
are two sizes, and two positions with respect to the line, the solu-
tions are more numerouLs and some are shown in Figure 4.
t1il\\ /\/L1FJ
lfflr cJ[nu
FIG. 4. Simplified small letters proposed by Broca aild Sulzer.
"We do not wish here to go farther into this question and ask
whether it would be worth while to change our present alphabet;
but we desire only to point out that these characters, derived from
the Phenician alphabet, are not scientifically as perfect as could
Lettres Valeur Lettres Valeur
% aIt
9 b, bh m
, g,gh I' n
d, dh x , s
h domc e 0 o
'I ou,v, w 9 p, ph
I v. ts,s
B hdur kh
$ th r
. 5. w s h
k 4 t
FiG. 5. Alteration of modern f rom ancient letters.
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278 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
be wvished. A glance at Figure 5 shows that all the changes
mnade in transforming the old alphabet into ours are far from
being simplifications."<
So far as capitals are concerned, whether simplified or not, they
should be dropped altogether. In the teaching of fonoline, we
omitted them and never missed them. Further, we were only em-
barrassed by them, as every teacher of primary reading is, when
they appeared in the a-b-c English. The Germans distribute their
complex capitals lavi-shly, to the exasperation of the reader (speak-
ing for myself). The French tendency is better, to omit them
as much as possible. Neither the writer nor the reader of short-
hand commonly misses capitals or wishes for them. They only
make him trouble. Had we grown accustomed from our youth
to the use of small letters only, we should then have had the right
attitude toward capitals, namely, that they are a useless and expen-
sive luxury; and we should have rejected at once any proposal that
they should be introduced into oLLr language. As matters are, we
ought to welcome the possibility of further simplifying our alpha-
bet by reducing it from fifty-two characters to forty.
A further question of interest is, do words printed in fonoline
have sufficient character and individuality to insure their quick
recognition in rapid reading Students of the psychology of read-
ing seem to agree that glance recognition, as we may call it, de-
pends chiefly on the length of a word, on its consonants, especially
those that are so tall as to stick up above the general body of the
word, and on its first letter or letters, which, as they strike the eye,
serve as a kind of key to the part that follows. It is evident that
words woould have characteristic lengths and first-letter keys, no
matter what alphabet were used. The great importance of the
consonants in furnishing the skeletons of words and so giving them
characteristic shape must long have been felt, even if not con-
sciously reasoned out; for the Hebrews, centuries ago, left the
vowels out of their words and still found them, for the most part,
easily legibile. The modern writer of Hebrew either fills in his
vowels or omits them, as he pleases. So does the writer of Pit-
manic shorthand. When writing under speed, he puts in only an
occasional key vowel, yet finds his writing easily readable. The
joined conisonants of a word form an "outline" which flashes into
his mind instantaneously when he hears that word pronounced, and
which he recognizes at once when he sees it on paper.
I venture to assert that this advantage is carried over, in large
3 This report was published in La Nature, Paris, February 13, 1904. The
quotation and figures given above are taken from a translation printed in
The Literary Digest of March 12, 1904.
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THE SHORTHAND ALPHABEIT 279
measure, illto matter printed in fonol
,guided largely by context, as such readers always are, would find
his words taking on such a characteristic consonantal shape that he
would have little use for the vowels. The consonants would form
the chief mass of the average word, and in the great bulk of cases
would protrude either above or below their adjacent vowels. Yet
if there were doubt in any case, as there might be when two words
contained the same consonants in the same order, the vowels would
be there to give their voice and settle the matter. But to vowels,
generally, we should apply a rule in contrast with that which we
apply to children: the vowels should be heard and not seen too
conspicuously.
If it should prove desirable to indicate the accent of words,
this could be accomplished by any of several simple methods, and
ill a manner which would cause printers no difficulty.
Let us now consider, but very briefly, how and how much we
could shorten and enrich the work of the eleme'ntary school
through the use of fonoline.
Learning to read would become so easy that many children
would learn at home. (One of our pupils retaught a part of her
fonoline lessons to her little brother.) At any rate, independent
reading, on the part of the average child, would begin before he
had spent more than a few weeks in school; and he could then
advance, by silent reading, at his ownl pace, taking up one form
of literature after another as fast as he was able to appreciate it.
The subject of spelling would disappear from our procrams of
study, leaving the time now devoted to it to be turned to some
useful purpose. Like the Italians and the Spaniards, we should
theii have no spelling books in our schools.
The use of the dictionary would never have to be taught as at
present; for since, with a phonetic alphabet, the pronouncing of
a word is equivalent to the spelling of it, one could readilv find
in the fonoliine dictionary aliy word that he could pronounce.
Not only could any one master his own language quickly, but when
foreign tongues were undertaken, he could use what would then be
his native alphabet as an aid to the mastery of them also. A
"phonetic transcription" would cease to be in any way formidable
and would become wholly a help if one could indicate the pro-
nunciation of strange-looking foreign words by using the familiar
characters of his own alphabet. An enterprising and scholarly
minister, father of one of our pupils, made use of her knowledge
of fonoline to introduce her to Hebrew, in which language he was
anxious to give her an early start. Pitman's shorthand has been
adapted to twenty-one foreign languages, including Latin, and
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280 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
also to Esperanto. Should alny peculiar sound of a foreigni tongue
require a new symbol, then, it would very likely be ready to hanld.
Indeed, I do riot consider it too wild a dream to hope that the
Pitmnanic shorthand alphabet mitay some day serve as the commnon
alphabet for all the languages of the earth. I leave others to deduce
the vTarious results of this, alnd will here only remark that I should
consider it a very lonig step toward a universal language, a step
which, while suLppressing no laniguage, would very likely resLilt in
preserving the best elements of all.
In the subject of writing, fonoline, throucgh its relation to short-
hand, would secure advanitages which nio phonetic alphabet nIot so
related to "the winged art" could gain for us. As matters are,
we teach our pupils four different fornis for each of our twenltv-
six letters; these are the printed snmall and capital letters, aict the
corresponding written forms. Of course, these four forms are
sometimes similar, as in the case of the letter o; but again thev
are quite at variance, as with cd, e, g, and 1. With fonoline in use,
all this extra aind useless learniing, together with the whole subject
of writing as wve now know it, would drop out of existence. Judging
as well as I can from the very limited amount of writing fonoline
which was donie by our experimental class, I should say that, if
pupils were given a regular daily period of such practice, they
could by the elnd of the first year in school write anything, ex-
pressed in the wAords of the usual first grade vocabulary, which
they would be likely to utter. With a very moderate amount of
practice as compared with what is necessary for the learning of
ordinary writing, they could write at least as fast as they now do
the longhand, and probably considerably faster. There are ad-
vaantag,es of position and moovement also, which conform more
nearly to that which is naturally adopted by young children. For
pupils of low mentality, this might be the limit of attainment.
For those who were ordinarily bright of mind and facile in
learning, however, it would be but a small beginning. From
fonolinie the learnier could pass, by the gradual and easy introduc-
tion of shorthand principles, to shorthand itself. This would be
accomplished bys such means as the joining of consoniant strokes
wherever convenient, and the introduction of shortening devices
so familiar to the writer of phonography, such as the s-eirele arnd
the hooks at the beTinnings and endings of strokes. The abbre-
viated signs for our most common words could also be taught,
signs which woulld soon enable the pupil to write, in the shortest
kind of shorthand, nore than fifty per cent. of all the language
he ordinarily used.
If such a course as I have described were preceded and aecomn-
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THE SHORTHAND ALPIABET 281
panied by fonoline readingo, an-d if wve gave to it up through the
grades the time which is now devoted to writing, I believe it safe
to say that pupils would then be able to write io less than four
times as fast as they inow can with our cumbersome longhand, and
with equal, or even greater legibility.
In the life outside of school there would resuilt great savings
in the printing of the language, in typewriting and linotyping, in
teaching the feeble-minlded, in the problem of Americanization, in
progress toward a uiniversal langquagye, and ili many other ways.
But the greatest argumeint, least appreciated because hardest
to appreciate, lies, perhaps, in aniother direction. It is that a
quicer alphabet, as we may call it, would make mankind more
thoughtful and more social. The mathematician could never have
made the progress he has in dealing with number and quantity
had he not invented a shorthand method of expressing and work-
ing with them. The physicist and the chemist have their short-
hand. What scientist does not? Is not this one of the distinguish-
ing features of the modern use of symbols, to coneentrate a great
bulk of meaning, in such brief form that we can hold it all in one
grasp of consciousness, reason with it in evTery way as an inclusive
unit of thought work? But of this argument we can- offer no more
than a suggestion.
Had such ani alphabet as fonoline been- in common use for the
brief span of a century or so, no argument to return to our present
slow and cumbersome methods would be heeded for a moment.
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