#shorthand

many-bees:

Here’s some various 19th century shorthand systems if you wanna get an idea of what Jonathan Harker’s journal actually looks like

many-bees:

Here’s some various 19th century shorthand systems if you wanna get an idea of what Jonathan Harker’s journal actually looks like

If this is your first time encountering shorthand then you’re in for a treat. What’s shorthand? Shorthand is a technique for writing very quickly.

At its basics you’re writing sounds not spelling and combining simple lines to make full words.

Get it? You’re optimizing for speed of writing not density or accuracy. So it’s hard to read and takes up more space but you can write down notes fast. How fast? Here’s someone writing at 120 words per minute.

The world record is 250 wpm, but even with a little practice you can get a lot faster than cursive or print.

I’ve seen a few people ask if Jonathan is writing assuming Dracula can’t read his notes. I don’t know the answer to that, but I can share exactly that happening with Superman and Lex Luthor.

Naturally a reporter like Kent would use shorthand to quickly transcribe notes in the field.

This is the sort of think Mina is practicing specifically because it’s the language used in business. You can read a great article on the expectations of men’s and women’s writing of the era here:

“Kept in shorthand”: An Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Narrative Technique

For anybody who is interested in learning shorthand but doesn’t vibe with phonetic spelling, try out Teeline. 

Tip: to learn quickly, try transcribing a song or poem you have memorized. By the end of the song, you probably won’t need to reference your key. 

english is the devil’s tongue which only pretends it knows how its own vowels sound

love me some coded writing so I tried learning shorthand, but I picked Teeline and my poor slav brain doesn’t like how it can’t decide if it wants to be phonetic or not

ewzzy:

If this is your first time encountering shorthand then you’re in for a treat. What’s shorthand? Shorthand is a technique for writing very quickly.

At its basics you’re writing sounds not spelling and combining simple lines to make full words.

Get it? You’re optimizing for speed of writing not density or accuracy. So it’s hard to read and takes up more space but you can write down notes fast. How fast? Here’s someone writing at 120 words per minute.

The world record is 250 wpm, but even with a little practice you can get a lot faster than cursive or print.

I’ve seen a few people ask if Jonathan is writing assuming Dracula can’t read his notes. I don’t know the answer to that, but I can share exactly that happening with Superman and Lex Luthor.

Naturally a reporter like Kent would use shorthand to quickly transcribe notes in the field.

This is the sort of think Mina is practicing specifically because it’s the language used in business. You can read a great article on the expectations of men’s and women’s writing of the era here:

“Kept in shorthand”: An Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Narrative Technique

ewzzy:

If this is your first time encountering shorthand then you’re in for a treat. What’s shorthand? Shorthand is a technique for writing very quickly.

At its basics you’re writing sounds not spelling and combining simple lines to make full words.

Get it? You’re optimizing for speed of writing not density or accuracy. So it’s hard to read and takes up more space but you can write down notes fast. How fast? Here’s someone writing at 120 words per minute.

The world record is 250 wpm, but even with a little practice you can get a lot faster than cursive or print.

I’ve seen a few people ask if Jonathan is writing assuming Dracula can’t read his notes. I don’t know the answer to that, but I can share exactly that happening with Superman and Lex Luthor.

Naturally a reporter like Kent would use shorthand to quickly transcribe notes in the field.

This is the sort of think Mina is practicing specifically because it’s the language used in business. You can read a great article on the expectations of men’s and women’s writing of the era here:

“Kept in shorthand”: An Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Narrative Technique

jessepinwheel:

jessepinwheel:

bananacreamphi:

I finally looked up shorthand because of Dracula daily and what the FUCK

HOW DOES MINA READ THIS???? IT’S SO COMPLICATED

This is actually a sample of Gregg shorthand, which was primarily used in America and invented in 1888 (though to my understanding wasn’t super widely used until later on with Anniversary edition and onwards)

Mina and Johnathan most likely used Pitman shorthand, which was the shorthand that was developed earlier and was dominant in the UK until fairly recently when it was supplanted by Teeline.

Pitman looks like this:

For both Gregg and Pitman, the different strokes in a sign correspond to a certain sound in the word, so the word “purse” in Gregg would be written [p r s]. Certain sounds are grouped together, like P/B or J/Ch, which are distinguished by stroke length (Gregg) or line weight (Pitman), so even if you write a sign sort of wrong, you can guess what the word is supposed to be from context. It does, in fact, take a while to learn.

also if anyone is dying to know, the gregg sample OP posted appears to be a section of pre-anniversary gregg from the 1916 manual (page 153, specifically). I was astonished to find that unlike the anniversary manual, this passage had a key provided. the direct transcription line by line is as follows:

ith sh-nd ev prs ma fm s on bks orf
akr(ing) s on rkimns ntha nth sam spas
astho ther prent-d; nd no selsh o prent-d
bks d ktn nd one ktn ot ent-d. ne prs
hul kol one f a bref tm sch faks ntu
sh-nd as apr lae tb euf nlaf nd stms
red o(above line) ots so col-d lfi th ades(emphasis) sekr-d
agag rekr(ing) n ft red(ing). efths selek(ing)

the corresponding translation:

with shorthand every person may form his own books of reference
according (to) his own requirements and that in the same space
as though they are printed; and no selection of printed
books would contain and only contain what he wanted. any person
who will collect only for a brief time such facts into
shorthand as appear likely to be useful in life and sometimes
read over what is so collected will find theideassecured
again and again recurring in future reading. if this selecting

(the original source quote goes a little bit further than this, but this is what’s in that excerpt above.)

you’ll notice from this excerpt that words aren’t just written phonetically, there’s a lot of brief forms like prs -> person or kol -> collect. signs also get blended together into phrases, like orf -> of reference or lfi -> will find

for a more visual explanation of how I got the transcriptions from a bunch of curly lines, I pulled out the word “requirements” to demonstrate:

each curve corresponds to a different sound, which I then have to translate. being able to tell what strokes correspond to what sounds is pretty easy and you could probably learn most of that in a couple of days. knowing what those sounds actually translate to is a lot harder

pitman is the same way (presumably. it’s not my area of expertise), but obviously what stroke applies to what sound is different between the systems. it also uses the little outside marks/placement on the writing line to indicate vowels whereas gregg uses loops, which is why it looks “cleaner”.

anyways, shorthand is cool. with practice, you, too, can conceal your correspondence from dracula!

I work at a law firm, and, today, my supervisor sent an email to me and a few other paralegals asking if any of us knew shorthand.

My first thought was, “I wonder if Jonathan or Mina could teach me.”

I then promptly burst out laughing.