The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun!
A similar game is The Expression Amrilato, a love story where you gradually learn the language Esperanto. After beating the game, you've learned a real language, and can now speak with people from around the world. You also learn, however, an idiosyncratic writing system which is only useful within the game.
I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :)
Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text.
Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.
Bt, nowadays we need the opposite - a "shorthand" which, once you have learned, can be consumed quickly.
I know from experience that it takes much less time to read Hebrew than to read the same text in English (even though my mother tongue is English), since the vowels are assumed and abbreviations are extremely common - the actual text is shorter and quicker to read.
I can scan a long article quickly, but I wish there was a way to convert that to a writing system that was quicker to intake.
Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
Try out Forker shorthand. You can learn it gradually, and the first steps are omitting vowels and simplifying some letters. You then progress to various abbreviations. Ultimately, it's based on the English cursive so there's nothing too exotic to learn in terms of orthography, although I guess if you are younger there is a chance you never learned a cursive style! I'm a novice but feel like it doesn't hurt readability that much, and it's quick to learn.
> Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.
Stenography is where it was at! My mom's second husband was working at the local parliament and had to take notes, in real time, about what politicians were saying and he'd use stenography. He'd then hand his "stenographed" notes to a secretary that'd convert them back to english, which he'd then proofread.
It was french btw, which is even longer than english (about 20% longer).
I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!
I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.
I have some experience with a German shorthand style (DEK) and it is more important to write clearly. Shorthand removes most of the redundant information that is present in regular alphabets and words. With regular writing, a small error somewhere can be error corrected using the surrounding context.
When I wasn't being careful, I could often read the text shortly after I wrote it, but after a few hours or days it became illegible to me.
There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly).
Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that.
One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.
If you want to optimize for legibility rather than speed, a fountain pen with a stub nib might help. Stub nibs are designed to make handwriting look a bit like classic cursive with no effort from the person. But they can also improve handwriting legibility by providing a particular feedback, basically, it stops some bad movements you hand might be doing.
I have most success with nibs which are very smooth but stubby. TWSBI Diamond 580 with 1.1 mm stub nib worked best for me, but it takes bottled ink.
I have found my cursive hand getting much better after spending some time with Gregg shorthand.
The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.
I use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am getting better though.
My mom went to a professional school for "company secretary" or something like that in the 70s and learned shorthand notation (and typing). I recall trying to learn from her books as a kid, it's not that hard.
But she never seemed to actually use it later in her life (she still touch typed tho!).
I wonder how useful shorthand is in these days when cheap recording devices are available in everyone's pocket.
Maybe people who keep hand written diaries still use it?
My mother-in-law was taught shorthand in the 1960s UK and still uses it regularly. We work together in a family business and any meetings we go to she'll jot notes down using it, the amazing thing [to me anyway] is that she can read it afterwards!
It's a fantastic skill but so rare to see these days, it was mainly used by secretaries dictating notes to then type up I think. Now we are our own typists, it's largely relegated to history.
Is anyone aware of any good iPad apps for writing notes in shorthand, then converting to text? I currently use an app called Nebo to write notes and journal entries, then convert them to text before uploading into other systems. It works well, and I really appreciate being able to get away from a keyboard, but I'm a much slower writer than typist.
I like the idea of a faster handwriting script. I've actually found the old Graffiti script pretty good (fast and clear) for writing notes. I remember I used to see it on whiteboards when MBAs were writing -- probably showing off. Unfortunately if I write on my ipad (my main use of it) the OS does a pretty good job of OCRing it so I can search my notes. The same thing isn't possible with anything abnormal like Graffiti.
Classic shorthand has never worked for me as it records the sound rather than the semantics. This is reasonable as a way to time delay dictation (when you read the shorthand you hear the sound in your head, so you type as if you were hearing the person speaking in realtime). But when I read I don't hear any sounds, so this would be like listening to the person speak, which defeats all the advantages of reading.
During the time I had a Pilot and even for a few years afterwards, I would find myself writing Graffiti glyphs on paper as mentally that's how letters were written!
Trading off writing speed for legibility seems wrong to me. Writing fast is a skill that can be learned by regular practice. If you spend half the time to learn an illegible code like orthic on simply practicing your usual handwriting you'll end up writing quite a bit faster while increasing legibility. I would try that first.
It's meant to be decoded into regular text later. Main usage is taking notes or dictation.
Trying to write as fast as an average person speaks makes it very hard to do anything else, like be an attentive conversation partner, but scribbling some notes down in shorthand so you can return to them later is really useful.
Orthic has a much greater economy of strokes, so it's as much about convenience as it is about speed. That is, you can write quite quickly without actually rushing.
It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines.
And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.
Writing fast with the English alphabet puts a strain on one's hand. You won't feel it unless you already have hand issues. You can keep adjusting how you grip the pen to improve things, but there is a baseline limit due to the orthography.
One of the things I like about Gregg is that similar sounds p/b f/v t/d have similar shapes so when reading, if it’s ambiguously or wrongly written, by pronouncing what’s there, I can figure out which one was meant. Also, since Gregg is phonetic, I don’t have to worry about how to spell either.
Orthic has some of that, but not to the extent of Gregg.
The best shorthand for onscreen writing is the way SwiftKey keyboard supports. Basically you swipe your finger in one continuous path between letters stopping between words. It let's one write in comparable speed to typing on a smartphone onscreen keyboard.
I'm still salty that there's no FITALY[1] equivalent for iOS. MessageEase[2] has the same kind of idea but is nowhere near as easy to learn and use. I could whip through text at great(ish) speed on my Palms and PocketPCs using FITALY...
While it’s nice (nowadays, many keyboards actually support "swiping), it still gets so much wrong, and accuracy plummets for bilingual writing (For myself, I decided that the annoyance of getting nothing right because I’m in the wrong language is better than introducing more subtle errors). For those reasons, I still wish there were phones with full physical keyboards.
Isn't there a theory that writing medium effects scripts? IE the angles of Runes lended themselves well to carving. And something about left-to-right scripts was to avoid smudging.
So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel.
Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.
Honestly, I'm more interested in keyboards that use vowels or other combinations to write over something like this. It's interesting, but I never need to write anything anyway. But the ability to type much faster would be helpful in certain situations.
If you haven't seen it one of the many dozen times it's been here, Plover - Open Steno Project https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/, allows machine stenography (write a letter, syllable, word, or phrase with one chorded stroke) on your phone or computer.
It's definitely faster, but it's a steep learning curve.
For a slightly easier learning curve, I suggest ASETNIOP - https://asetniop.com/. The are/were keyboards built with a single row (maybe + thumb keys) that speak ASETNIOP, but I can't seem to find any at the moment.
heads|2 years ago
The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun!
Pittman shorthand: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABI...
Sennaarian writing: https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/g...
tnel|2 years ago
wavemode|2 years ago
gxonatano|2 years ago
sam_goody|2 years ago
Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text.
Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.
Bt, nowadays we need the opposite - a "shorthand" which, once you have learned, can be consumed quickly. I know from experience that it takes much less time to read Hebrew than to read the same text in English (even though my mother tongue is English), since the vowels are assumed and abbreviations are extremely common - the actual text is shorter and quicker to read.
I can scan a long article quickly, but I wish there was a way to convert that to a writing system that was quicker to intake.
lifthrasiir|2 years ago
muraiki|2 years ago
Quick intro: https://imgur.com/a/zYyON
riversflow|2 years ago
TacticalCoder|2 years ago
Stenography is where it was at! My mom's second husband was working at the local parliament and had to take notes, in real time, about what politicians were saying and he'd use stenography. He'd then hand his "stenographed" notes to a secretary that'd convert them back to english, which he'd then proofread.
It was french btw, which is even longer than english (about 20% longer).
1f60c|2 years ago
Shavian alphabet https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/
Which has similar goals
marttt|2 years ago
I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!
ossicones|2 years ago
csa|2 years ago
Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive?
One can always hope…
Omin|2 years ago
There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly).
Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that. One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.
killerstorm|2 years ago
I have most success with nibs which are very smooth but stubby. TWSBI Diamond 580 with 1.1 mm stub nib worked best for me, but it takes bottled ink.
bathyspheric|2 years ago
The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.
dsr_|2 years ago
supersrdjan|2 years ago
riffraff|2 years ago
But she never seemed to actually use it later in her life (she still touch typed tho!).
I wonder how useful shorthand is in these days when cheap recording devices are available in everyone's pocket.
Maybe people who keep hand written diaries still use it?
Steve44|2 years ago
It's a fantastic skill but so rare to see these days, it was mainly used by secretaries dictating notes to then type up I think. Now we are our own typists, it's largely relegated to history.
kstrauser|2 years ago
patch_collector|2 years ago
jbosh|2 years ago
gumby|2 years ago
Classic shorthand has never worked for me as it records the sound rather than the semantics. This is reasonable as a way to time delay dictation (when you read the shorthand you hear the sound in your head, so you type as if you were hearing the person speaking in realtime). But when I read I don't hear any sounds, so this would be like listening to the person speak, which defeats all the advantages of reading.
lelandbatey|2 years ago
kfarr|2 years ago
jhbadger|2 years ago
ukuina|2 years ago
sieste|2 years ago
smeej|2 years ago
Trying to write as fast as an average person speaks makes it very hard to do anything else, like be an attentive conversation partner, but scribbling some notes down in shorthand so you can return to them later is really useful.
supersrdjan|2 years ago
It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines.
And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.
flandish|2 years ago
BeetleB|2 years ago
drewcsillag|2 years ago
Orthic has some of that, but not to the extent of Gregg.
Roark66|2 years ago
zimpenfish|2 years ago
[1] https://textware.com/fitaly/ofkey.htm
[2] https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php
Semaphor|2 years ago
dartharva|2 years ago
maksimur|2 years ago
LAC-Tech|2 years ago
So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel.
Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.
Sakos|2 years ago
argiopetech|2 years ago
It's definitely faster, but it's a steep learning curve.
For a slightly easier learning curve, I suggest ASETNIOP - https://asetniop.com/. The are/were keyboards built with a single row (maybe + thumb keys) that speak ASETNIOP, but I can't seem to find any at the moment.
TurboHaskal|2 years ago