At 11:56 10/15/2001, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>I may have overstated the case. It was probably a Zeitgeist
>thing, rather than a direct derivation. James Evans invented
>the orginal set of aboriginal syllabics in the 1830's.
>Isaac Pitman developed his system in 1837 in England,
>and it spread to the U.S. through his brother Benn, who
>moved to Cincinnati.
>
>There are some similarities, in the use of straight lines
>or semicircular arcs (rather than the cursive elliptic
>arcs later introduced by Gregg in this system), and in the
>use of dots (or dashes) to indicate vowelling.
Further to my previous comment regarding the Rossville webpage, if you
examine the photograph showing a detail of the 1841 Cree hymnary, you'll
note that Evan's original scheme for indicating long vowels did not involve
diacritic marks but, rather incising a line through the syllable. This
enabled him to indicate long vowels without cutting additional matrices,
since he could simply file a number of the existing sorts. It would be
interesting to see if a direct connection could be made between the later
addition of diacritic marks and knowledge of Pitman or other shorthand systems.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.
- Harry Carter
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