From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Sep 20 2004 - 18:41:22 CDT
Incidentally, for those interested, the website of the National
Court Reporters Association has a brief history of
shorthand (skewed of course to the English language-based
developments):
http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/shorthand.shtml
A summary of the development of the Stenograph machine that
largely displaced shorthand in professional contexts:
http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/machine.shtml
And a discussion of Computer Assisted Transcription (CAT),
the technology which has since displaced the Stenograph
in almost all contexts:
http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/CAT.shtml
CAT is what most courtroom reporters now use and what
makes realtime captioning for TV possible, for example.
In part it is this trajectory which makes shorthand encoding
in Unicode a matter of historical anachronism, and why
there are no real application vendors battering down the
Unicode Consortium doors for a Unicode encoding. All the
serious users of shorthand long ago abandoned it for a
computer-assisted technology that combines rapid keying
systems with dictionary lookup for realtime transcription
into normal text. In such systems there is no need to
"encode" shorthand as Unicode characters.
--Ken
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