From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Sep 21 2004 - 07:44:58 CDT
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> At 18:50 -0400 2004-09-20, Ernest Cline wrote:
>
>>From a logical point of view, wouldn't shorthands fit better in the
>>Notational systems (1D000..1FFFD ) superblock than in the African and
>>other syllabic scripts ( 11800..11FFF) superblock ?
>
> Please understand: it doesn't matter.
I agree, but many shorthand systems are not notations, but really some
hybrid form of phonetic symbols and abbreviations of real words or parts of
words such as common prefixes and suffixes.
I talked about the shorthand used in France because it is a *standard* which
was officially taught for decennials within public schools, and recognized
professionally (today this is no more required) and that is still taught
today in some private training courses. Many books have been published about
it, but they are old (most often published in the 60's or early 70's) and
hard to find today, or expensive. You can find them in public libraries or
in some schools, that have difficulties to get new prints (so photocopies
are used, sometimes with poor quality).
There's apparently a need to renew the script by prividing it on Internet
courses and publications, using a standard form (with caligraphic quality)
that can be easily and coherently produced in a way which is not just a scan
of handwritten paper, with lots of variations across writers (something that
does not help recognizing the script for learners).
If there was a way to recreate new courses with modern technologies to
publish low-cost educational materials, such shorthand could be taught at
low price to many students for their own notes. Traditionally this script
was taught to secretaries, whose work has considerably evolved since
computers have appeared everywhere on their desktop.
There are still too many oral meetings where it is hard to find concrete and
complete conclusions, because the summaries produced after them are not
covering the past discussions. This creates additional costs because people
need to rediscuss things that were already discussed or even decided in past
meetings. To limit this cost, people are now required to come at meetings
with precomposed documents containing all their arguments. They come with
their own "final" conclusion fixed on their papers, and live negociation and
agreement become hard to find in these meetings, where most people read
their own paper that they don't want to rework after the meeting.
Once again, many problems would be avoided if meetings were more open to
discussions, and each proposal evaluated orally. Shorthand scripting would
help people take precise notes, and produce later a better document whose
content would be easier to agree upon by participants. Shorthand skills is
still a precious thing for anyone that participate to many work meetings or
brain-stormings. It would be useful also when negociating commercial
contracts, or to accelerate those meetings (without needing to wait that
everyone has finished taking his notes), notably during stressed situations
where lots of things are discussed and many things forgotten before their
application (people's memory can fail). More generally, shorthand skills by
participants avoids much unuseful papers produced before and after meetings.
I do not consider shorthand as a notation but really as a script, which, to
be useful, must be readable with a good standardization level. The existence
of such rules inner to that script qualify it as a true linguistic tool
which goes further than just a simple semi-private notational system. The
existence of training books (even if they are now old, like Foucher's one
that speaks about a complete and simplified system) or training courses that
persist today are proofs that it merits encoding to facilitate its teaching
to more people at lower costs. Puting such script into an encoding is
possible today, now that Unicode renderers have considerably evolved to
support scripts with compex shaping and layout mechanisms like Indo-Arabic
ones.
So we have capable renderers, but lack of encoding; the next step to have
one would be to have fonts made for them. But is it possible to create such
fonts without adding the encoding first, because of the way renderers can
work with complex scripts?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Sep 21 2004 - 07:46:46 CDT