Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/150

* SHORTHAND. 116 SHORTHAND. ate the advantages that he claimed. Each letter of his alphabet could be written in four direc- tions, as follows: i/_. The first letter alone of a word was written out ; by adding to this dif- ferent terminations, different words would be ex- pressed, and each of these words was to be com- mitted to memory. Thus: I abound, and t about; J accept, and t accuse; J advance, and t air; J again, and <) age; J all, and 1. almost; ^ also, an<l t, altlioiq/h. Three dozen other words were made by giving the letter the other slopes indicated; thus: -~ alter, and -' am; -' amend, and — anger, etc. In this way, 864 words could be constructed out of the letters of the alphabet, and each must be committed to memory. Tliis set makes up the author's 'Char- acteric Table,' as he calls it. Then we have 28 pages of "appellatine" or synonymous words, with a certain short mark on one side of each letter; placing this on the opposite side reverses the meaning, giving us the antonyms; as -I abandon, but I- retain or keep. One sign also is made to stand for all synonymous words, such as veracity, iruthfulness, sincerity, etc. Following this list again comes a "Table of English Yords," filling ISO pages more, all to be 'learned by heart.' In 1000 Peter Bales brought out a system similar in some respects to Bright's, but which was no easier for the memory. Bales called his system 'brachygraphy.' The next system tlxat indicated progress ap- peared twelve years later, by .John Willis, and was called "The Art of Stenography, or short writing by Spelling Characterie." That is, spelling out the w-ords and joining the letters, instead of mak- ing every word an arbitrary sign to be committed to memory. This was the first real stenographic alphabet for shorthand, and a decided advance be- yond Bright. The advance, indeed, was such that the author sincerely believed he had reached the goal, in spite of the many drawbacks in the cumbrous letters, and in the large omissions neces- sary to secure any degree of brevity, and the still larger number of indispensable arbitraries. The art nevertheless did not stand still, and even during his lifetime Edmond Willis had an- nounced the device of separating the vowels from the consonants, and placing them around the strokes in different positions, so that they might be written or not according to need and oppor- tunity. During the following twenty-five years, about ten publications appeared, each with new char- acteristics, but the only one that gained any lasting reputation was that of Jeremiah IJich 'in 1654, entitled Semigraphy, or Art's Raritt^. It is better known by a later title. The Pen's Dex- terity. Rich's shorthand continued to be pub- lished with sliglit changes for at least 150 years. There is no very striking advance in Rich's system beyond some of the previous systems ; such awkward forms as h h, y y, z z still appear in the alphabet, and it included over 300 pure arbitraries. The Book of Psalms and the whole of the New Testament were engraved at great expense in Rich's system. Contemporaneous with it, some dozen systems appeared, many of them quite different in the structure of the alphabet, but no new principle of worth was evolved. The best of these, and the one that obtained most celebrity, was that of William Mason, first pub- lished in 1672. The alphabet of Mason's first edition follows Rich's alphabet closely; but that of the third edition y vowels according to their places (three beside the strokes) ; by consonants single, double, or treble; or by prepositions or terminations. (2) Symbolical sliorthand, which uses natural marks for words and sentences — a kind of image visible to represent the words. (3) Deficient writing, when some part of a word stands for the whole, as 06 for abbreviate or abbreviation, etc. (4) Arbitrary characters — small marks or dots made at pleasure for some words in frequent use which cannot be made so short by the letters of the alphabet. There are no less than 423 of these symbolical and arbitrary characters to learn. But Mason's great discovery was the use of the circle as a duplicate form for the letter s, which has been continued in the structure of some of the most successful systems to the present day. The last edition of Mason's system is the foun- dation of the famous Gurney system, which was first published by Thomas Gurney in 1751, and which obtained its fame, not so much from any special merit that it possessed as from the cir- cumstance that Mr. Gurney obtained an appoint- ment from the Government as its shorthand writ- er — an appointment that has descended with the Gurney family to this day, giving them a monop- oly of publishing the debates of the Commons, though much the larger proportion of their staff now use the Isaac Pitman system. During the latter part of the eighteenth cen- tur.v, and wliile tliese last-named systems were in use, some fifty others were issued, none of which made any important place for itself in shorthand history except Byrom's, Taylor's, and Mavor's. Byrom (1767) seems to have had more regard for the ease and gracefulness with which his letters were formed and united than for brevity of style; and in order to attain this ob- ject, he employed duplicate forms for a number of his letters, and even a triplicate in the case of I, as will be seen by a reference to his alphabet in Table I. Still using the old unphonetic vowel scale, he represented the five vowels by dots placed in order beside the strokes, but arranged in the case of curved horizontals in a manner that appears strange to a modern writer; thus: >,^j> an, en. in, on, un. Taylor (1786), appar- ently making brevity his first and sole aim, discarded all medial vowels, but used a dot occa- sionally to indicate the presence of any open or sounded vowel at the beginning or end of a word. He says: "Some have characters to represent all the vowels, which they use in conunon, as in other writing, namely, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of words. But this kind of writing ought not to come under the denomi- nation of shorthand," etc. Taylor also aban- doned the use of all arbitrary characters. At later dates, Harding and Odell, having an eye to legibility as well as to brevity, modified Tay- lor's vowel principle; the former using a dot and a dash according to position with regard to the letter, as 'I at, let, .1 it, 'I ol, "i vt ; and the lat- ter employing a different sign for each vowel without regard to position, as J at, ^ et, i it, "1 at, ^ ut, <i aut, 4 out. In neither case, however, were these vowel signs generally in-