Classical antiquity The earliest known indication of shorthand systems is from the
Parthenon in
Ancient Greece, where a mid-4th century BC inscribed marble slab was found. This shows a writing system primarily based on vowels, using certain modifications to indicate consonants.
Hellenistic tachygraphy is reported from the 2nd century BC onwards, though there are indications that it might be older. The oldest datable reference is a contract from
Middle Egypt, stating that
Oxyrhynchos allows the "semeiographer" Apollonios two years to be taught shorthand writing. Hellenistic tachygraphy consisted of word stem signs and word ending signs. Over time, many syllabic signs were developed. In
Ancient Rome,
Marcus Tullius Tiro (103–4 BC), a slave and later a
freedman of
Cicero, developed the
Tironian notes so that he could write down Cicero's speeches.
Plutarch in his "Life of Cato the Younger" (95–46 BC) records that Cicero, during a trial of some insurrectionists in the senate, employed several expert rapid writers, whom he had taught to make figures comprising numerous words in a few short strokes, to preserve Cato's speech on this occasion. The Tironian notes consisted of
Latin word stem abbreviations (
notae) and of word ending abbreviations (
titulae). The original Tironian notes consisted of about 4,000 signs, but new signs were introduced, so that their number increased to as many as 13,000. In order to have a less complex writing system, a syllabic shorthand script was sometimes used. After the
decline of the Roman Empire, the Tironian notes were no longer used to transcribe speeches, though they were still known and taught, particularly during the
Carolingian Renaissance. After the 11th century, however, they were mostly forgotten. When many
monastery libraries were
secularized in the course of the 16th-century
Protestant Reformation, long-forgotten manuscripts of Tironian notes were rediscovered.
Imperial China 's
Treatise on Calligraphy, an example of cursive writing of Chinese characters In imperial
China, clerks used an abbreviated, highly cursive form of
Chinese characters to record court proceedings and criminal confessions. These records were used to create more formal transcripts. One cornerstone of imperial court proceedings was that all confessions had to be acknowledged by the accused's signature, personal seal, or thumbprint, requiring fast writing. Versions of this technique survived in
clerical professions into the modern day and, influenced by Western shorthand methods, some new methods were invented.
Europe and North America An interest in shorthand or "short-writing" developed towards the end of the 16th century in England. In 1588,
Timothy Bright published his
Characterie; An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character which introduced a system with 500 arbitrary symbols each representing one word. Bright's book was followed by a number of others, including Peter Bales'
The Writing Schoolemaster in 1590, John Willis's
Art of Stenography in 1602, Edmond Willis's
An abbreviation of writing by character in 1618, and
Thomas Shelton's
Short Writing in 1626 (later re-issued as
Tachygraphy). Shelton's system became very popular and is well known because it was used by
Samuel Pepys for his diary and for many of his official papers, such as his letter copy books. It was also used by
Isaac Newton in some of his notebooks. Shelton borrowed heavily from his predecessors, especially Edmond Willis. Each consonant was represented by an arbitrary but simple symbol, while the five vowels were represented by the relative positions of the surrounding consonants. Thus the symbol for B with symbol for T drawn directly above it represented "bat", while B with T below it meant "but"; top-right represented "e", middle-right "i", and lower-right "o". A vowel at the end of a word was represented by a dot in the appropriate position, while there were additional symbols for initial vowels. This basic system was supplemented by further symbols representing common prefixes and suffixes. One drawback of Shelton's system was that there was no way to distinguish long and short vowels or diphthongs; so the b-a-t sequence could mean "bat", or "bait", or "bate", while b-o-t might mean "boot", or "bought", or "boat". The reader needed to use the context to work out which alternative was meant. The main advantage of the system was that it was easy to learn and to use. It was popular, and under the two titles of
Short Writing and
Tachygraphy, Shelton's book ran to more than 20 editions between 1626 and 1710. Shelton's chief rivals were
Theophilus Metcalfe's
Stenography or
Short Writing (1633) which was in its "55th edition" by 1721, and
Jeremiah Rich's system of 1654, which was published under various titles including
The penns dexterity compleated (1669). Rich's system was used by
George Treby chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Secrecy investigating the
Popish Plot. Another English shorthand system creator of the 17th century was William Mason (
fl. 1672–1709) who published
Arts Advancement in 1682. , inventor of a German shorthand system, with a sample of his shorthand Modern-looking geometric shorthand was introduced with
John Byrom's
New Universal Shorthand of 1720.
Samuel Taylor published a
similar system in 1786, These shorthand systems later became widely used in administrative offices, parliamentary reporting, and stenographic training institutions in several English-speaking countries.
Thomas Gurney published
Brachygraphy in the mid-18th century. In 1834 in
Germany,
Franz Xaver Gabelsberger published his
Gabelsberger shorthand. Gabelsberger based his shorthand on the shapes used in German cursive handwriting rather than on the geometrical shapes that were common in the English stenographic tradition. shorthand shorthand Taylor's system was superseded by
Pitman shorthand, introduced in 1837 by English teacher
Isaac Pitman, and improved many times since. Pitman's system uses a
phonemic orthography. For this reason, it is sometimes known as
phonography, meaning "sound writing" in Greek. One of the reasons this system allows fast transcription is that
vowel sounds are optional when only consonants are needed to determine a word. The availability of a full range of vowel symbols, however, makes complete accuracy possible. Isaac's brother Benn Pitman, who lived in
Cincinnati, Ohio, introduced the method to America. The record for fast writing with Pitman shorthand is 350
wpm during a two-minute test by Nathan Behrin in 1922. In the United States and some other parts of the world, Pitman was largely superseded by
Gregg shorthand, which was first published in 1888 by
John Robert Gregg. This system was influenced by the handwriting shapes of Gabelsberger. Gregg's shorthand, like Pitman's, is phonetic, but has the simplicity of being "light-line." Pitman's system uses thick and thin strokes to distinguish related sounds, while Gregg's uses only thin strokes and makes some of the same distinctions by the length of the stroke. In fact, Gregg claimed joint authorship in another shorthand system published in pamphlet form by one Thomas Stratford Malone; Malone, however, claimed sole authorship and a legal battle ensued. The two systems use very similar, if not identical, symbols; however, these symbols represent different sounds. For instance, on page 10 of the manual is the word d i m 'dim'; however, in the Gregg system, the spelling would actually mean n u k or 'nook'.
Andrew J. Graham was a phonotypist during the period between the emergence of Pitman's and Gregg's systems. In 1854 he published a short-lived (only 9 issues) phonotypy journal called
The Cosmotype, subtitled
"devoted to that which will entertain usefully, instruct, and improve humanity", and several other monographs about phonography. In 1857 he published his own Pitman-like "Graham's Brief Longhand" that saw wide adoption in the United States in the late 19th century. In his youth,
Woodrow Wilson mastered the Graham system and even corresponded with Graham in Graham. Throughout his life, Wilson continued to develop and employ his own Graham system writing, to the point that by the 1950s, when the Graham method had all but disappeared, Wilson scholars had trouble interpreting his shorthand. In 1960 an 84-year-old anachronistic shorthand expert Clifford Gehman managed to crack Wilson's shorthand, demonstrating on a translation of Wilson's acceptance speech for the 1912 presidential nomination.
Japan There are several other pen shorthands in use (Ishimura, Iwamura, Kumassaki, Kotani, and Nissokuken), leading to a total of nine pen shorthands in use. In addition, there is the Yamane pen shorthand (of unknown importance) and three machine shorthands systems (Speed Waapuro, Caver and Hayatokun or sokutaipu). The machine shorthands have gained some ascendancy over the pen shorthands. Japanese shorthand systems ('sokki' shorthand or 'sokkidou' stenography) commonly use a syllabic approach, much like the common writing system for Japanese (which has actually two syllabaries in everyday use). There are several semi-cursive systems. Most follow a left-to-right, top-to-bottom writing direction. Several systems incorporate a loop into many of the strokes, giving the appearance of Gregg, Graham, or Cross's Eclectic shorthand without actually functioning like them. The Kotani (aka Same-Vowel-Same-Direction or SVSD or V-type) system's strokes frequently cross over each other and in so doing form loops. Japanese also has its own variously cursive form of writing kanji characters, the most extremely simplified of which is known as
Sōsho. The two Japanese syllabaries are themselves adapted from the Chinese characters: both of the syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, are in everyday use alongside the Chinese characters known as kanji; the kanji, being developed in parallel to the Chinese characters, have their own idiosyncrasies, but Chinese and Japanese ideograms are largely comprehensible, even if their use in the languages are not the same. Prior to the Meiji era, Japanese did not have its own shorthand (the kanji did have their own abbreviated forms borrowed alongside them from China). Takusari Kooki was the first to give classes in a new Western-style non-ideographic shorthand of his own design, emphasis being on the non-ideographic and new. This was the first shorthand system adapted to writing phonetic Japanese, all other systems prior being based on the idea of whole or partial semantic ideographic writing like that used in the Chinese characters, and the phonetic approach being mostly peripheral to writing in general. Even today, Japanese writing uses the syllabaries to pronounce or spell out words, or to indicate grammatical words.
Furigana are written alongside kanji, or Chinese characters, to indicate their pronunciation especially in juvenile publications. Furigana are usually written using the hiragana syllabary; foreign words may not have a kanji form and are spelled out using katakana. The new sokki were used to transliterate popular vernacular story-telling theater (yose) of the day. This led to a thriving industry of sokkibon (shorthand books). The ready availability of the stories in book form, and higher rates of literacy (which the very industry of sokkibon may have helped create, due to these being oral classics that were already known to most people) may also have helped kill the yose theater, as people no longer needed to see the stories performed in person to enjoy them. Sokkibon also allowed a whole host of what had previously been mostly oral rhetorical and narrative techniques into writing, such as imitation of dialect in conversations (which can be found back in older gensaku literature; but gensaku literature used conventional written language in between conversations, however).
Korea Shorthand for the native Korean alphabet
Hangul saw limited use before the 1945
liberation of Korea. It only began to see practical use after that. Various systems were developed in the 1940s and 1950s. After the 1948 establishment of South Korea, the
National Assembly had its stenographers adopt a variety of styles. In 1969, the
parliamentary style Hangul shorthand () was developed and became the widespread standard, although other standards continued to be used. The need for Hangul shorthand faded with the rise of computerized stenography in the 1990s.
Oceania In
New Zealand, cleric
Herbert W. Williams produced a book for writing
Māori shorthand in 1896. == Classification ==