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?
