VMs: RE: More shorthand trivia

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxx>]

As meager as shorthand history is, there is a reason for it
apparently.  Shorthand first appeared as a series of hundreds of
"notes", a system that had a glyph or symbol for each word.  The
Tironian notes were the Christian answer, and were later expanded
to some 8,000 symbols.  Several of these, including the
andpersand, are still in use.

Shorthand was outlawed twice by the church as "demonic" or
"diabolical", and shorthand works promptly destroyed, leaving
gaping holes in its history.  This happened once under the Pope
and Roman Emperor Justinian, (527-565 C.E.), and again under the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, (1194-1250 C.E.).  During the
Dark Ages, reports of shorthand are sporadic, but it did survive
in one form or another.

Interestingly enough for our purposes, one has to look carefully
at the period between 1450 and 1535 to begin to understand the
revival of shorthand.  This ties strongly to a revival of ancient
languages, which reached its peak around 1535-1540.  Most
historians have focused on the revival of the Greek tongue and the
move away from monotone Latin, but shorthand falls into this
artistic revival.  An unestablished fact is that the dates for all
major revivals roughly coincide with the invention of the printing
press.

Shorthand first resurfaces officially with Timothy Bright's
publication, which is not so much an alphabet as a collection of
hundreds of symbols used to denote different words.  This is
probably in keeping with the Tironian tradition, but it seems that
there were other more modern forces at work as well.

As early as 1602, we see two alphabets emerging, interestingly
enough from religious men.  (All early shorthand systems came from
men with heavily religious training and affiliations.)  The
alphabets are similar, although some character assignments are
switched in places, and the system of connection of notes is
different.  I cannot discover whether Bright taught his system
outside the university, although he did receive a royal patent for
his "invention".  In 1602 Peter Bales makes mention that he is
teaching his system from his house.  Willis and Shelton also
taught their systems from their houses.  Bright's "patent" would
have allowed him to profit from the teaching of his system,
barring any other to teach it.

For someone as early as 1602 to be teaching a fully developed
system outside a scholastic environment (for profit) as his own
invention goes against my understanding of the advancement of
technology.  I've tended to focus on the particulars in order to
understand the roots, as nothing appears uniquely, in and of
itself, without a history.  If it did, we'd have direct proof of
captured UFO's and alien visitations!

Bright's system was probably not copied because of his exclusive
patent, something he probably should not have sought after.
Instead, two systems emerge, most interestingly, with different
alphabet configurations.  Those that prefer one assignment are
Cantabridgians, those preferring the other assignment Oxfordians.
I'll not speculate further on the implications of this statement.

German, French, and Italian systems did not appear in print until
well after the English publications.  The only way to fill in the
blanks on any of this is to study rare shorthand manuscripts,
looking for anything that would lead one to formulate an alphabet
based on the characters in question.

My problem here is that I've found several characters that
directly relate to an emerging Cantabridgian, system, and the
implication that the emerging Oxfordian system was not congruent
causes me to speculate that existing personal systems outside
England were more divergent than those between two well connected
universities.

It's food for thought, but it all needs much more detailed
research before "going to press".

GC