Word frequency in shorthand

[igenlode]

While obediently learning my General Contractions (now up to paragraph 188 of 200 in Pitman's Shorthand Instructor!) in order to be able to do the exercises, I can't help asking myself if the language can really have changed that much since this textbook was published in 1913: was there ever a time when shorthand writers truly, desperately needed to write 'constitutional', 'ironmonger', 'bondsman' or 'dethronement' on a daily basis, such that words like these were provided with dedicated short forms as part of Pitman's shorthand scheme?

Some of the weirder inclusions make sense when you realise that a significant proportion of shorthand usage in the Victorian era consisted of taking down sermon texts -- either while their author was in the throes of composition or as a record after they were preached -- and the utility of including common words like 'there', 'over', 'happen', 'must', etc. is obvious. But I honestly cannot see why anyone would ever take the trouble to fill the necessarily limited list of General Contractions with obscurities like 'minstrel' when they could instead have provided shortcuts for words such as 'obvious'...

Comments

[pedanther]

One possibility that comes to mind is that the word choices are based on a survey of actual sermons to see what words came up frequently, which would then be subject to the vocabulary whims of the sermons' author(s). (Particularly if they used only one author's sermons.)

Have you ever read a novel called The Shakespeare Thief? It's about a boy in Elizabethan England who was taught shorthand so he could record sermons, who is then hired by an unscrupulous theatre producer to help bootleg Shakespeare's plays.

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

Was there shorthand in Elizabethan England?

(There was certainly shorthand long before Pitman, but I wouldn't have thought enough people were literate -- or the pens good enough -- to make it worthwhile coming up with a formalised shorthand scheme back in the 1500s.)

[pedanther]

In the novel - which I misremembered the title of; it's The Shakespeare Stealer - the shorthand the boy uses is the idiosyncratic personal invention of the clergyman who taught it to him, and they're the only people who know it.

The author may have been using the old "it was invented early, didn't catch on, and was forgotten by history" trick for the sake of the plot.

And he used a pencil; or rather, a plumbago stylus, pencils as we know them not having been invented yet.

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

Makes sense, indicating that the author had given some thought to the details of the plot and period!

(And there were a lot of private shorthands that never caught on or have been forgotten, Pepys' diary being the most famous: long assumed to have been written in a private code, it is now known to have been written in a common naval shorthand of the period.)