Guest Wed Jul 16, 2008 2:40 pm GMT:
<<why should one phoneme--'s'--be given so much special attention?
is there also an analogous way of handling 'tt' with a new letter?
how about 'nn'?
>>
Guest, ever heard of stenography or shorthand?
In German, it's called Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift or Deutsche Einheitsstenographie, adopted in 1910.
Here are some of its principles (there may be some exeptions, too):
There are no capital letters. If someone writes Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift, he or she isn't concerned with capitalisation at all, even not at the beginning of a sentence and also not in proper nouns. But well, you can denote a capital by putting a horizontal bar below the stenographic shape.
You don't write double vowels.
You don't write double consonants.
Consider the following German words:
her = (hin und her = to and fro)
Heer = army
Herr = gent, gentleman, lord, master, mister, sir
So, applying that rules you would get
her --> her
Heer --> her
Herr --> her
In most of the cases, you would surely distinguisch them by context. But that's not the way Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift works.
The stenographical shape of the letter h is like the number 2 without the horizontal bar below.
The letter e is denoted by a short junktion line between two other shapes. (Here, between the low end of the h and the upper left point of the r.)
The letter r looks like the lower half of a backslash.
her is a stenographic abbreviation (Kürzel) denoted by the letter h
Heer is written ''her'' in stenographic shapes
Herr is written ''he(rr)'' in stenograpic shapes
I use (rr) here to denote that there is a special stenographic shape for double r, which looks like an entire backslash. So (rr) looks similar to r, but has doube height.
There are three exeptions to the third principle mentioned above: You have special shapes for
ss = ß (looks similar to the capital letter O)
ll (double l, looks like two connected loops without a white spot in the middle of the loops, i.e. like two connected dots)
rr (looks like a backslash)
So, how to write the compound Tierreich=animal kingdom in Stenography?
No, you don't use (rr)! You write ''tir'', go back to the base line because the i (and it's just an i because i = ie in Kurzschrift) is denoted by a junktion line from the lowest point of the t (which looks like a slash, but less inclined) to the upper left point of the r, which is shiftet upwards half the higth of the distance of the base line to the upper line, then have a little space between it and write ''reich''. You can't use (rr) because each r belongs to another word.
I actually have no exemple why it is necessary to have double l either, but it will be fun to discover it some day.
According to my stenography teacher, the shape of the s (similar to the small letter o) is choosen for good reasons. The shape o (or a little circle) is a shape where you can easily connect other shapes at any position. Thats because in German, s often occurs as Fugen-s on the junction of two compound words, see:
Interessensgemeinschaft
Interessengemeinschaft would be correct, too, but I prefer the form with Fugen-s because it sounds more natural and is much easier to pronounce.
Interessen = interests pl.
Gemeinschaft = alliance, association, collective, companionship
The stenographic n looks like a tilde on the base line. If you write Interessensgemeinschaft, the n and the s come very close and -- you must admit, the circle fits well into the last part of the tilde.
If you want to write the word erst = first, primal, not until in stenography, the r and the s are not wirtten separatly but melt together
in the way that the r is shifted a little upwards and ends up in the circle.
If you want to write hin as in hin und her (to and fro), you melt the shape of stenographic h with the tilde, which denotes n. The resulting shape looks like the number 2 but the bar below replaced by a tilde. It is also a Kürzel.
If you want to write selbst = self, in person in stenography, you don't write it out letter by letter, because its a Kürzel. You must learn it. Kürzels are often derived by a special process: Take some outstanding letters of the word you want to derive a Kürzel for, and melt them somehow together. Applied to selbst, you take the s and the t (here, its another kind of t called Aufstrich-t, because it's preceeded by an s and not at the beginning of a word), append that t to the point where the s ends, and clip it a little.
Stenography if full of processes like that. And you complain about how the ß is derived?
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