[warning:LONG] thoughts on encoding density and ambiguity, pen and stenotype, in a verbatim context

• steno-dictionaries

  3 81 7.9 JSON

  Di's Plover-theory stenography dictionaries used by Typey Type for Stenographers.

Of course, having a specific vernacular might reduce the effective number of states. Each chord in stenotype at the basic level can be considered to consist of a initial consonant cluster, vowel, and final consonant cluster. To make the problem simpler, let's just consider the left hand consonant cluster with 7 consonant keys ==> 2**7=128 states. Certain consonant clusters will never occur at the beginning of words in a given linguistic context. For the start of American English words, I can think of (7 single keys) S,T,K,P,W,H,R, (16 single consonant chords) "b,d,f,g,j,l,m,n,qu,l,v,y,z,ch,ch,th/θ,ð" (15 clusters) "sh,st,str,st,pr,pl,br,bl,skr,kr,kl,gr,gl,dr,fr,fl" for the beginning of words. This is 38 states that would need to be put into something that could be done in the speed of a stroke, just to represent the first consonant/consonant cluster and without any vowel or final consonant cluster. It leaves an additional 128-38=90 states available for disambiguating/briefing purposes. Perhaps a pen shorthand system based on stenotype could actually ignore most states beyond these 38, except for a very small briefing set? Are most of these states left idle? It seems not. Analyzing https://github.com/didoesdigital/steno-dictionaries/blob/master/dictionaries/dict.json shows that 119 of 128 left-hand states are actually used in this dictionary, so yes, this space of 128 states does largely get used at this by this steno dictionary. 41 left-hand states have over 100 entries, and many of the less common ones are devoted to briefs/phrases. Thus, left-hand SKP can be used safely as a brief for "and". Left hand STW is used as a component of for "situation", "steering wheel", "storm watch", "start with". SPWR, which would be read as S-B-R is used as "inter-", "enter", a generalization of SPW used to brief "ent","int". On first blush, I would probably never want touch a pen shorthand that briefed "SB" to "ent/int", but that's just my own preference.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project