Pitman Shorthand Cheat Sheet

Posted by Roger Keays, 1 March 2009, 6:12 PM

Some time last year a customer who runs a Pitman Shorthand course in Brisbane contacted me. Shorthand is really fascinating and, without knowing it, it was my first real introduction to linguistics because the whole system is phonetic. I had found one of the original Pitman shorthand books in the restricted section of the library at UQ. It was so old that the pages were falling apart - kind of exciting, like a lost art.

It's hard to find shorthand books these days, but I've managed to collect a few - even some reading books. One of the really weird things about reading shorthand is you can read the authors accent (usually British).

Here's a shorthand cheat sheet that I put together for a bit of fun, and just in case all those books disappear one day.

Comment posted by: simon on 8 May 2010, 8:11 PM

In the vowels section what does the symbol mean do they mean the word or the thing in brackets?

Comment posted by: Roger Keays on 8 May 2010, 8:29 PM

The symbols are the IPA representation of the vowel. The words are examples which use that vowel. To learn more about IPA, check wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA

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