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Show ANCIENTS HAD SHORTHAND The System Used by Old Romans and Hebrews Was Not Based on Phonetics Pho-netics Like Ours "We are told in a recent story, that not only the Romans, but the ancient Hebrews, possessed fine systems of stenography, and that public men took stenographers with them wherever wher-ever they went. This is not true in any strict sense, the New York Mail states. The ancient Romans and Hebrews had systems of shorthand, but not all stenography. Their shorthand short-hand consisted of abbreviations, the use of letters for words, the introduction introduc-tion of arbitrary systems, and that kind of things. No system of phonetic phonet-ic stenography, such as we have at the present day, in which a fluent character represents a certain sound, and in accordance ac-cordance with which the sounds of human hu-man speech can be transcribed as they are uttered, was known to the ancients. an-cients. The shorthand system invented invent-ed by Giro, the secretary of Cicero, is well known; it has no phonetic basis. ba-sis. Two amanuenses were necessary neces-sary to keep up with a speaker, and there are even tales that Caesar kept six amanuenses going at once. It is certainly a long jump from that to the handy girl of today, whose swift pencil pen-cil easily keeps up with a man's utterances. ut-terances. Few people at the present day have any Just or correct understanding of phonetics. The average person confuses con-fuses the names of a letter of the alphabet al-phabet with the sound which it is sup-ppsed sup-ppsed to represent, fails to distinguish between diphthongs like long "i" and the simple vowel sounds, and in many ways betrays the fact that he is quite without a phonetic sense. The teaching teach-ing of stenography has spread a knowledge of phonetics, and in the long run must produce a much more general realization of the ridiculousness ridiculous-ness and wastefulness of our present system of spelling the English language. |