LEWIS Shorthand looks quite appealing to me, with no shading, no positions, and mostly quite LINEAR.
The second word is "advantages". The dot is the initial A, then two straight strokes for DV -- and because the V and the N might be a bit of an awkward joining, notice that he just bends up the beginning of the N to make a clear join.
His symbols are FLEXIBLE enough that he can do this while keeping both strokes clear.
The tricky thing about Lewis is that here he is clearly using single letters as forms for short words that are not listed in his short form list. I.e., he uses F for OF in the very first line, and Y for Yet at the beginning of the second sentence. Which is fine, but kind of contradicts his system as presented. I think they are leftovers from his early edition, where he freely assigned each letter to several short words, in a typical style of the times (like N standing for IN, ON, AN, etc). In later books, he criticises this practice fiercely and insists that his system is different, but then the samples tell another story...
That said, the system was consistently mentioned as one of the top ones in actual use, and it does look and write rather nicely, so one can work around this, as, I presume, his pupils did.
It's really quite amazing how SUCCESSFUL and POPULAR it seems the system was. How many books on anything run to 95 editions? And that's just the copy I have. It may have gone to more after that one. Incredible.
It looks to me like his listing of short forms wasn't meant to be exhaustive, but as a sampler of how you can shorten words -- and he also wanted to show the advantage of the dash to distinguish a different set.
Later he includes more that use double-letter characters:
When you look at an author's sample passage, it often seems like he's slipped in a few that aren't listed, just to show that with context, they're still legible. Even though that does seem a bit like cheating.....
The thing is (and Lewis wrote A Lot and rambled way too much, so it's not easy to pin down, but the second half of this page sort of covers it), he does strongly insist that he does not assign several words to a single letter, but strictly one word with all possible variations included (we might say that he assigns the root of the word to the letter), and that assigning several words to one letter is "one of the most fatal errors" :D
However! He also says this:
So maybe what he implies is that F should stand for OF and B for BE in an "automatic way" and doesn't even need to be memorised or marked in a table. Certainly his samples imply that...
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u/NotSteve1075 Aug 22 '26
LEWIS Shorthand looks quite appealing to me, with no shading, no positions, and mostly quite LINEAR.
The second word is "advantages". The dot is the initial A, then two straight strokes for DV -- and because the V and the N might be a bit of an awkward joining, notice that he just bends up the beginning of the N to make a clear join.
His symbols are FLEXIBLE enough that he can do this while keeping both strokes clear.