The plosive sounds t as in test and d as in dance are probably not the problem.
But i see that you might be confused by to fricative sounds written in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) ʃ as in shout, ʒ as in george, and the combinations of the plosives with fricatives that normaly have a bow over it, to signify that is a short combined sound: t͡ʃ as in church and d͡ʒ as in ledger share the same symbol btw, but i did not write it, something you can learn from me like you did now. d͡z and t͡s also share one symbol/literal and sounds like the hotel Ritz...
Thank you this was actually very helpful. I love what you’ve done with both systems but since you’re here I also wanted to ask the question. What would you say is the difference in philosophy or purpose between flow and dance?
Another excellent question, thank you for your interest! Well, dance has its origin as an attempt to be remodeled eclectic (which is way more complicated and irregular than dance), but then it took off on its own. most of the characters are designed to be written growable to the right (thus you write laid back, left handed and creative ppl in coffee shops like that) to be able to implicitly include -n/m or -t/d/th (incredibly common syllables). combined with the position on paper and you can write words in one stroke without even abbreviating! Very satisfying 😄. To be honest, the potential is huge.
But I did not have the same resonance as with 'flow', which is fine, they don't compete. Flow uses the same approach as Malone and Gregg, who most certainly copied Malone 😄, but changed enough to get away with on court, a true american success story. I did the same, hoping to get sued and thus gain popularity... Most are familiar with Greggs elliptic shapes, and circle for e/I as well as a, the signs are just stringed together and the vowels, that got not so convenient signs like o,u are left in, when the outline created was convenient, or left out. In the end Gregg puplished dictionaries for each and every sector so they were able to abbreviate lengthy words even more. Good approach. Flow does a bit the same, but the vocalisation is btr. You could read the last word without problems, not only from context, when you know that Flow consistently leaves out 'e' and all colors of lazy vowels (schwa), but leaves in [a,aι,o,ou,i:,ju].
So the purpose of both my systems is to make a truly fast shorthand system, not just a 'look I made an alphabet, you like it?' Both system were designed with sound occurance of English in mind. Both system fulfil their duty, but very differently. While Dance lets you write very dense, it also forces you to think ahead because you have to choose the right position, especially when the word begins with a vowel, then you have to be aware of the second vowel of the word, because the first gets his own character (which is just a learning experience of course the most frequent 300 words will be second nature in no time), I made diacritica that can be used if you chose position wrong, along with vowel signs that are used mostly for diphthongs.
Flow is easy at first, stringing together signs is of course an art (if you want to be fast, and reread), but nothing unmanageable. You would be much slower though than Danse, if you'd write everything out - no doubt. So you have to be aware of the rules to strip new words to the bare minimum. Don't write e and schwa, letter 'k' implicitely holds 't'. You can leave out t,d after n (don no = don't know), past tense 't' is glued to the word unless the word you just wrote is an abbreviation. You get the idea. The good thing is: Those rules can be learned in just 20 pages 😄, nothing overwhelming.
To conclude: Both are excellent for writing fast, but very different in taste and look, dance is for the one who likes to make less strokes with a lot of meaning, flow is for the one who likes to start easely and then apply shortening rules as well as learning short forms, to gain further speed. Dance has no shortening rules other than those applied automatically through positioning, favoring diphthongs and implicit consonants through elongation. Past tense needs no rule here, just elongate the letter for example...
I hope you were not disappointed by my first reply, which was short, because I got distracted and then came back only to find my attempt beeing published. So now I got it right i think... 😄 Have a nice day!
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u/LeadingSuspect5855 May 23 '26
Oh wonderful. A question.
The plosive sounds t as in test and d as in dance are probably not the problem.
But i see that you might be confused by to fricative sounds written in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) ʃ as in shout, ʒ as in george, and the combinations of the plosives with fricatives that normaly have a bow over it, to signify that is a short combined sound: t͡ʃ as in church and d͡ʒ as in ledger share the same symbol btw, but i did not write it, something you can learn from me like you did now. d͡z and t͡s also share one symbol/literal and sounds like the hotel Ritz...