Xah Shorthand System

By Xah Lee. Date: 2022-02-06. Last updated: 2023-09-01.

xtodo work in progress

Xah Shorthand System, Intro

Massive new era keyboard based shorthand system in the works.

We have the pitman shorthand system (year 1837). Which is based on phonetics, and for hand writing.
Then we have the Unicode: Shavian Alphabet 𐑕 (year 1960), based on it.
We have steno, which is based on phonetics, chording hardware for hand, and part ad hoc shortcuts. [see Stenotype Machine]

Am slowly designing a modern computer keyboard based shorthand system. Single key press one at a time, not chord, and for computer keyboard.

Look at it this way: in typing study, we have bigrams for letters, meaning the most frequently used letter pairs.
and we also have bigram for words. the most frequently used word sequence. and in general, n-grams.
the mobile phone input system saves typing by phrase and sentences, that's a magnitude more than a phonetic system (such as steno).

The first easy step, in this xah system, is for each word in dict, shorten them by dropping vowels. And, also, rectify them using phonetic spelling. e.g. for letter c, use k or s.
For example, “word” becoms w. “Time” and “times” both became t. “Communication” becomes kmnks.
Now, do this for the top say one thousand most frequently used words.
in this way, we will end up with many words having the same abbrev.
Now, look at frequency of those words, pick the most frequently used one for that abbrev.
Now, this system, as it is, would be already very significant. we have one thousand abbrevs.

After that, u refine it, by, looking at the top 300 most used english words. For each that doesn't already have a abbrev, add one, by devising some scheme so they r diff from the phonetic abbrev.
Also, is to look at most frequently used phrases, of 2 to 5 words. Similar, device a scheme to abbrev them so they r differentiated from the phonetic abbrev.

some general scheme on abbrev design. this is written and eddited as i go over the years working on xah abbrev system casually.

2023-09-01

the following is English phoneme based on Unicode: Shavian Alphabet 𐑕