A great impetus was given to the study of short-hand about 35 years ago by the lication of Mr. Isaac Pitman's Phonography. The introduction of the penny postage at the same period vastly aided the diffusion of the system, and societies for phonographic correspondence were established in all parts of the kingdom. The Psalms, the New Testament, and many other works, were published in the phonographic alphabet, and magazines written in short-hand found a widely diffused circle of supporters. This sys tem of writing is elegant and expeditious to a practiced hand, and a very great improve ment on all preceding systems. The alphabet consists of the following characters: The distinction between breath and voice (or mite and sonant) consonants, as above shown, is happily expressed by a thickening of the symbolic line for the latter elements. The characters in the second column are, however, anomal9us, the first four, which are written " thin," representing voice consonants, and the fourth and fifth, written with the difference only of "thick" and "thin," representing distinct formations, which differ front each other as d does from g, and both of which are voice consonants.
In this system vowels are denoted by the interpolated signs— placed at the top, the middle, or th'e bottom of the consonant lines. The vowel marks• are written thick for " long," and thin for "short" sounds. The long and short vowels are not, however, phonetic pairs, differing only in quantity; and thus the vowel scheme is less accurate than that of the consonants. It is, besides, very complex to a begin
ner, from the employment of a special set of characters for vowels preceded by w and y, the latter elements not being included in the alphabet of consonants.
In " phonography," as in almost all other systems of short-hand. voWels are added by separate liftings of the pen, while their insertion is indispensable to legibility, unless special modes of writing consonant combinations are adopted. The latter expedient is employed by Mr. Pitman for such compounds asp., pl, spr, stn, nl, mp, etc., the charac ters for which make, practically, large additions to the alphabet.. The use of a general vowel sign would evidently be of little advantage in this system, as it would, equally with the exact vowel marks, require the pen to be lifted for its insertion.
In a more recent system of phonetic shorthand, a new principle of writing is adopted, by which the positions df all sounded vowels are indicated in the writing of the consonants, thereby securing easy legibility, with brevity and simplicity, in the of a known language. This system, the invention of Mr. Melville Bell, is based on the following principles: I. A full-sized character represents a consonant with a vowel sound before it.
II. A half-sized character represents a consonant with a vowel sound after it.