Shorthands

[Mike Cleven]

>From: nadja at node.COM (Nadja Adolf)
>To: mike_cleven at hotmail.com
>Subject: Shorthands
>Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 12:27:15 -0700
>
>Gregg is still in use in the US, and there are many active users.
>There are books on Gregg available at most community colleges since it
>is still taught to legal secretaries and some executive secretaries.
>
>Is Duployan an older edition of Pitman? The modern Pitman looks kind of
>different; I've only seen it used by British secretaries here in the
>US. What do the French use now?
>
>It's interesting that the UK switched from Gregg to Pittman. I wonder if
>the reason is that it's easier for another reader to read someone else's
>Pittman than someone else's Gregg? The few Pittman users I've known said
>that was one advantage of Pittman over Gregg, but I wouldn't know.
>
>I do know I tried to learn Gregg and found it much more confusing than
>the Duployan demonstrated at the Lu?lu.

I never did get shorthand, though I do type like blazes.  My Mom knows Gregg
but I never had reason to learn it; very unmanly in our time of the age,
anyway.

It was my _understanding_ that Duployan and Pitman are related or similar;
maybe I've got it wrong.  Somewhere; in the list or not, I can't remember; I
came across a reference that Lejeune had deliberately chosen a French
shorthand so as to help further segregate his flock culturally from the
Anglo-Protestant swine he thought he was trying to rescue them from.  I may
have gotten it wrong which English shorthand Duployan is related to,
however; my impression has been that it was apposite to Gregg shorthand,
which was (from what I understand) the shorthand of choice for legal types
in the old colony and early province; but this choice may have been
American-influenced, rather than inherited from any Imperial traditions,
i.e. the local English shorthand was American rather than British based....

I continue to have mixed feelings about the Duployan and the Kamloops Wawa;
I see them now as instruments of segregation and the bell-jar, efforts to
isolate native Jargon speakers from the (then very large) non-native
Jargon-speaking community.  The idea that native people should be kept apart
is very much the message of the native-only thrust of the KW's inception,
and indeed I think can be found as a fairly straightforward subtext in
Lejeune's own introductory writings on the issue.  At a time when a standard
romanization of the Jargon might genuinely have been useful, Lejeune and his
compadres (a pungent pun, that) sought to create a barrier between peoples
by creating a specialized literacy, rather than an inclusive one......

MC
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.