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This is the third part of a short series of articles about implementing Phomnemonal, my experimental typing shorthand. The other parts are listed at the end of the article. If you’re not interested in the theory, please jump right to the abbreviations.

An English Spelling Reform Called What?

Last time I wrote an article in this series, I was so busy patting myself on the back on the cool name I had invented, I didn’t notice that using standard English (an oxymoron if ever there was one) to spell it made it impossible to figure out how to pronounce the thing. Using the sound associations I tabulated last week helps a little, if I respell it founemonl, but with four syllables to pronounce it’s still not particularly clear. When I say it, Phomnemonal rhymes with phenomenal, only where phenomenal emphasizes just the second syllable, Phomnemonal emphasizes the first two syllables equally… but enough of that :-D

Diphthongs in Phomnemonal

Although I’ve already catalogued 12 vowel sounds needed to speak English, many words have not only long and short vowels, but also vowels that change sound in the middle: Diphthongs. Since Phomnemonal (are you getting used to saying it yet?) assigns the short vowel sounds to a, e, i, o and u, we can spell most diphthongs using a pair of short vowels. Table 1 shows the final nine sounds (beyond the 30 covered last week) needed to pronounce British English, as an extended version of the vowel table in the previous article.

Once you understand how the diphthong sounds are just two regular vowel sounds smushed together, and that they are always spelled by writing the letters for those two sounds together, last week’s Egzampl might be (a bit) easier to follow. Some linguists categorize the long-vowel diphthongs here as triphthongs, but I’m definitely talking about English not Welsh, no matter what last weeks comments say! ;-)

Increasing Typing Speed by at Least 10%

In the last article I set out an alphabet along with examples of the sound for how each letter is always pronounced. Purely because of the baroque way we spell with (particularly in British) English, even when using no abbreviations at all and simply spelling words as they sound, the result is an almost 15% reduction of the number of keypresses required to write English prose.

That does require quite an investment of effort to memorise not only what sound goes with each of the 30 letters, but to relearn all the spellings of common words you write. You do, in fact, end up typing slower while you pause to figure out what that shorter spelling was… better, instead, to make a more modest start that will give some pay off right away with minimal effort up front.

Employing Zipf’s Law, it turns out that in typical English writing, more than 80% of text is comprised of only 1000 words or so. The corollary of that fact, however, is that most of the interesting information is actually conveyed by the other 20% of the words in that text. To some extent English is already optimised so that frequently used words (a, at, the, in, on, for, i, he, it) that certainly play an important part in the syntax of the language, do tend to be shorter, where the infrequently used words (important, syntax, language, infrequently, shorter) tend to be longer.

Since Phomnemonal has a 30 letter alphabet, there are 30 possible one-letter abbreviations, and another 900 possible two-letter abbreviations, which gives us the means of writing 930 of the 1000 words that comprise 80% of written English using only one or two letters. Using phonetic spellings as a base, I’ve assigned each of the one-letter abbreviations to appropriate English words, being careful to provide mnemonics for all but the obvious ones.

Table 2 shows each of the one-letter abbreviations:

An Example

In contrast to the hard to understand phonetic shorthand I used for last week’s example, this time only the one-letter abbreviations above are used:

Our apartment z less than an hour r Cape Canaveral, d we ` hoping u visit \ Kennedy Space Center today, but while we ` g \ Florida Mall o Sunday we experienced \ most incredible thunder storm I p ever seen. S we parked our bikes outside, \ air around us actually crackled f a fraction v a second n anticipation v \ loudest peel v thunder I p ever heard. Less than a minute later, s we dashed f cover n \ Mall itself \ heavens opened f sheets v driving rain peppered with cracks v lightning almost directly overhead. I h no intention v trying u actually ride n that kind v weather, so Monday morning’s severe weather warning was enough u disuade us r chancing \ round trip u \ Space Center.

This time, that same paragraph is 126 characters shorter than the original and, thanks to having selected the highest frequency words to abbreviated, the paragraph is 22 characters shorter even than the phonetic example from last time… without sacrificing readability very much at all. Put another way, using only the 28 one-letter abbreviations (a and i don’t count) above, I pressed almost 17% fewer keys than writing that same text out in longhand.

In the Next Installment

I chose the text for the two examples more or less at random, but even for text that uses fewer of the abbreviated words than average I haven’t found any natural prose that doesn’t save at least 10%. Even if you go to the trouble of learning these abbreviations well enough that your finger muscle memory types the abbreviation without conscious thought on your part, that doesn’t help out too much when you want someone else to read your writing. That is what computers are for! In the next installment, I’ll show several ways of setting your computer up to expand the abbreviations as you type: your fingers press \, but your computer types the for you.

I’ve had my MacBook automatically expanding these abbreviations for me for about 2 weeks now, and although I’m still hesitating a little on plenty of the abbreviations, it has certainly helped speed up my prose typing noticably, and I expect to reach the full 10-15% speedup in another couple of weeks time.

Related Articles

1. Typing at the Speed of Thought
2. Phomnemonal: Analysis of Sounds in English Speech