Code in a Non-Conformist Register

[stenog]

If you find a good crib for the version the Rev has used here, and it is online, would you mind posting the link?

archive.org/google books don't have scans of any of Shelton's works, unfortunately. Many years ago I obtained a Xerox of one of them (the edition for the version that Pepys used) from the British Library (Shelton's `Tachygraphy, 1647'). There is an academic reprint of this 1647 edition and an earlier 1642 edition, from 1970, edited by William Matthews (Matthews, W., 1970, Shelton and Pepys. The Augustan Reprint Society, Publication #145-146, UCLA, California). I also recall a reprint in Westminster''s public Central Library just off Trafalgar square that I copied out by hand when I was a kid (I never got into train spotting......).

The BL has many editions. The author's full name is Thomas Shelton; The first edition was 1626, called `Short Writing'; later editions (many!) were called `Tachygraphy', which is what we have here, and finally Zeiglographia in 1685. With the BL's copy-on-demand service it is easy enough to get hold of digital copies, but you have to pay, of course. I won't be doing that; and if I get stuck with the resources I have, I'll leave it to you or other researchers more diligent than me to pick up the trail on the Shelton-shelves in the BL.

Your snippets look tantalisingly close to Tachygraphy, and the other poster's full-page I think is exactly this system.

There's plenty more code in those registers than that I've uploaded, and if I feel game in the future, it would be good to know how to go about transcribing the rest.

The `Tachygraphy' pamphlets are easy to read and short. Spelling is obviously quaint to our eyes, and you have to work with the long ess (which looks like an f without a crossbar). The 17th century word for a `dot', which comes up a lot in these tutors, is `tittle'. These systems were reasonably sophisticated, not just a simple letter-for-letter cipher, so you will need to work through the pamphlet as the young Pepys would have done and learn the principles of the system. It's quite easy (about an afternoon's effort), and a lot of fun, and orders of magnitude simpler than modern systems like Pitman, Gregg or even Teeline. But as with all shorthands, each writer tends to mold the system in idosyncratic ways, so even knowing the system there is still plenty of head-scratching work to be done.

If you have amongst your registers any more extensive examples (10+ lines?), could you post one or two, with surrounding longhand context, if any?

Sean.

[sunnylew]

The first page of this thread has the largest section of the script, and the one attached here has what looks like the next largest section.

Apart from that, most entries are only 5-10 sigils in length.

I hope this one helps.

[stenog]

Thanks for the extra image.

I must confess I am struggling. The outlines all have the right Sheltonian `geometry', but they don't make sense in the 1647 system that I'm familiar with. Shelton did change his `alphabet' a couple of times during the evolution of his system, swapping symbols so that what was the symbol for `n' in one system becomes the symbol for `t' in its successor. Unfortunately I have now exhausted my shorthand books without pinning down the exact alphabet. Some good old-fashioned cryptanalysis/crossword solving would probably yield good results, especially has you have a large corpus, but unfortunately I don't have the time to dedicate to it.

Anyway, rest assured that you are not dealing with some devious code, but with fairly standard clerical (in both senses!) practice for the time.

I will leave the printouts on my desk for a while as background `noise'. If inspiration strikes I will post here, but for now I must get back to work! My apologies if I raised too many hopes.

Sean.

[stenog]

Some unwarranted pessimism on my part.

A beer and a trawl of books.google.com has turned up a real gem: Mason's `La Plume Volante':

(http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/La_plume_volante_or_The_art_of_short_han.html?id=IpsDAAAAQAAJ&redir_esc=y).

It originally dates to 1707, and was the foundation of numerous shorthands all the way up to the 19th century! You can browse it online, or download a pdf to print off. What is fascinating (to me!) is that probably 95% of the outlines are *exactly* the same as Shelton's outlines, but they have completely different meanings.  This book is also unusual for manuals of the time in that it basically contains a vast dictionary of some 4000+ outlines. It is hugely useful.

I suspect this will work for both the register shorthand and the full-page one. In fact I have just noticed that Mason's outline for the word `page' appears before the numbers in the centre margin of the full-page scan

Needless to say I'm  a happy bunny. Will attempt a transcription tomorrow when I have printed out all 125 pages of the manual and spread them out all over the floor!

S.

[stenog]

Well, I have had success with netti's full-page document, but the shorter snippets from the origianl poster's register are proving a tougher nut to crack.

For those interested, the full-page document is somebody's commentary on a book called `Grace Triumphant' by Fellowes (1770), an online edition of which can be found here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ygkDAAAAQAAJ. The lefthand column of shorthand consists of verbatim quotes from this heady poem ("Lend me thy chariot and steeds of fire"), and the numerals in the centre margin are page-number references to Fellowe's book, which do indeed correspond to the electronic edition above. Very nice.

The system is Mason's, but the second edition (Art's Advancemnt) rather than the third (La Plume Volante), so I struggled for a while, especially as there are no online or electronic copies of the former.

As to the poor OP's snippets, they certainly look like Mason or a derivative, but they seem not to correspond exactly to La Plume Volante, and are so telegrammatic that educated guesswork from context is not easy. If Mason is the key, then entry #63 [Rebecca Cockerel] and entry #64 [Mary Masterson] both end in the word `lease-holding'. I am getting hold of a copy of Mason's second edition from the British Library and will continue my head-scratching over the weekend

Sean

[netti]

stenog - you are amazing! thank you so much for all your hard work. I hope you have enjoyed the puzzle 

[stenog]

stenog - you are amazing! thank you so much for all your hard work. I hope you have enjoyed the puzzle 

It beats the crossword hands down, and the best part is that the results actually matter to someone.

S.

[stenog]

Well, hot on the heels of yesterday's success, I bring more glad tidings!

I have found the system used in the original poster's register. It was devised by one Jeremiah Rich in the 17th century, and was, despite its manifest shortcomings, hugely popular amongst non-conformist clergy and professors at Oxford university until well into the 19th century. In fact Pitman recounts a correspondence he had with an Oxford don, and friend of his, in the 1830s, who still used the system every day, and was still asked to teach it (though he professes to have steered all those prospective pupils towards Pitman's then state-of-the-art Phonography).

Rich's system is an absolute nightmare to decipher, I have discovered, as I am learning the system as I go. Not for the faint of heart is the original (and posthumous) publication, called `The Pen's Dexterity',  here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rxZSAAAAYAAJ . Shelton and Mason were, I'm afraid, red-herrings, although the similarities in geometry are striking.

Line 2 of entry #51 [William Hill] which contains the `venus symbol', and gave rise to some speculation early in the thread, begins "<?> he told me last Sunday ... supposing that he might .... ". The venus symbol is actually the sign for Sunday (or maybe Friday.... depends which edition of Rich you look at. Sigh.)

Progress is slow, because the system is so complicated, but I'll get there

Sean.

[chinakay]

Hi stenog, what a fascinating thread.

Is netti's little snip in Reply #20 the same? Because I thought it looked an awful lot like Hebrew