If you’re thinking of learning Pitman, you’ll soon discover that there are few types of Pitman you could learn. If you hunt around on archive.org, or Google Books, you’ll come across public domain versions of various old Pitman books which cover earlier versions of the system. It’s tempting to learn from one of these free [...]

For a while, Pitman shorthand was the most widely used system of shorthand in the English-speaking world. It was used throughout the British Empire, which included Australia, India, Canada, and large chunks of Africa. In the United States, various authors were publishing their own versions of Pitman’s system, under a wide range of names. To [...]

In the 1982 cult horror film Big Meat Eater, nerdy butcher Bob Sanderson works to promote Adanaco, the “new universal language” he’s developed for his small English-speaking town. Inventing new languages, or new ways to write old ones, has been a geeky obsession for hundreds of years. Benjamin Franklin, irritated by the inconsistencies of English [...]