**Characterie: A modern introduction**
by Brent Werness
# Introduction
In 1588, Timothy Bright published *Characterie. An Arte of shorte, swifte, and secrete writing by character.* This book described the very first published shorthand for the English language, and it ignited a flurry of activity in shorthand that gripped Elizabethan England. People started using this new found skill to document sermons and plays live, and in some cases even potentially providing versions of things like Shakespeare's plays that survive to this day. It is a shorthand system primarily based not on sounds or spelling, but on concepts, synonyms, and antonyms. Nothing similar is known before and, aside from some near duplicate systems, nothing like it has been produced since.
Despite this unique position in history, the system is poorly known. The only existing manual is written in Early Modern English, and is almost exclusively available through an 1888 reprint that is riddled with errors. Even the original manual was very sparse with examples and adopted a difficult structure which likely meant that contemporary students struggled to learn the system.
This book aims to be an entirely new manual that rectifies the inconsistencies, provides a vastly larger set of examples, and hopefully delivers the smoothest learning process in the over 400 years since the first work was published. Even if I fall short of this goal, I hope that this lets many new people appreciate the intellectual achievement of Timothy Bright in creating something truly new.
> So haſt thou the art of ſhort, ſwifte, and ſecrete writing, none comparable.
>
> Farewell.
>
> -- Timothy Bright
!!!
**Historical Accuracy.**
Despite the importance of this system to history, the surviving ways to read the original text (primarily through a poorly executed 1888 reprint) are mostly of extremely poor quality. It provides only a handful of examples, and those that it does give appear to be often incorrect. Moreover, the dictionary is inconsistent with itself, skipping over some symbols, assigning others multiple meanings, or drawing a symbol that does not adhere to the principles described in the text.
The system itself is well designed, and the structure of the text, while not at all to my taste, does show how meticulous Timothy Bright's thinking process was---always looking to break things down and find order and structure. However, even the original text, at least the surviving copies, are incomplete and sometimes opaque.
I am far from the first person to notice this issue ([Pocknell 1885]("https://characterie.neocities.org/references.md#19thcentury/timothybright's,orthefirstenglish,shorthand,1588(1885)")). Any new manual needs to repair these inconsistancies, so when preparing this text, I have always biased towards making the system reflect the written words of the text, ignoring those examples that directly contradict it. Given that the resulting system aligns well with the only surviving contemporary texts ([Segar 1589]("https://characterie.neocities.org/references.md#16thcentury/thedivinepropheciesofthetensibylls(1589)"), [Bales 1590]("https://characterie.neocities.org/references.md#16thcentury/thewritingschoolmaster(1590)")), I am fairly confident that these choices are correct, but there are a few points where guesses needed to be made. I have marked them all with notes similar to this with the hope that any incorrect adaptations I may have made may be more easily fixed.
# Chapters
* [Principles](./principles2.html)
* [Shapes](./shape.html)
* [Meaning](./meaning.html)
* [Repetition](./repetition.html)
* [Paraphrasing](./paraphrasing.html)
* [Dictionary](./dictionary.html)
* [Table](./table.html)
* [Samples](./samples.html)
* [Annotated Bibliography](./references.html)
* [Appendix A: *Brachygraphy*](./brachygraphy.html)
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[«Brachygraphy](./brachygraphy.html) -- [Home](./index.html) -- [Principles»](./principles2.html)