**Principles of Characterie** *Brent Werness* # Learning Characterie without the characters Characterie is the original English language shorthand system. If you have learned a more modern shorthand system like [Gregg](https://greggshorthand.github.io/), [Pitman](https://www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand.org.uk/), or [Forkner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forkner_shorthand) you are likely coming into this with some expectations of what you might see. You likely expect it to either be based on spelling or sounds, to have a special fast-to-write alphabet, a variety of rule to take the basic spelling or sounds and abbreviate them to make the words shorter to write, and a few words that are so common that they are given a special status and written with a single brief form. Characterie *will* have many of these features. There will be a fast-to-write alphabet. There will be some aspects related to the spelling or sounds. There are certainly rules about how to abbreviate, and words that are given special brief forms. However as you will see, it will still feel foreign. There are actually incredibly few rules for abbreviations. The core organizing principle will not be spelling or sounds, but actually meanings through synonyms and antonyms. And finally, those words that are granted the status of getting brief forms are not exclusively common words, but contain words like *banish*, *dizzy* or *tempest*. Thus, before we launch in to learning the system itself, we should take a moment, without strange symbols and writing directions, to understand how you need to think to write in Characterie. To focus our discussion, I will take the following Shakespeare quote and slowly nudge it closer and closer to how someone might write it in Characterie. ~~~~~~ none All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. ~~~~~~ ## Reduce words to their root word The first step is to separate off things like common endings, tenses, number, etc. Most concretely, this means we will separate out endings like *-s*, *-er*, and *-ing* and develop fast ways of marking the when needed. For many of these, we will be guided by sounds and simply leaving enough to make it something that can be read back, so for instance, we will not make any distinction betweens *worlds* and *world's*, as it will be clear from context. ~~~~~~ none all the world-s a stage, and all the man-s and woman-s mere play-er-s. ~~~~~~ Notice that I dropped the ending *-ly* from *merely*. Characterie is not fully capable of taking verbatim transcriptions, and in particular it has no way to denote the difference between *mere* and *merely*. Indeed, historians use features like this to try and identify if a text was transcribed by Characterie or not! This has already reduced the variety of word we need to write by quite a bit. We no longer need to have ways to write *play*, *plays*, *player*, and *players*, but instead need only write the root word (called a *lemma* in linguistics) and then mark it with these modifiers. Thus we are left only to learn to write *all*, *the*, *world*, *a*, *stage*, *and*, *man*, *woman*, *mere*, and *play*. ## Don't sweat the punctuation Characterie has only one punctuation mark which is used to denote any pause in speech. As there is no distinction in spoken English between different punctuation marks, this is sufficient to record most meaning. We'll indicate that pause with a separated period. ~~~~~~ none all the world-s a stage . and all the man-s and woman-s mere play-er-s . ~~~~~~ ## Introduce special characters for small and common words Some of the most common words, like pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles (along with a smattering of other terms and phrases) will be important enough to give them unique small symbols, which are referred to as *particles* in Characterie. In this example, the words which are given the status of particles are *the*, *a*, and *and*. I'll mark that these words are particles, and thus are written with their own special symbols, by putting a period in front of the word. If you would like to see them all, you can find a complete list in the [dictionary](./dictionary.md.html). ~~~~~~ none all .the world-s .a stage . .and all .the man-s .and woman-s mere play-er-s . ~~~~~~ This leaves us to handle the words *all*, *world*, *stage*, *man*, *woman*, *mere*, and *play*. ## Form a core vocabulary of concepts So far, this has all been standard for the way most shorthand writing systems work. However, these next steps are, to the best of my knowledge, unique to Characterie. To represent all other words, we will first pick a list of ~550 words that will serve as the sign-posts for the english language. These are not necessarily common words, but instead an intentionally diverse collection of words that allow you to write as many words as possible as one of: (1) a synonym, (2) and antonym, or (3) a sub-type of one of these core words. These core words are given the name *characterical* words, to represent the fact that these are the core concepts which are given a single character, and all other words will be derived from these. The fact that words can derive from the characterical words in many different ways means that the set of characterical words needs to be very carefully chosen, and is *not* necessarily what you expect. For instance, the word *no* will be characterical, however the word *yes* will not be, since it is an antonym of *no*. There will be no word for things like *hour* or *minute* as they are types of *time*. No words for *happy* as that can be related to *enjoy* or as Timothy Bright preferred, as being related to *bless*. Each one of these will be given a special symbol which will encode the first letter of the word, along with a way of marking which of the characterical words it is in the list. In the full system, these are given specific individual symbols. For the purposes of this section, I'll simply refer to them as `A1` through `A2` and so on. If we substitute the words which are characterical, we see that this is: ~~~~~~ none A9 .the W30-s .a stage . .and A9 .the M3-s .and woman-s mere P12-er-s . ~~~~~~ This leaves us with *stage*, *woman* and *mere* as the three remaining words. ## Define the rest of the words via accompanied meanings For these remaining words we get into the heart of the system, the notion of *accompanied meanings*. This is the way that you take a word and change it into a synonym, antonym, or sub-type. If you are making a synonym or sub-type of the given word, this is called the *consenting* accompanied meaning, where as antonyms are *dissenting* accompanied meanings. Consenting meanings will be marked by placing the first letter of the word you want to write on the left of the word, dissenting will be marked by placing it on the right. For all of these words, we will work with consenting meaning. To be able to work these out, you need extreme familiarity with all of the ~550 characterical words. The original text TK gives many examples of such consenting and dissenting pairs in the back (about 5000), however this is beyond the current scope to transcribe this. 1. **Stage.** *Stage* has two possible words it can derive from, either *place* or *play*. In this context of theater, it is likely less ambiguous to derive from *play*, which we already saw was `P12`, so *stage* is "the word that starts with `S` and has consenting meaning with `P12`." We will write this as `S>P12` 1. **Woman.** Everything that people create reflects the thoughts and values of the people at that time. This system is no exception, and so *woman* is derived from *man* which is `M3`. So it is "the word that starts with `W` and has consenting meaning with `M3`," or simply `W>M3`. 1. **Mere.** Timothy Bright says that *mere* should derive from either *very* or *mix*. I am not sure what meaning would align with "mix", however *mere* (as in small or least) could be viewed as being dissenting with *very*. I would likely prefer to make it have consenting meaning with *lean*, but for demonstration purposes, I'll go with dissenting with *very* which is `W11` (it turns out he also doesn't keep all letters of the alphabet distinct). In this case, we put the first letter on the *right* of the characterical word, and get `W11>M` Thus all together, we end up writing essentially this: ~~~~~~ none A9 .the W30-s .a S>P12 . .and A9 .the M3-s .and W>M3-s W11>M P12-er-s . ~~~~~~ This may seem like you don't save much space at all, but remember we are still inefficiently writing this in the normal latin alphabet. Once you also learn the symbols of Characterie, which are designed to write exactly these things, this becomes much more compact. !["All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."](./principles/all_the_world.svg) !!!
A note on how the book was made To make figures like the above, I actually wrote code which displays the Characterie given exactly the strings like above. Indeed, for simplicity, I allowed it to take one step back, and any Characterical word is allowed to be spelled out. So that figure was made by rendering the following string (where I have inserted line breaks to wrap the sentence): ~~~~~~ all .the world-s .a S>play . .and all .the man-s .and W>man-s very>M play-er-s . ~~~~~~
## Additional Tricks I won't get into detail here, but one of the areas that Characterie invests heavily in is additional tricks to avoid writing repeating words. In this case, since *woman* derives from *man*, the system allows you to attach the `W` to the particle `.and` rather than to a second copy of *man*. There are many such tricks that are, again, unique to Characterie, but we'll need to get deeper into the system to actually learn them. ~~~~~~ none A9 .the W30-s .a S>P12 . .and A9 .the M3-s W>.and W11>M P12-er-s . ~~~~~~ !["All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."](./principles/all_the_world_repeat.svg) # Summary So that is how Characterie works in a nutshell. There is still a lot to learn, and many details to work out, but to summarize, the flow is: 1. Separate endings and reduce all words to root words. 2. Write common words (particles) with special symbols. 3. Write any characterical word with it's own symbol. 4. Derive the remaining words from one of the characterical words either with consenting or dissenting meanings. This means that you need to always have the meanings of words in mind! This is quite distinct from later shorthand systems where you can write any word that you hear, and gives writing in Characterie a unique feeling---that you are always thinking in terms of similarity and differences from a small reduced vocabulary.