Evening star., 1935-04-07

- - nOteDOOk, covered with the neat,
tiny writing of the bibliognost, to finger the
pages of the Milne manual of Greek short
hand. Here at last was the key to those
mysterious symbols written on stone, wax
tablets and papyri. whose meaning has eluded
the most patient and eradite savants ever
since they were recovered from the tombs and
sands of old Egypt.
Shorthand! l perceived. as talked with
H. ]. M. Milne, Assistant Keeper of the De-
partment of Manuscripts, British Museum,
that ! had erred in dismissing the subject as
dull one starting in business college textbook
and ending IN a slim stenogIapher dreaming of
marrying the boss's son. Shakespeare, the
Church Fathers, Caesar, Pericles lost
civilizations and immortal names glimmered
in the shorthand pattern, and lived again.
Romance and magic and mystery were IN it
and now the thrill of a newly discovered key
to enable men to read at last the secret
writing of the ancient Greeks.
Where and when shorthand began Is any
bodys guess. Some say the Egyptians in
vented it, because of their threefold form of
writing - enchoric. hieratic and hieroglyphic.
Others attribute it to the Hebrews. owing to
their mode of writing by consonants, emitting
the vowels and describing words by initials
only. We know that the American systems de-
rive from the English; but was the English
system an original invention. or did the
Romans borrow from the Greeks and carry
the knowledge into old Britainl Was it there
passed from satrap to slave, from scholarly
abbot to toiling monk, until the literary
pirates who sat in the Elizabethan theater
and took down the dialogue of Shakespeare's
plays in shorthand. although they thought
they had devised their own systems, really
owed something to the pioneers of the
ancient world9
Nobody knows. Only two things are sure.
One is that if you present man with the prob
lem of capturing spoken words before they
escape and are lost forever, he will solve that
problem. The other is that from the root of
the shorthand idea innumerable systems can
shoot.
BENJAMIN Franklin talks of being instructed
in shorthand by an uncle, tanner in London
who had invented his own system. Bernard
Shaw, ever the rugged individualist, finds no
system so good as the one he devised and
uses. his brain moving faster than he can
write longhand. Pepys wrote his famous
diaries in shorthand (he had hundreds of sys-
TENS to choose from them.
Shorthand has, indeed, intrigued many
great minds. Dickens wrote Wilkie Collins:
-. dare say am at this present writing
the best shorthand writer in the world" John
Byron, first of the modern dialect poets, was
also founder of the first shorthand society
and inventor of the system which John Wesley
used to write his diaries. And then there was
Cicero.
Cicero himself was adept at shorthand.
1t was he who introduced nOiarii trained in
shorthand reporting into the Senate (as
Plutarch records) on that momentous day,
December 6, 63 BE-, when the Senators de-
bated the fate of Cataline and his fellow con-
spirators. We owe to this initiative of Cicero's
the only Grafton of Cato the Younger that has
come down to US; also that great speech of
Caesars which contains the Caesarian view,
long before the dawn of Christianity, on the
immortality of the soul:
so far as the question of the penalty is
concerned, indeed, we are able to say this, as
the matter stands, that in grief and care,
death is relief from affection. and not
punishment; that it eliminates all the miseries
of mortals, and that beyond its bourne there
is no place either for sorrow or JOY"
We know all about Roman shorthand from
contemporary references. But the Romans
had only transferred Greek invention to
their own use. Where was the key to the
system used in the older and more advanced
civilization to take down the discourses of the
poets, philosophers, and politicians, whose
o,,thorc colroro cOrnruiffoC3 tharvo IN ,r~;<,u ,