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A linguist explains why Korean is the best written language

Edit Business Insider 28 Jun 2016
Pixabay. It is one of the more common complaints of schoolchildren ... Let's face it - while such languages can boast centuries of glorious literary history and cultural achievement, the passage of those centuries has taken its toll on the logicality of our written languages ... Pixabay ... (Some other, er, 'prominent' featural alphabets include Pitman Shorthand, the Shavian alphabet, and Tengwar, one of J.R.R Tolkien's invented scripts ... ....

Margaret Miller obituary

Edit The Guardian 01 May 2016
She was a glowing advertisement for her own abilities ... She was born Margaret Pitman a few days before the second world war broke out, into a family that was patrician but progressive. Her great-grandfather, Sir Isaac, had invented Pitman shorthand; her father, Sir James, a Tory MP, devised the Initial Teaching Alphabet. Margaret grew up in London before working in publishing and as a tour guide ... As a godparent, she was a godsend ... ....

How shorthand works

Edit BBC News 15 Jan 2016
Pitman shorthand expert Mary Sorene, demonstrates how it works ... ....

Over 300 shorthand institutes shut

Edit The Times of India 04 Jan 2016
the 'art of recording the spoken sound' in real time, or Pitman's Shorthand as it is popularly known. One could hear a pin drop at the classes run by the Shorthand Writers' Associ ation of Karnataka at the Bhavan, but for the speedy dictation of the master. TOI visited the association ahead of the 203rd birth anniver sary of Isaac Pitman, the En glishman who popularized the art, on January 4 ... "We do learn English shorthand in college....

Easier said than written

Edit The Economist 05 Nov 2015
Christianity, commerce and civilisation ... confusion ... “You” can now be rendered as “ibbit”, “ivvit” and “illit”. In northern Quebec and the eastern Arctic, the proselytisers eschewed Roman letters in favour of phonetic symbols based on the Pitman shorthand system (see picture) ... ....

Capital Life: What's on in Canberra's arts scene from September 26

Edit Sydney Morning Herald 22 Sep 2015
Dead man's penny. Michael Keighery's​ latest installation features 8709 squeezed and fired "knuckles" of clay – each one representing one of the Australian soldiers killed at Gallipoli in 1915 ... The project centres on the dead soldier's diary written in Pitmans shorthand and taken from his body at Gallipoli ... The plaques were inscribed with the words "He died for Freedom and Honour" ... Tideline transfer ... ....

Keir Hardie and Jeremy Corbyn: both bearded, both hated by the Mail, both cruelly mistaken

Edit The Guardian 19 Sep 2015
After an interval of 107 years and 19 other leaders – two of them temping women and, since Clement Attlee, none of them moustached – the Labour party has at last elected a second leader with a white beard ... Related ... Melissa Benn ... Pushed on by his mother and grandmother, he went to night school, taught himself Pitman’s shorthand down the pit by the light of a miner’s lamp, and had his intellect quickened by the work of Thomas Carlyle ... ....

The Reading Cyclist or the Cycling Reader (The National Archives)

Edit Public Technologies 21 Jul 2015
(Source. The National Archives). I virtually come from a cycling dynasty. My grandfather was a keen member of the Cyclists Touring Club and undertook some amazing cycle tours of the Alps all carefully documented in notebooks (unfortunately written in Pitman shorthand, so accessible only to my sister who learnt useful skills at school rather than how to parse a verb or declaim Lear's storm speech from Act III Scene ii) ... distributed by....

A new culture of night schools would transform our workforce

Edit The Guardian 19 Jun 2015
In 1970, a young Guyanese woman stepped off a plane at Gatwick airport to begin a new life in London. Rose Lammy, my mother, had grown up in a small village on the banks of the Demerara river in Guyana, South America. She was attracted to Britain by the opportunities it offered, but arrived here unskilled and unsure of her prospects ... Beginning work as a home help, she was soon encouraged to take an evening course in Pitman shorthand ... ....

Lincoln Conspiracy Trial -- Ben Pitman

Edit The Examiner 15 May 2015
One of the least known, but highly valuable participants, in the Lincoln conspiracy trials was Ben Pitman ... Pitman (who is also known as Benn Pitman) was born in 1822 in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England ... The institute promoted Pitman’s brother, Sir Isaac Pitman, who had invented phonetic shorthand ... Ben Pitman invented his own system of shorthand ... Ben Pitman’s shorthand system became adopted across the United States....

D-Day veteran who became Ford’s PR man in Cork

Edit The Irish Times 17 Jan 2015
Pat Gillen, who has died aged 89, was one of the last surviving Irish D-Day veterans. Just a fortnight before his death he received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French government ... It is the highest French honour ... Modesty ... Having studied Pitman shorthand, typing and book-keeping at school, he was called for an interview that included a shorthand test in which the only word “I could just not get right was carburettor” ... ....

`Incredible bravery but incredible waste' - Artist creates ceramic memorial to Gallipoli dead

Edit Canberra Times 17 Oct 2014
Artist Michael Keighery with hundreds of ceramic figures, created to honour the Gallipoli war dead. Photo. Jay Cronan ... All he managed to write before he was killed was, "Dear Mum and Dad, here..." ... "While the men were incredibly brave... He said it had been holding his great-uncle's diary, written in Pitman shorthand, in the Australian War Memorial that first triggered his desire to create the artwork ... ....

So, what's it really like being a personal assistant?

Edit Belfast Telegraph 05 Aug 2014
A new book about the working lives of personal assistants in the City of London is causing a sensation. Two high-flying Belfast PAs tell Kerry McKittrick what their jobs entail ... No longer are they responsible for filing and typing as in the world of 1950s-set drama Mad Men ... She says. ... I can type, and though I don't have Pitman shorthand, having worked for an IT company comes in very handy as I have Excel skills and PowerPoint skills ... new....
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