I've been studying higher mathematics since middle school, which involves writing lots of lines of arcane formulas. Throughout all that time, my handwriting has fermented like the finest wine. I never explicitly set out to learn any kind of shorthand, but just by writing and writing and writing, my brain naturally, gradually streamlined my writing. Today I can sit in on the fastest lecture and write circles around the speaker. The result, however, looks like the writing of some advanced alien civilization.
My evolving handwriting offers a rare glimpse into the ever-changing nature of language in general. The personal notes of one PhD student evolve on a much faster scale than the official language, because there's only one person making the change. In "real" language, change is much slower. But remember from physics, momentum equals velocity times mass: better to get hit by a fast-moving rock than a slow-moving steam engine. The languages of the world are like steam engines, they change slowly but that change gets multiplied by their unimaginable size, creating an unstoppable momentum of doom. Linguistic prescriptivists who try to get in the way, get flattened by the force and inevitability of linguistic change.
Sit back and enjoy some examples of my exotic, beautiful handwriting. Might it be a glimpse into the future evolution of the English language? Probably not, but who knows...
THE SHORTHAND ALPHABET
The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", is very famous for being a short concise statement which uses all the letters of the English alphabet. It's difficult to naturally invoke my crazy demonic handwriting with a single letter, so I picked this sentence as a way to naturally summon forth my strange penmanship and hit every letter of the alphabet.
Now let's break that up to get the alphabet in order:
One of the first things you notice when you look at the handwriting in order, is that certain letters are indistinguishable from eachother. J, G, Y are all very similar, and have all been simplified into long, featureless curves. R and S are also very similar, these have become short, featureless curves. Aside from the different sizes, R/S are almost identical to J/G/Y. And C isn't too much different from R/S either.
One might think, with whole blocks of letters looking almost identical, wouldn't that make notes unreadable? It turns out that isn't the case at all. In part, this is because we don't actually look at each letter as we read an English word. Instead we recognize the overall shape of the word. Also, it's very rare that, say, the J/G/Y identification actually adds any ambiguity. For example, in the sentence above, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", the word "jumps" as I've written it could be one of "jumps", "gumps", or "yumps". Of the choices, "jumps" is obviously the correct one.
Let's look at some common J/G/Y words. "yes" is one of the most common. Does the J/G/Y identification introduce any ambiguity? Well, "jes" and "ges" are both nonsense, at least in English, so no, no ambiguity is introduced. How about "go"? "jo" and "yo" are also conceivable possibilities, but both are massively less common than "go", and context will make it clear anyway. And if there were any danger of ambiguity (very unlikely), then I could take an extra second to write first letter in more detail.
Did I carefully study the whole English vocabulary to figure out which letters could "merge"? No, the merging occurred automatically over many years of furious writing. My subconscious mind very gradually introduced the changes in tiny increments.
COMMON WORDS
In practice, a native English speaker does not write just letters, we write words. Although we consciously think of each word as being built up of individual letters, in practice, extremely common words may as well be irreducible. With that in mind, I wrote down the 49 most common English words, as listed at the English Wiktionary. I am trying to capture how my handwriting naturally flows; all these words were written just once. If I was unhappy with how a word turned out, I included it anyway. These are hand-written words in the wild.
The problem with these common words is, they're too short. It's hard for my handwriting to really take flight off such short runways. Let's look at some longer words, words which come up frequently in the lectures I go to, and which should therefore be written in very evolved handwriting:
TECHNICAL WORDS
The beauty of the R/S/G/J/Y similarity really bl0ssoms in these longer words. I have to say my favorite is "analysis", where the last 4 letters become just four slanted lines of different lengths. Notice also how the "ry" in "theory" or "corollary" morphs so that the beginning (rightmost) part of the y actually lies below the r, as though they were both just one letter. I remember when this mutation was first starting to appear in my handwriting, the "ry" combination resembled the Japanese katakana "ri" (リ), which is a very interesting coincidence since the two have similar pronunciation. I wonder whether my subconscious mind was up to something clever!
CONSISTENCY
To get an idea how consistent my handwriting is, I took a random word from the above list- "infinty"- and wrote it a bunch of times. Here's the result:
Pretty consistent, I think. That means the handwriting is really a structured mutation, and not just random scribbling.
AN ACTUAL PAGE OF NOTES
With all this talk of my amazing shorthand, I should definitely share an actual page of notes. Here are some notes I took this week in my advanced mathematical logic class (a class with only a couple other students even registered). Click for a higher resolution copy.
Translation:
WHERE FROM HERE?
I'll continue writing, and I'm sure my handwriting will continue to evolve. What'll happen next? Maybe my a's and o's will merge? Maybe my lowercase "m"'s will evolve into simple horizontal lines, as is already evident in some of the common words above? Who knows, it's not like it's at all within my conscious control. I'll just sit back, eat some popcorn, and enjoy the show.
Here are some other articles I wrote. Fortunately, they're written on the computer, so you don't have to take ten years worth of abstract notes to understand the handwriting ;)
Researching English On Books.google.com
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
How To Be A Better Teacher
My evolving handwriting offers a rare glimpse into the ever-changing nature of language in general. The personal notes of one PhD student evolve on a much faster scale than the official language, because there's only one person making the change. In "real" language, change is much slower. But remember from physics, momentum equals velocity times mass: better to get hit by a fast-moving rock than a slow-moving steam engine. The languages of the world are like steam engines, they change slowly but that change gets multiplied by their unimaginable size, creating an unstoppable momentum of doom. Linguistic prescriptivists who try to get in the way, get flattened by the force and inevitability of linguistic change.
Sit back and enjoy some examples of my exotic, beautiful handwriting. Might it be a glimpse into the future evolution of the English language? Probably not, but who knows...
THE SHORTHAND ALPHABET
The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", is very famous for being a short concise statement which uses all the letters of the English alphabet. It's difficult to naturally invoke my crazy demonic handwriting with a single letter, so I picked this sentence as a way to naturally summon forth my strange penmanship and hit every letter of the alphabet.
Now let's break that up to get the alphabet in order:
One of the first things you notice when you look at the handwriting in order, is that certain letters are indistinguishable from eachother. J, G, Y are all very similar, and have all been simplified into long, featureless curves. R and S are also very similar, these have become short, featureless curves. Aside from the different sizes, R/S are almost identical to J/G/Y. And C isn't too much different from R/S either.One might think, with whole blocks of letters looking almost identical, wouldn't that make notes unreadable? It turns out that isn't the case at all. In part, this is because we don't actually look at each letter as we read an English word. Instead we recognize the overall shape of the word. Also, it's very rare that, say, the J/G/Y identification actually adds any ambiguity. For example, in the sentence above, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", the word "jumps" as I've written it could be one of "jumps", "gumps", or "yumps". Of the choices, "jumps" is obviously the correct one.
Let's look at some common J/G/Y words. "yes" is one of the most common. Does the J/G/Y identification introduce any ambiguity? Well, "jes" and "ges" are both nonsense, at least in English, so no, no ambiguity is introduced. How about "go"? "jo" and "yo" are also conceivable possibilities, but both are massively less common than "go", and context will make it clear anyway. And if there were any danger of ambiguity (very unlikely), then I could take an extra second to write first letter in more detail.
Did I carefully study the whole English vocabulary to figure out which letters could "merge"? No, the merging occurred automatically over many years of furious writing. My subconscious mind very gradually introduced the changes in tiny increments.
COMMON WORDS
In practice, a native English speaker does not write just letters, we write words. Although we consciously think of each word as being built up of individual letters, in practice, extremely common words may as well be irreducible. With that in mind, I wrote down the 49 most common English words, as listed at the English Wiktionary. I am trying to capture how my handwriting naturally flows; all these words were written just once. If I was unhappy with how a word turned out, I included it anyway. These are hand-written words in the wild.
The problem with these common words is, they're too short. It's hard for my handwriting to really take flight off such short runways. Let's look at some longer words, words which come up frequently in the lectures I go to, and which should therefore be written in very evolved handwriting:TECHNICAL WORDS
The beauty of the R/S/G/J/Y similarity really bl0ssoms in these longer words. I have to say my favorite is "analysis", where the last 4 letters become just four slanted lines of different lengths. Notice also how the "ry" in "theory" or "corollary" morphs so that the beginning (rightmost) part of the y actually lies below the r, as though they were both just one letter. I remember when this mutation was first starting to appear in my handwriting, the "ry" combination resembled the Japanese katakana "ri" (リ), which is a very interesting coincidence since the two have similar pronunciation. I wonder whether my subconscious mind was up to something clever!CONSISTENCY
To get an idea how consistent my handwriting is, I took a random word from the above list- "infinty"- and wrote it a bunch of times. Here's the result:
Pretty consistent, I think. That means the handwriting is really a structured mutation, and not just random scribbling.AN ACTUAL PAGE OF NOTES
With all this talk of my amazing shorthand, I should definitely share an actual page of notes. Here are some notes I took this week in my advanced mathematical logic class (a class with only a couple other students even registered). Click for a higher resolution copy.
Translation:Observation: If T is universal, then A can be taken to be a model (universalness means all substructures are models) and the map from A to B' [can be taken] to be an elementary embedding.In order to jot all this stuff down while the professor is discussing it, and at the same time take time to think about it as it's being written, it's absolutely critical to have very fast handwriting!
Concrete example. Let K be a field. Regard K as a K-vector space. Language is (K,+,-,0,1,(α_x)_(α in K)) where α_x is left-multiplication by x. Then this admits QE, and is axiomatized in a nice way... and that every def'able fnc is piecewise built out of terms. Q.F. formulas look like finite combos of alpha_0 + sum_{i=1}^n alpha_i x_i = 0 and ≠. This theory also turns out to be universal (∀-axiomatizable)
Define the theory T of K-vector spaces axiomatically: (K,+,-,0) is an abelian group... ∀xy, x+y=y+x... ∀x, x+(-x)=0... 0≠1... α(x+y)=αx+αy... α(βx)=αβ(x)... sλ_(r/s)(x)=rx
Claim: T=Th(K) where K=(K,+,-,0,1,(α_x)_(α in K)). Since K models T, if T is complete then T axiomates K.
WHERE FROM HERE?
I'll continue writing, and I'm sure my handwriting will continue to evolve. What'll happen next? Maybe my a's and o's will merge? Maybe my lowercase "m"'s will evolve into simple horizontal lines, as is already evident in some of the common words above? Who knows, it's not like it's at all within my conscious control. I'll just sit back, eat some popcorn, and enjoy the show.
Here are some other articles I wrote. Fortunately, they're written on the computer, so you don't have to take ten years worth of abstract notes to understand the handwriting ;)
Researching English On Books.google.com
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
How To Be A Better Teacher
Posts
3 comments:
Way too much time on your hands there Sam. But I guess the same goes for me since I read it, though I'm procrastinating. It does seem that your writing has improved since I last saw your notes.
Time? What is this "time" you speak of?? There is only one moment, and that moment is NOW ;)
In Australia we were made to learn running writing, so the form becomes much more important than the individual letters. It's kind of like learning the 'shape' of kanji after a while.
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