(And it isn't even Talk Like a PirateDay)
Image via Daily Gregg
(warning this post uses a bit of IPA)
I just finished up Unit 8, where we are
introduced to the special "R" rules. Unit 8 is only
concerned with the "ur/ir/er/ar" sound in relation to the
beginning or ending of a straight stroke. For the rest of the
Anniversary's method of expressing "R" I'll need to wait
until Unit 20.
R is weird - In America, some people
say it is a vowel, but that isn't quite right. R is a bully,
specifically R doesn't like shwas (ə). To quote one of the phonics
books that I used to teach my son to read: when R comes after an I, E
or U it likes to squish it down so far that you can hardly hear it at
all - all you can hear is "er"(ɚ) (note: "ar"
is really "ɑ" plus "ɚ")
Like the graphic above states, this
special method (reversing the circle) is unique to Anniversary, In
simplified and later editions, they just write the R out. I don't
have the simplified manual, so I don't know exactly how the rule is
stated, and I'm not quite sure why they decided to change it. (Ok, I
actually do have an idea: This special rule is one more thing to
memorize, and [looking ahead to unit 20] it can probably be a bit
difficult to write smoothly without a lot of drilling practice. And
it may be a bit more difficult to read fluently.) But it is
definitely something to keep in mind when reading old found shorthand
notes, or when choosing a method to learn.
On a personal note I usually prefer the way the Anniversary reversed circle words look, but there are a handful of Simplified versions that I think look nicer. Maybe once I'm all done with Anniversary I'll get a Simplified manual and I'll blend the two versions for a more pleasing to my eye hybrid.
*
There are exceptions when it would be
impossible or really hard to write quickly, like "air"
And since Gregg isn't really a wholly
phonetic system, sometimes the rules are bent a bit to to make other
words that don't quite fit that description easier/quicker to write.
The R sound(s) of American English is a topic of much debate and research among phoneticists. The sound in "bird, herd, word" is classified as a vowel, or a liquid, or an approximant, depending on who you ask.
ReplyDeleteI like Catford's description quoted at vorlin.org/v2k6/rvowel.html but research is ongoing with ultrasound, MRI's, acoustic spectrograms and so forth to find out what these sounds are and how they are made.
There is some doubt that adequate phonetic symbols exist for the American R sound(s), see the comment from Mark Beadles at stackexchange
Fascinating!
Delete(I seem to be saying that a lot lately in regards to shorthand)
thank you for the links, I spent most of Tuesday falling down the wikipedia rabbit hole researching for this post, phonetics is quite the interesting subject.
Here is the section on the omission of R from the Simplified manual. http://i.imgur.com/NnPfKVv.png
ReplyDeleteAnd here is some context from the authors: http://dailygregg.tumblr.com/post/117459020090
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