Merry Christmas!

GeneralCarlos17

Here is a list of Christmas reading material for your pleasure!


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  3. Does there happen to be any transcripts for some of the Christmas readings? I downloaded the Christmas Carol a few years ago and haven't gotten very far in the reading of it. Diamond Jubilee was the one I learned, so I've had the hardest time reading the pre-Anniversary or Anniversary Gregg. I finally got an Anniversary manual but still find it very hard to read all these wonderful old stories in shorthand. I get a few words down then get very lost in the translation.

    1. Debbie, the "Christmas with castanets" story listed above is written in Simplified and I think you might find it readable? Simplified is more similar to DJ than Anniversary is.

      The shorthand version of Christmas Carol contains about 40% of the original text. What you could do is use the original longhand text as a key, but you would have to find the right passages… here is a link to one plaintext copy of the original Christmas Carol

      http://tinyurl.com/longhandcarol

    2. I agree that occasional transcripts for Anni would be helpful since its increased brevity and no doubt top speed are gained at the expense of increased crypticness at least for those of us who learned later versions. However I very much appreciate the variety of versions that Carlos posts, so there is something for everyone!

  5. Thanks for the re-post, Carlos. Happy New Year to everyone.

    (By the way, I note that Linus is saying "Christmas" in Anni and "all" in DJ. I wonder what version of Gregg Charles Schultz knew. He included shorthand in several of his strips.) 

    1. You're welcome!

      From what I've seen, whoever wrote the shorthand for Peanuts learned DJS (or Series 90). The reason I say that is that in one of the cartoons, the writer uses "j-mn blend" for "gentlemen": no one who learned Anniversary or Simplified would ever use that outline, given how many times the outline with the gent blend appears in the Gregg books! Whether Mr. Schultz wrote the shorthand himself, that's something I don't really know.

  6. Things like this Peanuts cartoon pique my curiosity, so I looked up the strip that this panel came from. It was run in 1968, so the current Gregg series was DJ at the time, and not yet S90.

    According to a Peanuts fan online, this is the first strip in which shorthand appears, and the only strip in which the shorthand is written by someone other than Woodstock.

    The outlines are definitely DJ, not Anni or Simplified, as Carlos mentions: see the strip and look at the words "all" and "advance". Also, "sincerely" is spelled in full. But "Christmas" is abbreviated as in Anni.

    Despite the great care with which the ordinary roman letters in the strip are printed, the shorthand is not very competently written: "Christmas" looks like "class", "how" looks rather like "ache", "Santa" is spelled with separate n-t instead of the nt blend, "looking" looks like "mocking" (clearly written with o instead of u), "a" looks like "at".

    My guess, then, is that Schultz didn't really know shorthand, but either used a dictionary or a human source, and copied the shorthand into the strip himself. I strongly suspect a human source rather than a dictionary for two reasons: first, the errors; and second, the non-DJ forms for "Christmas" and "sincerely".

    I hope this nitpicking doesn't bore all the rest of you!

  7. I forgot to mention above that Charles Schultz apparently did all the work on the Peanuts strips alone, without assistants. So he would have been the one to letter the shorthand.

  9. Thanks Carlos! This looks amazing to see all this reading material. Thanks for the recommendation of buying the Louis Leslie Gregg Shorthand Functional Method books too. They are easy to take with and I have been able to work on my reading some each day. 

    Very grateful for this group. Hope you all have had a delightful Christmas.

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