The Gregg Group was founded 22 May 2004, prompted by the lack of online shorthand resources. As the primary use for shorthand — business and legal recording — has waned in recent decades, we generally acclaim the skill as a hobby or personal tool. The purpose of the group is to promote the use of Gregg systems of shorthand by providing advice to beginners, support for students, and an association of users of this efficient, attractive, and enjoyable method of writing.
As you may know, a pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of a language’s alphabet at least once. A common example is “a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
I was wondering if anyone has composed pangrams using the basic Gregg alphabet, however you might define that. (Would you want to include both over-th and under-th? Would you feel compelled to include blends such as ten, dem, ent and pent? )
I googled but couldn’t find pangrams for any symbol shorthand systems.
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I haven't seen any either. Since each stroke in shorthand has the potential of representing a word, it would likely be a very long sentence!
Just thinking out loud here. Any other pangramophiles, feel free to chime in.
To make a pangram, I think it is necessary to define the challenge more clearly.
(1) Which version of Gregg does the pangram creator want to use.
(2) Are we using the strokes only in phonetic mode, or are we mixing and matching brief forms and phonetic strokes? Probably the latter since it is unnatural to make a sentence without brief forms, even in Greghand.
(3) How to define the set of strokes that must be included? For example, obviously B and L must be included. Is it also necessary to have an instance of the BL blend in the pangram? What about the dash that indicates the W sound in the middle of a word? The oi, ow and yoo diphthongs?
A different and larger challenge would be making a "panlogogram" — a paragraph that would use *all* the brief forms (logograms) of Anniversary or Simplified. That would keep someone busy for a while.
This is an attempt at a pangram of the basic strokes in Greghand: "Dave should roll a keg to the pub and hang my tanks of French jelly."
It uses the basic strokes but does not use the diphthongs, blends, -ly loop and W dash.
I have to think about this. Adding the blends and the missing diphthongs will make the sentence too long.
Also, the right s is missing in the sentence, correct?
You're correct about the s, I was thinking one form of s and one th would be sufficient?? Might be able to get the diphthongs into the sentence by giving Dave a weird family name 🙂
And a related thought: In Pitman2000, I know there were some letters for dictation which used all the brief forms. Granted, there are far fewer in Pitman2000 than Anniversary, but that's another exercise someone might want to take on for the post-Anni systems.