Easyscript.
Unlike Keyscript, Easyscript uses:
1. capital letters
2. commas used as in English.
3. keyboard signs like *, @, % and the single inverted comma as an abbreviation.
Keyscript uses only lower case letters, the full stop (or period) as in English, the comma as a question mark only, and very occasionally the single inverted comma when writing a conversation. You never have to use the shift key when typing in Keyscript.
Easyscript prides itself on having only five basic rules. Keyscript actually has only two main rules.
1. Omit vowels in words. (Although vowels and diphthongs are used regularly in specified places, as explained in Stage 5 of the Lightning Guide.)
2. Use the vowels (and the less frequently occurring English consonants) to represent common combinations of consonants.
No.2. is called indication. The concept is unique to Keyscript and enables the whole word to be written using very few letters, without just leaving out letters as Easyscript does. This makes Keyscript easier to read than Easyscript.
In Keyscript, the spelling of a word is fixed. In Easyscript you often choose the number of letters to write a single word. This gives rise to several different spellings of the same word, and would make Easyscript even more difficult to read, especially for someone reading the notes of another.
Keyscript employs one-letter abbreviations for the most common words in the English language. Easyscript has not taken advantage of this, except for some extremely common words like the, and, to & of. For example, in Easyscript, from is written frm, could is cld, with is wth, their is thr, this is ths. And was is was, and who is who, without any abbreviation at all! In Keyscript, all these words are written with one letter.
Unlike Easyscript, Keyscript regularly joins words together to show meaning. This joining or phrasing follows simple, set rules based on the natural flow of the English language. Phrasing makes Keyscript even faster to write and easier to read.
Much of what the Easyscript demo says about other systems is
just plain WRONG. You do not need
30,000 rules to learn 30,000 words in any shorthand system. And only a very few shorthand systems
operate on limited vocabularies. Pitman
is not one of them, neither is Keyscript.
Now to Teeline.
Teeline cannot be typed because it abbreviates (or streamlines) the actual letters, so it must be used as a handwritten shorthand only.
Teeline has the Pitman problem of letters having to physically join with other letters. So several letters have more than one form, i.e. a, d, f & l. The joinings often appear clumsy and this may slow down the rate of writing.
Teeline of course does not use indication as in Keyscript either. Its strategy for abbreviation is removing unnecessary letters, making letters faster to write through streamlining and removing vowels if they are not the first or last letter of the word.
With Teeline, these abbreviated letters are turned into symbols which must be learned. The symbols are derived from old cursive forms of the letter, the unnecessary parts of which are stripped, leaving only the core of the letter left. In Keyscript there are no symbols of any kind to learn.
Typed Keyscript has an enormous potential for very high speeds to be reached, as fast as normal human speech or faster. Handwritten Keyscript is also very fast, due to the familiarity of the letters of the alphabet, their cursive nature and uniform slope, the shortness of the words (the average written word in Keyscript is much less than two letters long), the application of the simple rules, and phrasing.