Learning shorthand

Abstract

We honour the great unknowns in the early history of mankind who first thought of the wheel or of the domestic use of fire. A still more climacteric concept was that of the man who saw the possibility of capturing the ephemeral spoken word in a permanent visual form — turned speech into writing, in short. We have come a long way from those early days of the pictograph and the hieroglyphic, the cuneiform script and the clay tablet. The story is rivettingly fascinating, and it is superbly told in the two volumes of David Diringer's The Alphabet (Hutchinson), sub‐titled A Key to the History of Mankind; and rightly so, I think.