La via della fonetica nella teoria stenografica europea moderna

The phonetic path in modern European shorthand theory. In addition to the widely recognized culture of pasigraphic universal languages, a remarkable production of shorthand programs developed in modern Europe, providing practical writing systems for rapid real-time note-taking, extensively documented in sectorial textbooks. Largely due to the high inconsistency of the standard English spelling system in relation to pronunciation, shorthand theories are especially popular in modern England, giving rise to a wide set of shorthand manuals that will become influential models in Europe and beyond. This paper presents a historiographical survey of highly representative English shorthand authors and texts spanning three centuries going from the beginning of modern shorthand tradition (end of the 16th century) to the 19th century, which detect a sequential focus in language analysis moving from logographic to the alphabetic perspec- tive. At the core of shorthand as a technical practice, the historical course of shorthand theory in England highlights an increasingly refined insight on speech reproduction and the concrete and exact description of sounds, thus tracing a critical and methodological path which is connected and directly paves the way to 19th phonetic science.