u/Evfnye-Memes

https://preview.redd.it/ckudl6lhs60h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=51a009e2f4bd6b6c0edd409686615b671addd3f3

https://preview.redd.it/v4c6edjpg7zg1.png?width=2222&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e8fa7697ae26164e1c4d4443ff88f6b4fcc7a7d

When taking notes, I often felt the need to abbreviate words, and usually accomplished it by dropping the vowels. With time, this got me thinking - what if I could devise a full-on system to write Italian in a way that would save a lot of space, AND at the same time show the inner workings of the morphology? Over time, I have been perfecting the system, and right now I am somewhat satisfied with how it turned out, even while knowing that there is always room for improvement and reform.

As can be seen from the example texts, this shorthand tends to one glyph of width per syllable, with additional information (codas, stress, complex onsets) being marked either on top or at the bottom of said glyph.

For a brief rundown:

• Since Italian has a very limited amount of allowed codas, I used diacritics to represent them: tilde for nasal coda (-n or -m, which are in complementary distribution), circumflex for rhotic coda (-r) and macron for geminate coda, which causes the doubling of the following consonant. Coda -l is rarer than the three above, therefore I marked it with a superscript ˡ instead.
• Word-initially, the vowel remains written.
• Hard ch /k/ and gh /g/ before e and i are represented with k and ɣ, respectively. Soft c and g are represented by c and g with underdots: c̣ g̣.
• The underdot is also used under a given consonant C for /Cj/ onsets. For /Cr/ onsets, a hook is added under the respective C. For /tr/ and /dr/, there are the dedicated retroflex IPA characters ʈ and ɖ.
• The sounds /ɲɲ/ (gn) and /ʎʎ/ (gli) are represented by their IPA symbols, ɲ and ʎ.
• The most common clusters that start with /s/ get their own glyphs: sp st sc(i) sc /sp st ʃʃ sk/ are represented by ψ ş x̣ x, respectively. /sk/ before a front vowel (sch) is indicated with ξ, and /str/ is represented with ʂ. For other initial /sC/ clusters, which are much rarer, superscript ˢ is used.
• When there is no coda diacritic on the stressed syllable and the stress is not penultimate (second-to-last), a grave accent is added if the syllable has any of /a ɛ ɔ/ as its nucleus vowels. An acute is added if it has any of /e i o u/. Optionally, it can also be marked on penultimate stressed syllables for disambiguation.
• Sequences written in Italian as <iu> and <ui> are represented respectively with <y> and <w>. <eo> and <oe> are represented with <ø> and <œ>. For all other vowel hiati, the highest vowel is written.
• The articles bear the burden of indicating the gender and number of nouns, adjectives etc., since in Italian all dependents in a noun phrase must agree with the head noun.

This guarantees around 40% to 50% of saved writing space, as seen in the examples above.