How to Write Faster

This section contains a short Speedwords vocabulary, which should be enough to get you started.¹ The original Dutton Speedwords textbooks are long out of print, but there's plenty of material on the Web² if you want to go further.

The basis for Dutton Speedwords is a principle known as Zipf's Law. Informally put, Zipf's law states:³

In most languages, there are a few very common words (such as a, and, of, and the) and a large number of uncommon words (such as spontaneity and forensics).

Zipf's Law applies not only to human languages, but also to computer languages, colors in computer graphics files, audio frequencies in sound files, and so on. This fact is the basis for most compression techniques, which reserve short encodings of one or two characters for common items and use long encodings for uncommon items.

Although the English language has already evolved a kind of compression via Zipf's Law (of is already shorter than spontaneity), Reginald Dutton engineered a language that would compress language even further.

A language is more than its vocabulary. You can't use a language without knowing its grammar as well. Fortunately, the grammar of Speedwords is very simple.

You can use most Speedwords as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs without changing them. This is similar to languages such as Chinese, which do not distinguish between parts of speech in this way.

Speedwords uses compound words, such as ca + dor (i.e., room + sleep), which means bedroom. Note that the way in which Speedwords forms compounds such as cador, literally roomsleep, is the reverse of the way in which English speakers would expect to form them (dorca or sleeproom).

The prefix y- indicates past tense, and the letter r indicates future tense: j sa means "I know," j ysa means "I knew," and j r sa means "I will know." When standing alone, y is the past tense of e: sh y fe means "She was happy." The continuous or progressive verb is also expressed with e; for example, j e sa means "I am knowing."

The English verb do is not translated into Speedwords when it is redundant: j n sa means "I (do) not know." The word to in the infinitive of verbs is also considered redundant; thus, sa means "know" or "to know."

Pronouns are not inflected to indicate case: w means "we" or "us." Possessive pronouns are created with -i: ji means "my," si means "his," and shi means "her(s)."

Nouns don't specify plurality when it is already indicated in some other way (e.g., ji 5 bu means "my five books"), but when plurality isn't already specified, use -z (e.g., ji bu means "my book," and ji buz means "my books").

Sentences that describe the existence of an item do not contain the word there: E 3 bu ir f v means "(There) are three books here for you."

Yes-or-no questions are simply prefixed with the letter q. For example, v pu k... means "you think that..." and q v pu k... means "do you think that...?"

For most other questions of grammar, you can treat Speedwords as a "relexification" of, or code for, ordinary English. You might not always write grammatical Speedwords, but if you're only writing for yourself, this should not be a problem.

Q v nu h ci ri i rapmotz? J n es k t r ne v u lo pe.