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Dutton Speedwords

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Dutton Speedwords

Dutton Speedwords, transcribed in Speedwords as Dutton Motez, is an international auxiliary language as well as an abbreviated writing system using the English alphabet for all the languages of the world. It was devised by Reginald J. G. Dutton (1886–1970) who initially ran a shorthand college promoting Dutton Shorthand (a geometric script), then offered a mail order (correspondence) self-education course in Speedwords while still supporting the Dutton Shorthand. The business was continued by his daughter Elizabeth after his death.

Any transcription, note taking or correspondence system must fulfill six requirements (Oliver, 2019, Micro-intellectual capital: A case study of Dutton Speedwords):

Ideally, these requirements should not be wholly biased toward English but consider European, Asian and Middle East languages.

The system of Speedwords created over 50 years by Dutton addresses all these requirements. Other systems have copied the solutions devised by Dutton without greatly improving his approach. One major advantage of Dutton's Speedwords is that it is readily available to everyone. Its current competitors either require pre-payment for materials before revealing the full details of their system or have a system that is a subset of the words necessary for a complete system.

Over time, three objectives were claimed by Dutton for Speedwords:

Initially, Dutton proposed Speedwords as an International Auxiliary Language (often abbreviated IAL) to encourage people to communicate internationally. Dutton wanted to provide a system that a sender could use which did not require them to learn the (foreign) language used by the recipient before establishing communication. Speedwords achieves this by relying on a deliberately small vocabulary. For international communication, the writer and reader are different, so, it is important that communication is unambiguous.

Then Dutton promoted Speedwords for high-speed writing. This used ideas and experience based on Dutton Shorthand. Dutton developed this stenographic method between 1919 and 1926. This approach also assumed that the writer and reader were different.

Up to this time, Speedwords avoided synonyms. Synonyms are variants of the same English word and treated them as equivalent. There are two possibilities:

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