Addressing a postcard in shorthand

[pne]

Today, I sent a postcard to my shorthand teacher, addressed entirely in shorthand. Edit 2010-09-10: it arrived!

I used the Verkehrsschrift (basic grade) of DEK (German Unified Shorthand) for the sender and recipient addresses, since if any postal employee learned shorthand at all (which is what I’m wondering, and which is the point of this experiment), it’ll be DEK. The message itself is in Aufbauschrift II (commercial grade?*) of Stiefografie, which is what I learned.

I used a DEK dictionary to help me compose the addresses, since (a) I never formally sat down to study it, and (b) I find it rather complicated, and its abbreviations—even in the lowest “grade”—fairly numerous.

Brownie points if anyone can “decode” the addresses, the message, or both. (Or point out any mistakes I made, especially in the DEK bits.)

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* The basic grade of Stiefografie is a lot simpler than that of DEK: it has no abbreviations at all, only a few signs for certain consonant combinations (nd/nt, ng/nk, st, sp, pf). Personally, I find that the second grade of Stiefografie is roughly comparable to the basic grade of DEK, and the third and highest grade of Stiefografie to the second/middle “commercial” grade of DEK. This, based on the number and kind of abbreviations used (which are very often very similar: I suspect that Helmut Stief used DEK Eilschrift as an inspiration in deciding what forms to abbreviate and how to do so). So Stiefografie has nothing to compare to DEK’s highest “speech” grade, suitable not just for dictation but for notating spontaneous speech.

Comments

[green_knight]

Please keep us updated whether it arrives. The automated sorting machines will have had a field day.

[pne]

Please keep us updated whether it arrives.

The recipient will be on holidays for the next couple of weeks (they still have school holidays where he lives, and he's a teacher), so I'll have to wait a while anyway. I'll see what happens.

The automated sorting machines will have had a field day.

Heh; indeed.

I wonder how good they are at handwritten addresses in general -- what proportion of hand-addressed mail the OCR systems can handle by themselves and what proportion has to be sorted by hand.

I did try to write as neatly and legibly as possible, but of course, shorthand is not what they're trained for :) But perhaps it'll help a postal worker who happens to know some shorthand if he doesn't have to decipher a scrawl.

[pseudomonas]

How close can one get on the postal code alone? If there's 100k of them, that's about 1 code for 1000 people, so to within maybe a dozen streets on average, I guess, most of which will have a #37. This assumes you're sending it within Germany, of course.

[pne]

How close can one get on the postal code alone?

Typically not all that close.

Large cities have several postal codes, but outside them, one postal code often applies to several neighbouring towns.

If there's 100k of them, that's about 1 code for 1000 people

The Wikipedia article says there are about 30'000 German postal codes right now. I'm not sure whether, but assume that, this includes postal codes assigned to PO boxes and to individual companies who receive large amounts of mail. So, let's say perhaps 20'000 to 25'000 postal codes for street addresses; that's about 1 code for 3500 to 4000 people, on average.

(Edit: I should have read further down, where it says that there were 8259 street-address postal codes in 2003, or about 1 code for 10'000 people, on average.)

Apparently, at least all of Straubing is in 94315, so that's about 44'500 people who live in that postal code, and a corresponding number of roads.

So in general, a postal code alone won't get you much in Germany. (Though we do have more postal codes now than before the reunification: back then, there were 3400 four-digit postal codes in the west and 2020 in the east = 5420. So maybe four to five times as many street-address postal codes.)

This assumes you're sending it within Germany, of course.

Yes, that assumption is correct in this case.

[eva]

Well, I wonder if it'll arrive, as I don't believe reading it is a common skill. The only person I know who learned some kind of Kurzschrift is my mother, and she was born in 1943.

[pne]

It depends on the job, I think.

Our receptionist (born maybe between 1960 and 1970?) said she learned it, and a friend of mine who's only a few years older than me (born around 1971, perhaps?) learned it, too (and hated it, she said).

I suppose it's most common in secretaries above a certain age, but I don't know which other jobs might also have required one to know shorthand. Perhaps not many. So yes, not a common skill, I agree.

I'm not really expecting it to arrive :) But we'll see.

[eva]

I'm not sure about my mother; I think she either learned it in Gymnasium, or perhaps before going to university, where I suppose it would have been a useful skill.

[schnurble]

I wonder if people at the post office will even realize it's shorthand and not just some illegible writing...

I while ago I went to the post office to send out a package, and the man before me had a long discussion with the guy behind the counter because he wanted to send something to an arabian country and had written the address with arabian letters and the clerk insisted that the address had to be written in latin letters because no one could read it. Not only the recipient's country but the full address...