Dephrase

Gregg Shorthand includes phrases in which a single shorthand form may represent several words. Readers unfamiliar with a phrase or lacking context may struggle to determine what words the form represents or not even realize that the form is a phrase at all. Grascii provides two tools to tackle this problem:

  1. Search: The Grascii dictionaries contain thousands of common and not so common phrases.

  2. Dephrase: When search does not provide results, dephrase is ready to fill the gap. Dephrase matches a Grascii string against several Gregg shorthand phrase patterns in order to provide possible longhand translations of a shorthand form. It is capable of deciphering common and novel phrases.

Note

The currently implemented phrase patterns and vocabulary are based on the Preanniversary edition of Gregg Shorthand, but many patterns may also apply to other editions.

Standard Dephrasing

The standard dephrasing uses a predefined set of phrase vocabulary.

$ grascii dephrase USHSE
YOU SHALL SEE
YOU SHIP SEE
WISH [TO] SEE

The dephraser provides three possibilities with the first and the last seeming most plausible.

The brackets around the “TO” in the last result indicate that the word “TO” does not correspond to any strokes in the Grascii string “USHSE”. Instead, it is a word often omitted in phrases.

Aggressive Dephrasing

Sometimes the standard phrase vocabulary is inadequate. Aggressive dephrasing integrates Grascii search to expand the possibilities.

Consider “GTH” which does not give any results with standard dephrasing:

$ grascii dephrase GTH
No results
You may try again with --aggressive to consider more possibilities.

Now with aggressive mode:

$ grascii dephrase GTH --aggressive
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) [TO] (THE|THANK|THEIR|THERE|THING|THINK|A THOUSAND)
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) [TO] THEY
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) [TO] THANK
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) (THE|THANK|THEIR|THERE|THING|THINK|A THOUSAND)
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) THEY
(GO|GOOD|GRAND|A GALLON) THANK

The words in parentheses delimited by pipes represent the results of Grascii search. That is, “G” in “GTH” could represent “GO”, “GOOD”, “GRAND”, or “A GALLON”. Similarly, “TH” has its own set of possibilities.

From these results, some of the most plausible phrases are “GO THANK”, “GO THERE”, and “GOOD THING”.

Note

At this time, the dictionaries and parameters aggressive dephrase uses for searches are the defaults based on Configuration.

Usage

grascii dephrase [-h] [-a] [--ignore-limit] phrase
<phrase>

A Grascii phrase to decipher.

-h, --help

Print a help message and exit.

-a, --aggressive

Perform a more aggressive dephrasing using Grascii search.

--ignore-limit

Ignore the 8-character phrase limit.

By default, if phrase is greater than 8 characters long, performing an aggressive dephrasing is blocked because the number of possibilities can explode exponentially as the phrase gets longer. Set this flag to bypass this restriction.