Conflicts

Part of Theory Development

A Conflict in steno occurs when the same outline could lead to multiple valid translations in a theory.

Conflicts create inherent complexity, as they couple translations together. They're the main source of complexity in steno.

Conflicts make theories worse. They add confusion and inconsistency wherever they are present, which makes systems harder to learn and use.

Conflicts can't actually exist in the output of a realtime system, so they require resolution. Conflict resolution has a tendency to spill over into other aspects of a system, and create even more complexity and confusion.

Some conflicts are unrepresentable in a dictionary, but others can be, meaning the space of conflicts is infinite.

Conflicts can only be resolved by restriction: either by restricting certain translations to require mandatories, or restricting the rules of a theory to work around a set of conflicts. All forms of conflict resolution require a learner to memorize an exception to the rules.

Most theories focus on conflict resolution, or how to avoid conflicts once they appear, but this is an inferior approach to conflict avoidance. Just don't have conflicts in the first place.

Conflicts aren't needed. They aren't inherent to steno, and they only exist if a theory author decides they are worth the trade-off. I don't think they're ever worth worth it, so I made a system that doesn't have them, but I also think there are good reasons for a system to make these trade-offs.

The 5 main forms of conflicts found in most hobbyist theories (Plover & Lapwing derivations) can be avoided:

• Word boundary and word-affix conflicts can be avoided with a regular outline grammar
• Proper noun conflicts can be avoided with a capitalization / # key
• Chord conflicts/stenonyms can be avoided with a conflictless layout
• Homophonic conflicts can be avoided with orthography

There may be good reasons to choose to add the complexity that comes along with these conflicts to your theory, such as if your layout is too tight to fit a # key, a key used to implement a regular outline grammar, or to fit all conflicting phonemes onto their own chord. The WSI layout, and machines that were designed around it, have ample room for all of these things.

Professional theories were made for transcribing human speech as you're listening to it, so the layout being phonetic makes perfect sense. Some hobbyists enjoy the relief of not needing to think about orthography as often, but the needs of hobbyists are very different than those of professionals. By my observation, phonetic layouts lead to the largest number of conflicts through homophones.

See Pinchord for an example of a conflict-less system.

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