I absolutely agree that Steno is faster than regular typing. I specifically mentioned that Steno doesn't quite behave the same as ETL because in Steno the chords represent syllables more so than single letters, which is what makes the shorthand less jarring than with ETL from a mental perspective as you only need to think of the sound a word makes rather than a subsequence of words that is unique.
Depends largely on the Steno system. Plover, for example, uses a dictionary, which, by default is more or less syllables. But sometimes not, for example "PAOUBL" is short for " proximal convoluted tubule", in the default Plover dictionary, or "A/KHEL/ES" is "Achilles", and so on. It's a tad more complicated than syllables, really.
In Steno you also type the whole word at once because you enter the begin/mid/end of the word at the same time with the left/mid/right of the Stenotype machine. Not so with ETL where you are simply inputting letters rather than sounds.
I don't really see a big difference, except for the dictionary. (Plover has an input method where you finish a sequence by hitting space, for keyboards without NKRO).
Ok, Steno is a little bit smarter, because it allows you to use multiple chords to input a single word - or at least Plover is smart enough for that. But you can get pretty far with a specialized dictionary too, and avoid the release problem.
The same is true with any chording input method: if you could figure out a way to avoid the need for waiting for releases, chording could potentially be faster than it already is.
But that is already figured out: have a system where you - in most cases - don't need to hit the same key twice to enter a word, thus, you can just hold all the keys required for the chord, and once the last one is released, a dictionary lookup is made. For the rare case where you'd need to hold the same key twice, you split the word, and use two chords to enter it. This should be the rare case, though, and at this point, the slowdown of having to use two chords is negligible compared to the speed gain by using short chords to enter full words.
Also, consider that with any reasonable chording system, you can press the keys in any order. "HABG", "GBAH" and any combination of these keys will still expand to "hack". This is quite a relief for your brain, you don't have to care about key order, so inputting a four-key chord to type a four-key word is in most cases faster than typing it out letter by letter, because of not having to pay attention to the order. Put it in another way: I don't have to wait for "h" to register before I can type "a".
In most steno systems, there are less keys than on a normal keyboard, thus less movement too.
Nevertheless, I do agree that the simplistic abbreviations presented before are inadequate to achieve higher speeds. But that's not the fault of chording, or the input system, but of the dictionary, mostly.
Imagine two words in Steno that have non-overlapping inputs. If you weren't limited by waiting for the release, you could enter both words at once. For example, I wager I could type "i am" faster than someone on a Stenotype machine because the Stenotypist would have to write "i" as one sequence and "am" as a separate one whereas on a regular keyboard you could write it all in one slightly offset stroke, with the type of style shown in my video.
The default Plover dictionary has "EU/-PL" as the chord for "I am". That's four keys to press - exactly the same amount as typing it one by one, and you can do it in one stroke. If you take order and the need to wait for "I" to register before you can press space into consideration, Steno will be faster. Even if you'd need two Steno strokes to input "I am", you'd only have to wait for "I" to register (which happens at release) before you can input the next chord, while with touch typing, you have to wait for each char to register before tapping the next, and have to pay attention to order too. A good chording system, with a good dictionary makes wait time a lot less.
So again, I have no doubt Steno is faster than regular typing, but chording could be faster if it wasn't limited by releases and ETL doesn't share the same human-friendly shorthand that Steno does, at least as I perceive it. More on that below.
I agree that the shorthands presented before are not great, but again, that's the fault of the dictionary. Chording is considerably faster with a good dictionary and expansion system.
I imagine in Steno that there/their would be the same input (or perhaps not, as these are common enough words that perhaps they have dedicated inputs, but the point I'm trying to make will be the same), but that Steno would resolve which one it is through context rather than through different inputs.
Most Steno systems don't do NLP, and they don't look at context, unless you specifically instruct the system to do so: like, "I'll be entering a single word, in multiple chords, don't put a space between them", or similar. But that needs manual action.
(for the record, "THR" is "there", "THAER" is "their" in Plover)
