some other thoughts
Have been "lurking" on this site for many years - and this thread really caught my attention. I took the liberty to send a copy of your picture to a friend of mine, who has friends of many varied interests and careers... and this is what I got back.
"I'm quite confident that this is some type of shorthand, though I can't be more specific than that. I see a lot of postcards of this vintage written in shorthand when I'm rummaging around at stamp shows in search of Esperanto and Volapük. It's too early to be Gregg, the type of shorthand most commonly used in the 20th century, since that wasn't published until 1888. The most popular English shorthand system before Gregg was Pitman, but I'm too ignorant of shorthand to say whether this is Pitman or not. Then again, it could be a different type of shorthand entirely. The number of shorthand systems that have been created over the years is mind-boggling: Pitman's A History of Shorthand, 4th ed. (1918), shows 17 different systems published between 1850 and 1880 alone in its "Table of English Stenographic Alphabets," and Pitman's book doesn't even cover systems published in America, unless they were also published in the U.K.
It certainly doesn't look anything like any of the Native American syllabaries that I've ever seen (i.e. Cherokee, Cree, and various others derived from the latter)."
Hopefully this helps in some way. Good luck!
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