Abbreviated writing forms are nothing new; however they were often correlated with technologies that limited space (expensive tools or reproduction methods). They are now much less frequent in edited works, because they can cheaply consume enormous amounts of virtual space, so it’s not worth the increased ambiguity. Where the medium or editorial time is more limited, as in emails or SMS, abbreviations can be useful. And of course, there’s the sociolinguistic aspect of this being a new, cool dialect in some contexts.

A lot of written English vowels no longer play the great role they used to. At least in my Australian English, a lot of vowels become what both Hebrew and phoneticians call a schwa. In terms of the phones that are actually pronounced prominently in my dialect “regards” might be best written “rgads”. But spelling has been fairly standardised for a couple of hundred years, and our new technology mostly furthers that standardisation (providing a red squiggly line when it reckons I should write “standardization” instead).

“The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjads.
All known abjads (except maybe Tifinagh) belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages and the related Berber languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases.
Some abjads (such as Arabic and Hebrew) have markings for vowels as well, but use them only in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets, the most famous case being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language.”

Many other writing systems are syllabic, so one sign for ka another for ki another for ku etc. It takes time to learn, but once you have done that, writing is fast.

Thx