Re: Written forms (was: Moi, le Kou)

From: "Yoon Ha Lee"

> Fraktur...<shudder>  No aspersion on you--it's beautiful, but it's such a
> pain in the butt to read (in German anyway) because I get lost in a sea of
> vertical strokes.
A common complaint. I never had a problem with it for some reason. The one I
have a problem with is the old German cursive. I've seen some old German
town registries and stuff online, and while it's obviously written with the
utmost meticulousness by some needle-nosed stickler for detail, I find it
completely indecipherable. Cursive based on Fraktur? Now *that's*
frightening.

> I did try to learn it calligraphy-wise but it's trickier
> than the calligraphy alphabets that I do use semi-regularly.  (It's not
too
> hard to teach yourself--I did, plus a trimester of intro calligraphy in
> middle school, during which I appalled the teacher by not using a ruler to
> space everything methodically.)  Sounds fun.  :-)
If you hum a few bars, I can fake Chinese brush calligraphy (of the Ou Yang
school). But the nib-nosed Western calligraphy pens? Never tried 'em. Sounds
like that might be an interesting, and more importantly, doable project this
coming summer.

Kou