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

-----Original Message-----
From: DOUGLAS KOLLER <LAOKOU@...>
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <CONLANG@...>
Date: Saturday, January 13, 2001 11:34 AM
Subject: 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.
<laugh>  I think I've seen that--it almost looks like copperplate
calligraphy.  Maybe they come from the same place.

>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.
<whistle>  I'd love to learn brush calligraphy of any sort; heck, I signed
up for a Chinese brush painting course last semester and only made it to two
sessions (out of eight) because my classes were murdering me.  I still have
the brushes and ink, though, and the professor claimed they were about the
best quality you could get (considering what we were charged for
supplies...).

I learned on felt-tipped calligraphy "pens," which aren't very satisfactory
but are cheap and good to practice on, *especially* if you have a tendency
to spill ink (I do).  Then there are ink-cartridge calligraphy pens, which I
found convenient, and the ones that you dip in ink (real danger of spills,
but the most fun--takes some practice learning to bleed off excess ink
before you start "for real," though).  I found the hard part was keeping the
pen at the same angle all the time, and I always cheated on the upstrokes--I
think you're only supposed to do downstrokes and sidestrokes.  I could never
figure out why, and then when I tried doing Western calligraphy with a
*brush*  I discovered upstrokes were a pain, and it all made sense.

I seem to remember there was *some* calligrapher, or someone who knew a
calligrapher, on this list who would know more about it than I do...<G>

YHL