Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> >   Do kids in France learn "when you read 'A' it looks like
> >this, but when you write it, it should look like this"?
>
> No. And I fail to see the point. It's just natural to separate
> handwriting
> from book printing. Those things are completely different (one is done
> by a
> human being, the other by a machine), so I fail to see why handwriting
> should imitate machines. I must say all those arguments keep surprising
> me.
> They are so remote from reality to me! :))
Do I sense some cultural assumptions at work? :-)

Mine say that machine writing is obviously secondary to, and ultimately based
upon, human writing.

Actually, back in first grade, we first learned to recognize the
handwritten, "q-like", lower case |g|, and only later the "8-like" common in
machine-printed texts. Similarly with lower case |a| and others. You could say
small |r| was an exception, since we learnt the "capital gamma-like" version
first, and the cursive "z-like" one later, but this was not truly an
exception, since the block letters handwriting we did back then used the
gammaesque version.

                                                       Andreas