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

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
Subject: Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)


> Even when recycling, it's better to have to recycle only half a million
ton
> rather than a million. The less the better. Also, we are *taught* to be
> legible in those conditions, so it's not an issue. I've personally never
> found anyone in France (except doctors ;))) ) who has an illegible
> handwriting, and I've never met anyone who didn't write in a variety of
> cursive. Blockwriting is certainly uncommon, except on forms.
You might find my own writing history rather interesting... (it has inspired
my con-scripting).

I learned to write pretty much on my own around the age of 3, imitating
printed material, so my characters contained features that no one around me
used in handwriting, and the directions of the strokes were whatever seemed
natural, in many cases bottom to top and right to left.

By the time I was going to kindergarten, I had abandoned the complicated
loops on the bottom of lowercase g as found in printed characters for the
simple hook that most people use, at the prompting of my parents.  They
tried to get me to write each letter in the correct direction, but it didn't
stick.

In kindergarten we spend a while "learning to read".  As you can imagine, I
was bored stiff.  Kindergarten, where many of the other kids learned to
write, had no effect on my reading or writing.  (No effect other than to
teach me that school is a boring place where they try and teach you stuff
that you've known for years.)

In second grade we were supposed to learn "cursive".  I figured out the
letterforms pretty quickly, but I didn't like it, so I didn't do any of the
work.  To this day, I still remember all of the forms from class, and can
produce them easily.  The teacher told us that if we didn't know how to
write in cursive we would fail when we got to middle school and high school.

http://www.janbrett.com/alphabet/cursive_alphabet_main.htm
(This is what "cursive" writing looks like in America.)

By fifth grade, no one was requiring the students to use cursive, only that
their writing be something neat and legible enough for the teacher to read.
I had abandoned cursive back in the second grade, so this did not affect me.
(Then again, I did barely any more work in fifth grade than I did in
second.)

But it was about this time that I realized I could change my handwriting
style at will, and started copying other people's handwriting, inventing new
forms, whatever.  Some of the styles I experimented with at this time looked
pretty neat and formed the basis for later con-scripts.

Somewhere around my second year of high school (age 14) I was starting to
develop a more script-like hand, with connected letters and loops and such,
and I began to abandon most of the invented variations from earlier years.

Today (age 21), I write in a mostly cursive hand that has independently
evolved from printed characters.  Some of the forms are similar to
"standard" cursive (convergent evolution?), while others are vastly
different.  Characters generally have different forms depending on whether
they are at the beginning, middle, or end of the word.  Different ligatures
of characters are _very_ common, and as standardized as any other
characters.  Bottom-to-top strokes are still more common than top-to-bottom,
right-to-left being about as common as left-to-right.

I also have another hand that I use when writing something for someone else
to read, but I don't have much occasion to use it.  Almost everything I need
to write to someone might as well be typed.

Replies