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

From:Joseph Fatula <fatula3@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 10, 2003, 10:33
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

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Amanda Babcock <langs@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Ian Spackman <ianspackman@...>