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Re: Moi, le Kou (was: verbs = nouns?)

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Friday, January 12, 2001, 13:44
-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <CONLANG@...>
Date: Friday, January 12, 2001 9:37 PM
Subject: Re: Moi, le Kou (was: verbs = nouns?)


>This reminds me. When i wrote out my name in katakana in front of a friend >who had studied for a year in Japan, she remarked that my handwriting was >"girly" . Apparently it's too neat for guys, she says. Which dosnt >surprise me too much because I write much neater in other scripts than I >do in Latin script (which if you see my class notes looks more like a >scrawl than writing).
I wonder if that's a common phenomenon. My Korean handwriting isn't great, but it's generally considered far more legible than my broken half-cursive, half-print and half-scrawl Roman alphabet handwriting (though I am painfully conscientious about diacriticals after lots of half-points marked off on French quizzes). And my mom's Roman alphabet handwriting, OTOH, is much neater and more "conventional" (like the forms they teach you when you're learning to write) than her Korean handwriting. My hypothesis is that when you're writing in a not-as-familiar alphabet you don't know *what* you can get away with modifying while still being legible. (I don't know how anyone associates cursive with print in English, frex; the letter-forms are in some cases pretty darn different, and I think you have to learn 'em separately....) The one area where my "handwriting" is neatest is, alas, in math and physics. It sucks when you lose points because your lowercase mu got confused for a 4...<G> ObConlang: Do your conlangs have different written styles--calligraphy, "print," "cursive," other? I haven't worked with my conscript long enough to figure out a "fast" cursive way of writing it, but give it time.... YHL