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Backtrack-Free Cursive

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Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#91

Post by marking-time »

andreyvit wrote: post #30

Wondering how many people are like me and hate writing in cursive. I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).

I don't hate writing in cursive, It's simply that I do it so badly that I use printing for almost everything except my signature. I deeply admire people who write cursive well. It is a beautiful form of communication.

I had a penmanship teacher in high school advise me to use printing because at least she could read it. I suspect that it pained her to give me that advice, but for me it was a gift.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#92

Post by roman-kashitsyn »

demetrius wrote: post #56

I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow. Belarusian Cyrillic r…

> I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

I used to do it as well! But I gave up on it for the same reasons I described in the article: impaired working memory.

> лишили лилии

That’s a tough one, but I think it’s possible to make it legible with careful choice of spacing to indicate the groups: the distance between the strokes within a letter should be noticeably smaller than the distance between letters.

> I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.

I also like this variant of ∂, though I eventually switched to the version with a descender. It doesn’t annoy me because it introduces only a short pen lift.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#93

Post by roman-kashitsyn »

dnpls wrote: post #40

All images on the site appear broken to me, using Chrome on Mac. Is it a site-issue or a me-issue?

What version of Chrome do you use? The images are encoded in .webp for compactness; I hoped that most of the browsers in use support this format, but I might have to go multi-source after all.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#94

Post by aidenn0 »

NoGravitas wrote: post #90

As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x. It uses a lot of the same kind of loops that this script uses, just for the simpler problem of joins. The downside of the Zaner-Bloser system, as well as Palmer and anything that derives from Spencerian cursive, is that when wr…

+1 for the rollerball recommendation.

It's hard to describe what it's like using something like the STABILO worker after using ball-point pens for years. Compared to a ball-point it feels like the ink is jumping out of the pen, and I was accidentally joining words together for about a week. They are also much less fussy to care for than a cheap fountain pen, and much cheaper than a good fountain pen.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#95

Post by aidenn0 »

sollniss wrote: post #17

The t I've learned in school in the 90s is a single stroke. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift

I encountered that on exchange to a Gymnasium in the '90s. I liked it better than the Palmer I learned in the US.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#96

Post by [deleted] »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #32
a115ltd wrote: post #18

This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language. The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavon…

> The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages. Also, Bulgaria used to own all the land in the world, but because Bulgarians are very kind people, they gave some of it to other nations so that they have a place to live too. Thank you, Bulgarians!

[deleted]

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#97

Post by a115ltd »

usrnm wrote: post #24
a115ltd wrote: post #18

This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language. The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavon…

> The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages. That's some interesting nationalistic propaganda, never heard that one before

It's the accepted view of scholars and the accepted EU stance.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#98

Post by tsunagatta »

NoGravitas wrote: post #90

As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x. It uses a lot of the same kind of loops that this script uses, just for the simpler problem of joins. The downside of the Zaner-Bloser system, as well as Palmer and anything that derives from Spencerian cursive, is that when wr…

Interestingly I had the opposite journey, I am a Young so they didn't bother to teach me cursive in school, so in high school when I got into fountain pens I taught myself italic hand so that my handwriting would be more legible and easier to write with it -- but just recently I got tired of the two-stroke 'e' and taught myself Zaner-Bloser instead, lol. I do definitely see the drawbacks you mentioned though, after I started getting more casual with my writing I noticed 'l's and 'e's becoming quickly indistinguishable

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#99

Post by starmftronajoll »

It's a fascinating innovation, and I enjoyed the creativity on display in the article. That said, I have never minded the backtracking. For me, it is a feature. Having learned it from childhood, the backtracks happen unconsciously, and in fact, I enjoy how my muscle memory instinctively sends my hand dancing back over the word to supply all the missing dots and crossbars.

Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive

#100

Post by demetrius »

a115ltd wrote: post #97
usrnm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages. That's some interesting nationalistic propaganda, never heard that one before

It's the accepted view of scholars and the accepted EU stance.

No, it's not.

You're confusing a language (the way people speak) and a literary tradition (the way people write).

When ancestors of Russians borrowed Church Slavonic writing, they were already speaking another Slavic language, Old East Slavic. For the time being, they were writing in one language (Church Slavonic) and speaking another language (Old East Slavic). Later, they dropped Church Slavonic and started writing what they spoke.

Modern Russian language is a continuation of Old East Slavic, not of Old Church Slavonic.

This is the scholarly consensus.

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