Talk:2912: Cursive Letters

That Q is pretty easy to read, but a lot of people write it in a way that looks more like 2. That Q always throws me off. The 2 goes close to the bottom left, neither cool nor legible. EebstertheGreat (talk) 21:28, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Cursive has been in the news lately, almost half the US states have recently passed laws requiring that cursive writing be taught in elementary schools. Barmar (talk) 21:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Recently? I think only California did it recently, most of those laws are older. -- Hkmaly (talk) 22:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Is this the default cursive taught in US American schools? I’ve often seen this capital I, G and Q on (older) Hollywood films, but the (standard) cursive writing in Germany or France looks completely different. --162.158.154.99 21:49, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes for the most part, at least from when I was taught (early 2000s). Though, we were taught the Q that looks like a 2, like the poster above comments on. ZeWaka (talk) 06:43, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Labelled: https://i.imgur.com/dTdLgO6.png Bewa (talk) 22:09, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

This labelled should go in the explanation - without it I couldn't tell what half those were. In the UK cursive capitals haven't been taught in schools for at least 60 years, I don't know of anyone under 80 who could write these! 172.70.163.24 (talk) 08:25, 28 March 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Interestingly, when I was at primary school (mostly in the '70s), we were absolutely not allowed to use biros and (cursively or not, but we certainly learnt how to 'connect' our letters) our writing was full of various serifs and nib-flourishes.

On moving to secondary school, we were absolutely required to use ball-points (so no more squeezing out those ink-capsules all over the place, or messing with blotting paper!), but I believe "joined up" writing was encouraged so long as it was legible. You definitely have to make more effort to add serifs with biros, though, where a nib positively encourages it. (BTW, the worst pens were the 'erasable biros', probably because their ink was made to be abraded off by their hard, gritty rubber, but this also made it so easily smearable by a hand when other inks would have more quickly dried in.)

My handwriting was never that good, in either case. I did (separately, at night-school) pick up actual caligraphy, but that just let me write very neatly (and yet often unreadable - imagine the word "minimum" in what I know as "black gothic", close to that ided as 'Textur' on this page's sidebar...) but extremely slowly... If I need to write readably (sometimes even by myself), it helps if I downplay that cursiveness that I certainly did learn.

But at least my cursive letters aren't as exotic as those alleged-Zs. The most 'unblock' character is the 'k' (which loops between 'arms' not too dissimilarly to the comic version). I tend to reserve "looping verticals" to 'l' used for the litre (to differentiate from my digit 1, e.g. looks a bit like "|ℓ" for "one litre", so as not to look like eleven). My "£" (GBP) and "&" do both flourish significantly, even without any opportunity or reason to go fully-connected by cursivity, but perhaps to make them distinguishabld from the more similar alphabetic glyphs.

I had a quick look for other people's experiences in the UK, and it seems to distil down into this sort of answer (look out for Quora's latest attempt to answer with 'AI bot' and get you to sign in, it's just the human answer that's relevent, etc...). 172.70.160.167 09:15, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Meanwhile if this was Russian/Cyrillic cursive, almost every letter would be at y=0! 172.69.7.49 00:10, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Is that a "u" in the lower left? SDSpivey (talk) 03:11, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, so this is my first ever comment; feel free to yell at me if I’m doing it wrong. But to answer your question, nope, that’s a lowercase v. That said, the two can be frustratingly similar in some handwritings. Also, while this isn’t the point of the comic (and I assume it uses Munroe’s own handwriting) some of those letters can be made more legible and/or much cooler looking if you just write them with an alternate style. — ThatSciNerd (talk) 03:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Could someone add an image of the title text? My phone apparently can't display it - just those good ol' unicode boxes. The transcription let's me know what it says, but without seeing it in cursive it's not really the same effect. thanks to whoever added the transcription though! 162.158.74.69 08:07, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

RE: the purpose of cursive - wasn't it developed so you didn't have to lift your quill so much, reducing blobbing and spattering of ink? 162.158.74.69 (talk) 09:20, 28 March 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I essentialy mentioned that in the justifying comment when I changed "faster" for being more efficient, but didn't want to add too much clunky reasoning to the main text. From my time when I was regularly using a nibbed pen (not quite old enough to have used quills!), there were a number of factors behind choice of writing style, with a number of them (other than the speed/laziness) not really translating to ball-point use. (Nib-angle disappears when it became a ball, not a (thin) straight-edge, the ink doesn't splash or surge, there's not as much of an issue redragging the pen-tip over freshly 'wetted' surface, etc.)

And, because 'modern' metal pen nibs tend to have their tip(s, either side of the 'wick-gap') feature a rounded contact surface, it probably doesn't have as much of an issue as a penknife-sharpened feather-quill with being 'pushed' up the paper/parchment, which likely influenced some forms of letters (like the 'Z's), where the angle of the implement (off the paper, and across the paper) not only dictated the widths of lines, according to whether it was a broad tip-width stroke or a narrow sideways slip, but also discouraged directly pushing strokes directly 'upwards' away from the angled hand. Some of the funny letters might have arisen from the better practice of only 'tacking' in that direction. Probably alongside the pressures that encouraged a right-leaning italic style, making awkward long risers move even more away from a direct push-angle of a typical right-handed angle of grip.

Some 'mechanical' reasons probably remain, even now. Even if upwards 'digging in' is now esentially eliminated, the 'extension' of the travelling wrist is still not as easy as the rotation (and steady sideways movement), so a discrete lean probably is still a pervasive trend, even to block-writing, like an A looking angled like /|.

...after having a quick look (couldn't see 'A' on the comic at first, until I narrowed it down), the comic's capital 'A' looks like a large version of the ɑ-like small one. I'm more used to capital and small being different (the former being the 'inverted ox-head' style). And though cursively, capitals 'need' lead-in cursivity less than characters more likely to be not at the start of words, surely this makes it harder to join up anything that does than a character with a handy foot to a riser on the left? I mean, this is probably what made a-style 'a's a more common font treatment than ɑ-style ones. (Limited by font, here, I cannot easily find an unambiguous "over-hook" codepoint for a that wouldn't become a hookless 'ɑ' in if viewed in something like Comic Sans. But you'll all know to what I refer, hopefully.) 172.69.43.243 13:33, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

The reason for cursive 'r' not being easy to read is probably more to do with the fact that it does not much resemble the printed version, and is almost more like a mirror image of it. 141.101.76.12 (talk) o09:37, 28 March 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Is that seriously how people are taught to write Z and z?? I could only tell what it was by process of elimination! I've always written my Z's as essentially the block letter, just with a slightly wavy top and bottom (like the top of lowercase r). Definitely agree with how Randall placed them on the graph. EDIT: Kind of like 𝒵, actually! 172.71.103.11 12:14, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I was 100% sure the graph included some Greek letters (commonly used in physics), such as nu, and that the lower right corner was zeta (or a weird reverse xi). Randall previously made fun of zeta ("a hair fell on the scanned page") so it made sense to me. Admittedly, English isn't my first language so I'm not used to reading cursive.