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Cursive (longhand)

door Shanemk, 2 oktober 2010

Berichten: 27

Taal: English

Shanemk (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 01:46:09

Has anyone here had any experience with whether or not Esperanto speakers from other countries can easily decipher Esperanto written in cursive? I was taught the Palmer method of cursive in school and it is, for the most part, easily read, but some letters may not make any sense to someone living outside and English-speaking country. For example, the capital Q, the l and b looking almost exactly alike, etc. Did Zamenhoff provide Esperanto with a "native" cursive system, or did he provide any guidelines for it?

I ask because my manuscript writing is really crappy but my palmer is decent.

erinja (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 02:43:38

Esperanto speakers write with whatever writing they learned in their native language, so their cursive might differ from yours.

I've never encountered a problem though. As a beginner I corresponded by mail with Esperanto speakers from other countries and I never had a problem with the writing. I thought it was cool to see the different handwriting styles!

Also, if you speak the language well, one or two ambiguous characters won't be a deal-breaker, because you'll get the meaning through context.

LyzTyphone (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 09:00:07

I am kind of a typography-penmanship fan, so...

I am sure Esperanto can be adapted to any penmanship that uses Latin Alphabet. As long as the penman figures out a way to properly treat the 6 ĉapelitaj leteroj (ĉĝĥĵŝ-ŭ), which I presume won't be difficult at all. And in face, in Esperanto you don't even have to worry about the Q, or Y!

How about scanning some of your writing~ I don't mind checking for you the legibility~ (Of course I am not very good at reading cursive, not being native Latin alphabet writer)

ceigered (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 10:46:20

As long as your writing is better than mine, in which g, y, j, and q are all merged into a single letter, you should be alright. (actually, in palmer, the z is most similar to my g/y/j and q if you want a comparison lango.gif).

Heck, even if you write like me, an Esperantist should still understand. Getting a letter from the Netherlands was interesting because of the differences in the way cursive here and there are written, but ultimately it was just interesting and not confusing in the slightest.

Having just looked at an example of the palmer "alphabet", it looks very tame spare capital G - luckily, anyone even remotely familiar with the Latin script will probably have no problem discerning what letter it is when it's the only one that looks that cool.

Ultimately, the only problems I've had reading cursive is when it was my teachers' cursive from back when I was at school, or when it's in a completely different script, e.g. cyrillic cursive - try that one for a challenge okulumo.gif.

Shanemk (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 22:57:49

Thanks everyone for helping. And I took the advice and scanned some of my cursive. I left out the gx on accident, but the g is still there so it's fine for this purpose.

Genjix (Profiel tonen) 2 oktober 2010 23:26:04

Please don't write cursive. I'm a native speaker from the UK and I cannot read cursive. It is very hard for me since I wasn't taught at school and never cared to learn.

It's one of those archaic things that will likely disappear in the future. Use block printing.

ceigered (Profiel tonen) 3 oktober 2010 04:51:45

Shanemk:Thanks everyone for helping. And I took the advice and scanned some of my cursive. I left out the gx on accident, but the g is still there so it's fine for this purpose.
That cursive is fine, it makes perfect sense to me and looks really nice too. And that little dude on there gets bonus points lango.gif

Genjix:Please don't write cursive. I'm a native speaker from the UK and I cannot read cursive. It is very hard for me since I wasn't taught at school and never cared to learn.

It's one of those archaic things that will likely disappear in the future. Use block printing.
Neither was I taught cursive (Link-script I suspect doesn't count), yet I've found it easy to pick up (in reading). But I doubt it will ever go away, for as long as people still need to write by hand (that is, forever), speedier and more fluent ways of writing will always exist.

After all, block printing takes so damn long to write notes with, and even once I get a computer for university to type notes with, block printing is still too tiresome elsewhere.

Anyway, learning to read cursive ain't too hard. Learning a new script like Cyrillic takes less than a week for most people to do, learning to read cursive can take less.

If you need a bit of practice, try here, since there's a "translation" rido.gif at the bottom.

Genjix (Profiel tonen) 3 oktober 2010 13:02:05

No one writes huge amounts of text in cursive. If you're making fast notes then scrawl or shorthand will do- and they are for yourself anyway. Otherwise why not try to make it legible for the rest of the world? Isn't that what Esperanto is?

Cursive dead

Shanemk (Profiel tonen) 3 oktober 2010 18:29:11

Cursive and penmanship is dying, so are hardcopy books, literacy in general, CDs, film cameras, etc.

I only wanted to know if cursive writing was readable by a majority of other populations.

Donniedillon (Profiel tonen) 3 oktober 2010 21:05:08

Your penmanship is just fine. Better than most in my opinion.
It's one of those archaic things that will likely disappear in the future.
I don't foresee cursive handwriting disappearing any time soon. Being able to write legibly and quickly by hand is an important skill for many people, for example, hospitals would grind to a halt and lots of people could die without it. Short hand is one solution, but even the best shorthand has problems with legibility. Now I don't think that everyone has to learn elaborate calligraphy, but I think that good penmanship is one of the building blocks for communication whether in Engligh or Esperanto.

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