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 Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.
> 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!
Church Slavonic is a South Slavic language and so is a cousin of East Slavic language like Russian or Ukrainian. Russian borrowed a lot from Old Church Slavonic but doesn't descend from it. It's like the influence of Latin or Norman French on English.
Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
I've learned to write x the way this post says (two mirrored c's) but I don't understand what you mean by "independence days". We don't have one in France anyway.
This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read. The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
I really like the result. Especially the i and j with the connected dot. I expected them to look off but they really integrate nicely.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
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).
You may want to look into Sütterlin script. It's a bit harder to learn than standard cursive, but it's very pretty, and a level-0 encryption since few people can read it nowadays.
Hey, that's the same one I was taught in the Netherlands in the late 80s! It seems to have been replaced with an English-style in recent decades though, is that the case in Germany as well?
According to the wiki, the Schulausgangsschrift is mandatory in 5 states and optional in 4 states (out of 16) (probably on a school/teacher level). So it still seems to be taught in some places.
For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but there are variants designed for English as the primary language too. (Melin is of course perfectly usable with English also.)
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
What a rabbithole ;) TIL about "Stiefography". I wonder how useful this is. I remember math lectures - typically, our prof used the white^H^H^H^H^Hchalkboard, so I could just write down things fast enough.
There is evidence that typing is actively bad for memory rentention compared to writing things down with a pen. I wonder where Stenography falls in this continuum.
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
I have had similar thoughts recently when attending language courses where I write a lot of notes by hand. This problem is exacerbated by umlauts. If the language doesn't have letters like ō (are there any? i only see this letter to represent a sound, never in a word), then the two dots can be replaced with a line and so, I guess, the lowercase T technique from the blog post could be adapted to it. I think I know what I am gonna do after work today
> Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception?
> For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.
I was taught script in the US and Italy as a child, and never learned it like this.
I write it with a descending curve, then go back and cross it with an ascending diagonal line when crossing t's / dotting i's/j's. Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cel3GtSOzow. I think that's pretty standard in English cursives.
> One way to remove backtracking is to lift the pen immediately instead of waiting until the end of the word, as if doing italic calligraphy. Pen lifts alleviate the mental queue problem and give a chance to readjust the palm, but they break the writing flow.
This is how I learned cursive in school, and it never occurred to me that this may interrupt my writing flow. I agree that doing the backtracks after writing the entire word would add to my mental load, but that's probably because I'm not used to that.
So generally, I'd say that the mental load is basically a matter of how one learned cursive in the first place. Though I agree that the mostly backtrack-free Cyrillic cursive looks more elegant.
Would be interesting to learn about the perspective of people who learned Chinese or Japanese as their first script.
Usually writing small, in all-caps, except code: in lowercase, and the "t" and "i" retain their lower curve. Cursive is difficult; easy to write, but (later) hard to read.
Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
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 Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.
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!
That's some interesting nationalistic propaganda, never heard that one before
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
I do it like this, backtracking to add a dot doesn't seem so bad when you're lifting the pen anyways and it doesn't break the flow.
It's been a minute since I've had to write very quickly, but I'd imagine if necessary this step can be skipped. Would have to try it out.
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).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift
Also, our capitals were a bit more complicated, such as having 3 loops in the H.
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
[1]: http://melinsstenografi.nu/image/sti-ukast.png
There is evidence that typing is actively bad for memory rentention compared to writing things down with a pen. I wonder where Stenography falls in this continuum.
The point of the phonetic systems is that you don't have to ‘spell’ words at all: what you say is what you write.
(Then there are briefs, of course, but those are for additional benefit.)
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
Wouldn't the ф as well?
> [for the x], I draw two mirrored c’s
Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception?
For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.
I was taught script in the US and Italy as a child, and never learned it like this.
Not if you write it as qo for lower case and oJo for capital.
> One way to remove backtracking is to lift the pen immediately instead of waiting until the end of the word, as if doing italic calligraphy. Pen lifts alleviate the mental queue problem and give a chance to readjust the palm, but they break the writing flow.
So generally, I'd say that the mental load is basically a matter of how one learned cursive in the first place. Though I agree that the mostly backtrack-free Cyrillic cursive looks more elegant.
Would be interesting to learn about the perspective of people who learned Chinese or Japanese as their first script.
Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
Plus some uppercase e.g. A, B, H, right?