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A brief history of cursive writing

#1
Magical Realist Offline
Some people are bemoaning the death of cursive writing. I hope this is premature. Writing in journals and diaries has always seemed to me a bit of an artform, scrawling out one's innermost thoughts and feelings in inky expressive curls and loops. One could almost feel the angst and repressed romance and frustration in the flowing soul scratchings. It takes effort to write, signifying a moral dedication to express something that needs to be said. An imperative to disclose the secrets of one's soul, else why write it out? And then there is the personalizing style cursive adds to one's signature, making it almost like a finger print that identifies you as you.

"Just how long have humans been using cursive writing? Scholars credit Niccolo Niccoli, a 15th Century Italian, for "inventing" our modern-day cursive, although it had been evolving long before his day.

As the new script from Niccoli and his colleagues radiated from Italy, it became known as "italic."

Niccoli's cursive was simple, sans curly-cues, and not every letter was connected. It was much easier to read than 19th Century cursive, which was pretty ornate by today's standards and known as Spencerian, for Platt Rogers Spencer.

In the early 1900s, Austin Norman Palmer became the cursive king, promoting his Palmer method as a quicker, less fancy and more readable alternative to Spencerian.

By the 1920s, the Palmer method was used in most American schools.

The D'Nealian method, named by inventor Donald Neal Thurber, came onto the scene in the late '70s. While the Palmer method used "stick-and-ball" or vertical printing, D'Nealian cursive involves the connection of printed letters with "tails." Although D'Nealian cursive isn't as elegant as Palmer, advocates say it is easier to learn because students don't have to learn cursive from scratch; they just learn to connect the tails.
Today, styles range from teacher to teacher. Those using the formal, no-tails methods usually refer to it by the supplier they use, Zaner-Bloser Inc. being the market leader. But the formal methods that succeeded Palmer, including Zaner-Bloser, are less ornate than Palmer.
Although few elementary schools have abandoned cursive altogether, penmanship is losing its luster.

In fact, Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson officially eulogized it in their book of 20th Century icons, "Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana" (Chronicle Books, $19.95). The smell of burning leaves, girdles, paper boys, the unanswered phone and, yes, penmanship, the authors say--all gone."==http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-...man-palmer


[Image: 120963837_sgfd_379491c.jpg]
[Image: 120963837_sgfd_379491c.jpg]

#2
Yazata Offline
The ancient Egyptians had cursive writing.

While old-style hieroglyphs were traditional, they were cumbersome and difficult, and were only used for formal ceremonial purposes, such as texts carved into temples and royal tombs. Which means they survived better than other forms of writing.

The handwritten form of the Egyptian language was called hieratic. This appeared very early and may be older than the hieroglyphs. It was written on papyrus and is optimized for handwriting. It was apparently used for most everyday purposes like business or writing letters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic

During Greek and Roman times, a variety of late Egyptian hieratic was known as demotic. (A Greek word meaning popular, used by the people)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)

And during late Roman times, around the time Egypt became Christian, people started writing a late version of Egyptian in the demotic manner using Greek letters. This is called Coptic and it remains the liturgical language (though not the everyday language, which is Arabic) of Egyptian Christians down to the present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_alphabet


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