Hi, folkieos!
It’s me: Asker Of Dumb Questions!
I was just doodling recently, and I wondered, “Where did cursive writing come from?”
I mean, I’ve come across instances where people talk about cursive examples of non-English languages-- so it must not be an English thing.
What’s the what? Who decided what was a cursive example of a letter and what was just scribbling?
And who were those Palmer people, back in the day?
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dewpickedfrog
I can’t find any references to support my suspicion, but I hate to see a question go unanswered, so I’ll give you something to go on. Cursive writing systems are not unique to English (as you guessed). I found examples of many languages that made use of some type of cursive script when committed to paper. It seems to me that when using flowing ink, there would be an advantage to minimizing interruptions and using a continuous line as much as possible.
With modern ball points, the advantage is probably much diminished, but I still have this observation: I normally write in manuscript form (printing), but when hurried revert to an odd hybrid that resorts to cursive for many easily joined letter combinations. This would lead me believe that for hand lettering, cursive may also be slightly quicker.
As for the history of lettering in general, this site was helpful: Hisory of Lettering
Disclaimer: these are just WAGs. I’d welcome a more authoritative answer.
Based on experience, I, like Waverly, revert to a pseudo-cursive hybrid when hurried. I find that I join letters adjacent to lower-case E’s and O’s with their respective vowels. There are plenty of other adjacencies that get the cursive treatment, but these are the most prevalent. As I look at a handwriting sample, I think I end up doing this because I don’t have to concentrate on lifting my pen between letters, just moving it in two dimensions on the paper plane. Cursive (and its bastard cursive-printing amalgams) simplifies writing by speeding transitions between letters. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
(As an aside, I was told to use cursive when writing the “I promise I won’t cheat” statement on my SAT’s. That took longer than the actual test did. :D)
Arabic is written entirely in cursive–there is no form of block letters for Arabic. I don’t know, but I imagine it is the same for Farsi and Pashtu, and probably some other languages from the region.
Ha! You should have used Google!
Just kidding. You would have to have an idea of what to look for. And what you have to look for is King Charlemagne:
http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecoleweb/glossary/charles.html
“Charlemagne was a learned man…Scholars at his court developed Carolingian miniscule, a script that is the basis for modern printing and cursive.”
Going with that lead I found this page:
http://www.orbilat.com/Latin/Latin-Alphabet.html
If you read this, there was cursive writing before Charlemagne. But it’s not the kind of cursive we think of, because there were no lower case letters. Charlemagne’s scholars invented the lower case letter (“Carolingian miniscule”) - a pretty big accomplishment. So cursive as we think of it developed from this.
Way to go, Charlemagne. (He really was pretty magne, huh?)
I have nothing to add except that when I was learning Russian they taught us how to write in cursive. It was very frustrating because Cyrillic (Russian) letters than look the same as Roman (English) letters in print look completely different in cursive. (Essentially, I found that almost any word in Russian cursive looked like someone saying “uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.”)
–Cliffy