Has there ever been a system of writing numbers that was cursive. Not spelling out the numbers, but say writing 34912 without lifting the pen off of the paper?
I’m guessing that there are some people who have developed a system that just they use, but I’m looking for something that is/was used to actually communicate information between multiple people.
I recall that the script alphabet that was on cards up over the blackboard in my 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms had “script” numbers at the end. However, it was not at all obvious how they were to be connected, and we never actually practiced them so I never learned if they were to be connected. So I’ll call them “script” since they don’t necessarily meet your definition.
I would have thought not. Cursive writing was developed for added speed in writing - which is only important if you’ve got a lot of writing to do, like writing a book or even a long letter to someone. But who ever needs to write out page after page of numbers? There’s no incentive to develop a faster way of writing 34912.
My cursive education was rather flawed, and I curse it! For me, cursive was taught to be about proper letter formation, with no emphasis on the claimed practical benefits of writing faster by not lifting the pen. We did, however, learn “cursive” numbers. I don’t know that there was any implication that they should be written without lifting the pen. But they were considered to be the properly formed numbers to use when including numbers in a document you were writing in cursive. For example, the 2s had loops, not straight lines at the bottom.
I’ve had classes where taking notes involved rather a large amount of numbers. But legibility trumped speed by quite a bit in terms of what was important there, so I don’t think I would have chosen to connect numbers using cursive even if it were possible.
Actually, I write lots of part numbers that are a seemingly random collection of letter and numbers, with occasional punctuation or spaces tossed in. Say AB34D9Z12F.
If I could write out the whole thing, flowing from letter to number and back, all in cursive, it would make the whole thing much faster.
Besides, how much harder is it to have 26 letter + 10 numbers, instead of just 26 letters?