I have been studying Uzbek… and by now I’m very glad that Uzbekistan has officially switched to the Roman alphabet, although I just wish they would actually get around to using it one of these years, since I’m getting sick and tired of trying to read Cyrillic handwriting! The Uzbeks don’t seem to care that they’re supposed to use a new alphabet now, because they all keep writing in Cyrillic.
What makes it hard for me is the way so many lowercase letters look the same when handwritten. One of my friends who studied Russian says it’s like “trying to read a picket fence.” The letters m, t, and sh all look the same. What’s more, the m looks exactly like the two letters li or il side by side. The letters n and p look almost the same. The a and o are often hard to tell apart. The f looks the same as the sequence “or.” The letters g and ch are supposed to be distinct, but when sloppily written they look the same. The same goes for k and x. The n sometimes looks almost like an m, sometimes like an i, when its crossbar sinks.
Worst of all, when you get a string of i, m, l, and sh all in a row, it gives the dreaded “picket fence” effect, where all you see is a long series of vertical bumps and no way to pick out individual letters.
Those of you who read and write Russian or other Cyrillic languages, you may not have the same problems I’ve been having, if it depends on the individual handwriting. But these are problems I keep coming up against. It may not be so bad when you’re already totally fluent in the language. But I need to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and it can take a long time and a lot of guessing when you can’t even identify the first letter in the word.
Anyone who is well versed in Cyrillic handwriting, if you know any tips, any subtle visual clues I should be watching for… One thing I’ve noticed, the lowercase l is supposed to start with a little curly downstroke on its left. The same as on the m.
I’m currently in my second year of studying Russian, and have very little problem reading Cyrillic handwriting, though it probably helped that I’m a typeface and calligraphy weenie and am used to deciphering chickenscratch from medieval texts. There are some clues to help you pick out individual letters. As you mentioned, there is a little hook or bump before L, M, and YA, and letters derived from those shapes. Another point to remember is that the middle section of M (where it dips down between the two peaks) often has its lowest point being higher than I. N will often have the curve of the central depression sloping up to the right, whereas with M and I it’s more symmetrical. The peaks of a T are more rounded than those of an M, N, or I. On a K, the left vertical component is significantly straighter than that of an X, so it looks more like |( as opposed to )( . Also, a lot of Russians (and myself) will also put a short horizontal line over a T and below a SH or SHCH, which helps greatly in picking them out of a mass of letters. A lot of it is just having a good eye for shapes, and of course some people will have crappy handwriting no matter how you look at it.
Now Arabic, there’s an alphabet that’s impossible to read when written quickly.
One more point: a lot of writers will write the vertical portion of K with the pen going up and then down, so it’s like a doubled line (like the English I or L), whereas on an X the left vertical will only have one line going up and the right one line doing down.
Traditional German cursive (Sütterlin) is also nearly-impossible to read. The letters c, e, m, n, and u are practically identical, as are f, s, and t. Many letters look nothing like their English cursive counterparts.
Sorry, I wish I could give you tips, but I’m awful at it as well. I find that older handwriting, particularly pre-Revolutionary before letters were removed from the alphabte in Leninist spelling reforms, is more difficult than modern handwriting.
However, I was somewhat cheered up when I was having a hard time reading some 19th-century genealogical documents (Revision Lists, which are sort of Tsarist family registries) and asked a native-speaking friend for help, and he had almost as difficult a time of it as I did.
And whew, good luck with the Uzbek! And have fun! Are you doing it just for kicks, or with a specific goal in mind?
i think the problem with usbek is that if you grew up with cyrillic you can’t deal with romanized. you will have a few generations that will have to have cyrillic before you can switch over completely. duel labeling and the ilk. personally i can’t make head or tails out of romanized.
as to handwriting… most native writers have fairly good handwriting. they make you practice for hours and hours in little slanted boxes right handed only (very unusual to find a lefty writer although things have changed recently.) the lines that ybeayf mentioned help a lot. the only thing that will help you is practice and context.
Do you know that there are many different Cyrillic alphabets. Serbian alphabet is good example - it consists of 30 letters, one sound is represented by only one letter, and one letter represents only one sound. In Russian alphabet, there are letters that represent syllables (for instance, sign that looks like mirror reversed R and is pronounced: YA).
Russian and Serbian cyrillic handwriting differ even more - I remember my first Russian language lesson - it was a shock to realize that our cyrillic alphabet barely resembled Russian. Even those letters that are the same in block version are completely different in handwriting.
I remember some funny words that really look like waves or picket fence when written. To fight that, Serbian cyrilic handwriting features short underlines and abovelines (is there such a word? :)) to increse readability.
And there are Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukrainian (…) cyrillic alphabets. I understand your frustration.
Well, technically YA is a syllable, but so is every other vowel when it stands on its own. YA is one of the four pre-iotated vowels in Russian (along with YE, YO, and YU), that palatalize the preceding consonant (I also palatalizes), or when pronounced by themselves have a y-glide at the beginning. Incidentally, English also has a vowel of this type: the long U, which has a y-sound at the beginning, and in many dialects will palatalize a consonant (just listen to an RP or American Southern speaker say “dew” or “Tuesday”).
How true that the line over the t and under the sh is invaluable for recognizing the letter – if, that is, the writer bothers to include it, which is about half the time from what I can see.
Also, the letter t can be written like a roman t (a riser with a crossbar over the top), or it can have that weird m-shape (with or without a line over it). The choice of which form to use seems totally arbitrary and a writer will use both on the same page unpredictably.
Arabic isn’t as bad as you think, because all those dots that go with the letters help a lot in identifying them. You think that’s bad, imagine trying to read Arabic before the dots were invented to tell apart all the different letters that shared the same shape. Before the introduction of the dots in the 7th century AD, the only possible way to read an Arabic text was if you already knew what it said. Seriously. Early Arabic writing functioned as an aide-memoire rather than an actual writing system. It was only the dots that made it possible to spread Arabic literacy. But yeah, when Arabic handwriting is too sloppy, it’s like any other handwriting.
I’m picking on Cyrillic because I think it’s poorly designed, what with too many letters being nothing but vertical strokes. I started learning Uzbek because I was interested in Central Asia, but then I got hired for it on my job because I was the only one who knew it at all… and now I’m planning a trip to Uzbekistan.
And even though I first learned it in Cyrillic, I find it much easier to read and understand in the new roman spelling. The new Uzbek roman alphabet has been official since the year 2000. So far the only place I’ve actually seen it used was in the lyrics to a CD of songs by Yulduz Usmanova – and the official Uzbek government home page.
goenetix, that’s surprising that Serbian has different ways of handwriting letters than Russian. I would have been lost trying to read Cyrillic handwriting in the first place… because so many of the cursive forms differ from the printed forms… except that the Cyrillic alphabet table in Concise Compendium of the World’s Languages by George L. Campbell fortunately included the cursive letters, which allowed me to get a start. It’s a terrific book… no linguist should be without it.
Cyrillic isn’t poorly designed, it just followed a different path of evolution from Roman handwriting, being based rather off of Byzantine Greek handwriting. I actually think that Cyrillic cursive letter forms are a lot closer to their printed counterparts than Roman ones are (and if you don’t believe me, look at how we write cursive or lowercase “a”, “b”, “d”, “e”, “g”, “h”, “r”, “s”, and “z”). The biggest disconnect between Cyrillic letterforms comes, I think, with T, but there’s a perfectly logical reason for it: in the Church Slavonic alphabet, T is written with two rather noticeable serifs on either side of the horizontal (example), and in the cursive writing those serifs were kept on as the first and third verticals on the cursive letterform.
Here and here are some good examples of Slavonic manuscripts. Just don’t lift your pen between letters, and you have modern Cyrillic handwriting. I suspect I have an easier time of it than most, though, because I’m quite used to reading Church Slavonic liturgical texts, which have all sorts of ligatures and abbreviations and accent marks that are purely for decoration. There, you really do have to know what the words should be, even though the abbreviations often have a letter or two above them as a hint. There are occasions where almost the whole sentence is a series of abbreviations (e.g. “GDI ISE KhRTE SNE BZhII” for “Gospodi Iisuse Khriste Syne Bozhii”). If you don’t know that BTsA is supposed to be “Bogoroditsa” or that MLT’ is "milost’ ", you are going to be totally lost.
The English expression “sheesh”, meant to express exasperation, comes out in cyrillic as a fence of 8 identical pickets without any other clues. Which is ironically exasperating.
IIRC most handwriting I’ve seen puts bigger spaces between the letters than between components of a letter, if the writer makes the effort to be clear. And of course some interpretations wouldn’t make sense, so there is a sort of contextual clue which of multiple choices are really likely.
But without doubt cyrillic has quirks that make it hard to read. I suppose English does, too, and we don’t remember them - don’t know if one is absolutely worse than the other.
It doesn’t stop there! For example, in Azerbaijani language, shishli means something having a skewer through it, like shish kabob as opposed to non-shish kabob. Writing shishli in Cyrillic makes a row of 11 identical pickets. And if you add the first-person singular possessive suffix, to specify my skewered one (say you’re in Azerbaijan writing an order to a kabob restaurant), that would be shishlim, making a total of 13 identical pickets:
|||||||||||||_
A Russian studying Arabic and taking vocabulary notes in Cyrillic would write the Arabic word for ‘apricot’, mishmish, with fourteen identical pickets:
||||||||||||||
To put the direct-object case ending -i on your kabob order, as when saying shishlimi ver, ‘give me my skewered one’, takes no fewer than fifteen identical pickets!
|||||||||||||||
Try reading that! Ha! :smack: No wonder Azerbaijan switched to the Roman alphabet just as soon as they got independence in 1991. They didn’t waste a second, bam, right away. It must have been the very first thing they did after getting independence. Now you can see why.
But they’re not identical! You’re forgetting the little hook that goes in front of the L and M, so it’s actually more like
||||||||,|||,||_
or, for mishmish
,|||||||,|||||||
and if you do what you’re supposed to do and put lines under the SH…
,|||||||,|||||||
…--------…-------
It’s all what you grew up with - my mind boggles that anybody can read handwritten dashed-off Japanese. My Japanese is very neat because I have to write it carefully - theirs, you’d just have to know what to expect contextually. I expect it’s the same in other languages, you expect certain words to show up in certain circumstances.
