Reading comprehension should be pushed more than teaching scribbly writing that becomes incomprensible when most old people do it when they reach their golden years (there’s a few excellent elderly writers but my God arthritis and/or deteriorating eyesight doesn’t help in that area at all). That would have made life for my hyperlexic ass easier in school.
There’s a bunch of stuff they should be teaching kids instead of that. How to grow a garden for food. First aid qualification should be a huge one for high school graduates with the way the world is right now and where it’s heading towards. Games like Go, Bridge & Mahjong to teach kids about thinking ahead and how their interactions can have consequences (poker would have been a bit of an controversial choice in the eyes of many parents).
Yes Carolingian vertical strokes are called minims.
It was invented under the guidance of Charles the Great aka Charlemagne, because he really was running an empire of lots of smaller semi-independent regions, and each of them had a different, mutually unintelligible, secretarial hand.
Look up Merovingian Court Hand to see how bad it could get. Well, not quite cursive Cyrillic bad, but pretty bad.
So he got a team of experts to come up with something that was easy to learn, easy to write, and easy to read. There was a script which mostly fit the bill used just north of Paris, and Alcuin, the lead intellectual of Charlemagne’s court, was English which used Insular Minuscule which influenced his used of that hand, which became Carolingian Minuscule c.800CE.
The modern “j” exists, but as a variant of “i”, especially in roman numerals: i, ij, iij, iu, u, uj, uij, … (similarly, “v” only really existed as a variant of “u”, and it was a later development).
Of course that was a long time ago. We now know the best scripts are quick to write, frustrating to learn, and nobody cares how often you can read them again afterward. Hence this decision in California.
