this solves the problem of the Chinese typewriter which has stumped inventers for 100 years! see the book by Thomas Mullaney.
Cursive about broke me. They introduced it in second grade and my printing got worse and my cursive was never good. And today, I use a computer for 85% of my writing.
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Its an X-Y pen plotter. We had two of them at a former job. Both made by Old-HP so they lasted for ever. We only needed the one but we bought a second one for tax reasons.
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Editor doesn’t read own blog, then reposts content.
I loathed cursive (IIRC the euphemism was composition class). There’s some absolutely amazing cursive writing and calligraphy is among the most beautiful forms of art. If they’d offered it as an art class in middle or high school I might even have attempted it myself (despite not having a visual art bone in my body). But rote instruction with the idea that it was a faster way to write? Nope. Typos aside, I can type like the wind and still write in print faster than I ever could in cursive.
I’m always reminded of this quote from Terry Pratchett’s “Interesting Times”:
Damn calligraphy! There would be changes! A written language of seven thousand letters and it took all day to write a thirteen-syllable poem about a white pony trotting through wild hyacinths. And that was fine and beautiful, he had to concede, and no one did it better than Lord Hong. But Ankh-Morpork had an alphabet of twenty-six unexpressive, ugly, crude letters, suitable only for peasants and artisans . . . and had produced poems and plays that left white-hot trails across the soul. And you could also use it to write the bloody minutes of a five-minute meeting in less than a day.
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It’s extremely telling that both Japan and Korea, who started writing using Chinese characters, swiftly invented other writing systems to avoid having to do that. It’s somewhat surprising that Japan didn’t go all in and ditch Kanji entirely the way Korea has mostly dropped Hanja these days.
Japanese has the further problem that the language doesn’t map perfectly to Kanji, so they had to invent a whole glue alphabet (two actually) to hold it together. The way Japanese is structured they probably would have been much better served by a roman alphabet, but sadly they were on the wrong side of the world for that and instead got an incredibly complicated writing system.
Cursive is faster to write so long as you don’t care about being able to read it later. Perhaps more to the point it’s much less error prone if you’re using a quill pen. Teaching it to grade schoolers is pure societal inertia at this point.
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That mom is the direct opposite of this mom; like matter and anti-matter. If they ever meet up, woe betide this sector of the galaxy:
Correct. Hiragana was created by monks as shorthand for kanji in the Heian era, 1100s, if I remember correctly.
I had to translate Kamo No Choumei’s Houjyouki from classical Japanese to modern, then to English, so I remember dealing with the history of kana.
Even though it was grief and I forgot how to write a lot of it I don’t regret learning it at all and I don’t regret them using it because it’s a beautiful language and I learned it for a reason. Wonderful things can be experienced if you go beyond your own language and forget the Roman system.
Golly…
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