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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

I use cursive to write a personal note, and also use many variations of typefaces in brush or cursive style for art projects. The world is aesthetically poorer without cursive IMHO. People who do not write that way are almost always able to read it when they try, in recent experience.

Interested to hear what other non-English languages have cursive forms.

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Chinese and Japanese characters also have cursive traditions. The normal handwritten form of a character often looks significantly different to its printed form. Lines that are separate in print form become one squiggly line in cursive form, so stroke order is pretty important. For example, this is 私, a pronoun to refer to yourself in Japanese:

http://db.yamasa.org/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/a7397e6ad510cc2a49256...

I think most of the latin alphabet languages have cursive forms. Cyrillic as well. Definitely English is no exception.

The Cyrillic variant is almost a different set of characters! And the flowing into each other takes such an extreme there, that my last name is a nigh-illegible series of wavelets.

I have no idea how Russian, Ukrainian, etc., historians manage to read old Cyrillic documents.

Honestly, if you look at old German documents written in the Kurrent cursive system, it's about as bad. For the most part, it's just a matter practice and familiarity with the writing system.

Лишин though, that's definitely a rough one.

The latin cursive scripts differ country by country. And reading old letters, even if it's in my language, is very hard. The letters looked differently. A proficient writer would write them consistently but to read it, you're looking for "distinguishing traits", not for the letter shape as depicted to learners.

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