writography, i.e. {calligraphy, typography} and cultural variations

[gusl]

If you've seen old (English?) documents, you might have seen that they used two forms of S, one of which looked like an "f" or an integral sign.

Here's why

Google freaks, I challenge you to find a page with a better explanation.

Btw, to this day, it seems the British like to write their numbers floating around, with for example, the loops of "6" and "9" aligned and the 1 as "I", including a small, round "0" and the decimal point in mid-height (higher than most of the "9").

Oh, and the Dutch write funny "8"s, which look kind of like a cursive "g" with loose ends.

Americans write "9"s with a tail straight down (I learned this from my PalmPilot), and if their "1"s have an upper tail, then they MUST have a "base" otherwise it would be interpreted as a "7" (not so in Brazil, where "7"s must necessarily have a slant).

Btw, does anyone still cross their "7"s?

Comments

[discopete1.livejournal.com]

The Germans use a beta symbol for a pair of esses. This can really screw you up if you don't know it and are busy looking for "Schloss Strasse" and don't realize you need to look for the street sign that says "SchloBstraBe".

I now warn all visitors to Germany of this, and more than one has thanked me on their return.

I'm a real hero!

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think that this is exactly the same practice as the old English long s. In English, when there was a double ess, they would write the first one long and the second one short. Now, if you do this without lifting the pen between (just link their tops) you get exactly the symbol now used in German! (For some reason though they call it an "ess-zed", and the German street signs I've seen have actually written it more as a long ess connected to a zed than one connected to a short ess.)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

hm... so "essay" used to be called "eBay"... (this was actually the first example I could think of... not that many English words have "ss")

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

in Dutch, something happened which I consider a strange phenomenon: the letter "Y" became "IJ". You can see a process similar to the evolution of the German beta/"ss": in cursive letters, if you write the "ij" without lifting the pen, you get "ÿ".

"IJ" is considered *one* letter, and the can be seen in the capitalization: for example, "IJmuiden". It seems the capital "IJ" was backformed from a lowercase interpretation of the symbol as "ij", rather than "ÿ". Which seems strange.

[candid.livejournal.com]

I cross my 7's and my z's.

[perspectivism.livejournal.com]

Neat topic!

Btw, does anyone still cross their "7"s?

I do!

Many of my math professors in college -- especially older ones & especially European ones -- crossed both z's and 7's. I mostly do the same; I liked its clarity & distinctiveness, so I picked up the habit.

[kirinqueen.livejournal.com]

I also cross my 7's and z's.

That "f" for "s" explanation is the one I learned in my phonology course last semester--that is, that it was developed to distinguish it from the letters around it. Hand-written Old English was so crowded and uniform that it was hard to read, so the idea of stretching out the "s" like that (as I understand) was to separate the word around it more easily.

[callmeemma.livejournal.com]

Most of the physics and (especially) math profs I've had so far cross their "z"s and "7"s. I don't do it, but I suspect that by the time I graduate, I will. I also get the impression that it's more common in Europe.

And I've seen the British numerals in page numbers in books... then again, it's possible they were British books.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I cross 7's, and I cross "z" whenever it is written as a variable, but only sometimes when it is part of a word. I think I picked it up from math people, like everyone else here.

I remember noticing in Hungary that people wrote their numbers differently. The clearest example was the "1", which they do like most Europeans seem to, with a long tail at the top and no base. (Sometimes the tail at the top is almost as long as the vertical bar, so it looks to me like a wedge of some sort rather than a number.) I can't remember any of the other digit differences, but I also remember being confused because they write their accents interchangeably as either acute, grave, or just a ' after the letter.

I hadn't noticed that my 9's were different from printed ones until you pointed that out - I just assumed the tail was always vertical.

And I hadn't really made much notice of those British numerals until you mentioned them - I just thought the book was printed in a slightly odd font!

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I cross my 7's and z's.

And I often make a 1 with a 'hat' but without a 'base'; my 1's are very inconsistent, though. Oh, and my 9's are usually curved, not straight-down.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

that's very unamerican of you. Please explain yourself!

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I blame it on doing zines as a teenager.

No really.

I had my own zine in the mid-'90s, and this was before middle-class families started getting really fancy computer equipment, so layout was generally done by hand, and all pieces were either written by hand or on typewriters. So anyway, I felt kind of a peer pressure to have distinctive handwriting. Most of my fellow zine publishers had cool, unique handwriting, and "normal"-looking handwriting was quite rare. There even seemed to be a direct correlation between normal handwriting and a zine's unpopularity.

So ANYWAY. When I was about 16 or so I started cultivating my own particular handwriting style, which is why even to this day I write some characters in a very un-American way.

Although, now that I think about it, my handwriting started getting "weird" when I was about 13 years old. I had a Japanese pen pal, and I loved the way she made 9's. I started writing mine like that, which really annoyed my math teacher because it was hard for her to read them. I also started making weird lowercase a's when I was 14, when I read some goth fanzine and loved the way the author drew them.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

I cross my 7's and my z's.

A guy in the physics department of the University in Eindhoven always does an experiment during the intro week. A bunch of fresh students and some 2nd/3rd years are given the task of writing some stuff on a blackboard. They don't know what the purpose is, but in the end the guy reveals he noticed that new students do NOT cross their z's, while by the second year almost everybody does.

He then checks the writings on the blackboard, and it invariably turns out he is right: The freshmen have uncrossed z's, and the 2nd and 3rd years have crossed z's.