Text 46, 52 rader
Skriven 2005-04-09 20:10:42 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Ärende: Old handwriting, especially German
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* Forwarded (from: ENGLISH-USAGE) by Stephen Hayes using timEd/2 1.10.y2k.
* Originally from Wayne Brown (8:8/2003) to Robert Bannister.
* Original dated: Sat Apr 09, 15:17

From: "Wayne Brown" <Wayne.Brown@aol.com>

Robert Bannister wrote:

> I'm not at all sure what you are saying here. In older German
> handwriting (I doubt anyone under the age of 60 can even read it now),
> the letter e looked like a small, spiky n, so that when it was written
> over a vowel it became degraded into 2 short, vertical strokes.

I think you'd be surprised how many people can still read the handwriting quite
easily. Roland Hutchinson has already pointed to some of the categories in his
message. Therefore, I'd just like to mention that Germanists in particular have
to learn to be at home with the handwriting in order to work with the mountains
of source material written in it -- letters, diaries, documents, etc, and
there's no small number of Germanists. Moreover, genealogy has become quite a
hobby in recent decades, prompting hobby genealogists to learn it. It's amazing
how people come up with all kinds of material written in the old handwriting,
from birth certificates to family letters, which first have to be transcribed
into legible German.

There's an important cultural aside to this that needs to be mentioned. There's
a concept in German called an 'ausgeschriebene Schrift,' which is usually
translated into English as a 'developed handwriting.' Unfortunately, the
translation doesn't say anything about what Germans mean by that. It usually
takes an explanation for an English speaker to get the picture. Little children
in German schools today learn to write according to a standard, but as they
grow older they develop their own handwriting style that may differ
considerably from the school standard. In US schools, for example, there used
to be strong trend to achieve a clear handwriting, and adults who retained the
style they learned in primary school were said to write well. In Germany, it's
a different ballgame. Handwriting is said to mirror a person's personality and
a primary-school handwriting in an adult is said not to be a 'ausgeschriebene
Schrift.'

One should keep this cultural element in mind because it applies not only to
Germany today but also to Germany yesterday when the old handwriting was the
norm. You can hardly find a specimen that correspondents exactly to the
standard that German schoolchildren started out learning in those days. The
newcomer to the old handwriting today has to start out by learning the standard
and then learn to adopt to each writer's individualism. Great fun!

Regards, ----- WB.

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