Elizabeth Weise at USA Today writes about a worthy cause (archived):
If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.
Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C. She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they’re looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.
Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. […] To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There’s no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
So there you are; if you have the increasingly rare skill required (insert rant here) as well as the time and temperament, go for it. (Thanks, Nick!)
And speaking of archives, check out Preservation of Osor’s rare book collection through digitisation (EAP1517):
The target material is the surviving private collection of uniquely rare books in the traditional Mongolian script held by Mr. Bat-Ochir Osor, who was one of the nation’s prominent educators and Mongolian language promoters of mid 20th century modern Mongolia.
His collection comprises exceptionally rare books printed in the traditional Mongolian script in the 1920s through to the 1940s, before Mongolia was forcefully shifted to Russian Cyrillic in the 1940s.
Thanks, Trevor!
“Increasingly rare” seems like an odd description for something that likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis, especially as the sample in the USA Today article seemed fairly straightforward.
When I was in school, reading texts from Elizabethan England, it took some time to get used to the shorthand, but generally decoding was possible if one understood the context.
So maybe they should be searching for “increasingly rare” people who understand American history.
“Increasingly rare” seems like an odd description for something that likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis
On what are you basing that? Young people certainly don’t use it, and even a lot of older people seem to have drifted away from it. I haven’t seen any recent stats, but “over half” sounds unlikely.
Does “increasingly rare” imply “rare”? Not to me, but I skew mathematical–logical on such questions of nuance.
Cursive was removed from the core curriculum around 2010, and since then, many states have reinstated it.
So just look at the proportion of the population that was educated since 2010 for a good indication of who might not have been exposed to cursive handwriting.
That basically means gen z, maybe a quarter of the population.
The real challenge is figuring out context and the shorthand employed in that context.
I still write with a pen a great deal, but I have noticed that the quality of my cursive penmanship has declined, presumably out of a subconscious realization that no one but me is ever going to read what I write. Writing for other people is now always done via a computer or phone keyboard.
It has been some decades since I have actually employed the cursive I was taught in elementary school and now I’m grumpy I wasn’t instead taught to write in traditional Mongolic script or at least Phagspa. Although I guess I was taught hiragana and 99.99%+ of my cohort of Americans weren’t. I think my hiragana is now even rustier than my cursive, though.
likely over half the population still uses on a regular basis, …
To echo the above comments, I was always rubbish at cursive. I often can’t read even my own cursive. I abandoned it at the earliest opportunity. If I write with a pen — usually only for official forms and shopping lists — it’s printed.
Reading (cursive) texts from Elizabethan England? at school? seems … bizarre. What gets in the way of understanding American (or any) history by reading transcriptions? I would have thought to the contrary: being forced to pore over original documents would rapidly make you resent learning any history at all.
I do notice the yoof hold their pen in a singularly awkward fist-like grip. (And risk smudging their writing because they’re not arching over the paper from the wrist — certainly wouldn’t work with actual wet ink.) Is this the result of never being taught to hand-write at all?
I arrived in the UK back in the nineties with a nice traditional American cursive handwriting that no one in England could read. The school ended up sending me off to a handwriting trainer to unlearn cursive and start writing in print like everyone else instead, so that the teachers could actually read it. They’ve stuck “cursive” back on the UK curriculum since then (thank/blame Gove), but not at all the cursive I’d learned – it’s basically joined-up print forms (except for f, which is missing its head for some reason.)
the vagaries of cursive education were/are manifold. in the (boston[-u.s]-area) 1980s, i first learned (in public school) a hand with looped ascenders and descenders, and traditional ornamented capitals (a “2”-like Q, for instance), but the private school i went to for junior high favored, as part of its progressive pedagogy, a (presumably “modernized”) version with print-style capitals and single-line ascenders and descenders (and “m”s with 2-bumps, in contrast to the other style’s 3, and “v”s that used a point rather than connection-position to distinguish themselves from “u”s).
i more or less refused to switch at the time, but both hands have stayed in my repertoire – not for everyday functional writing, but for design purposes in pen or paint. i suspect that zine-making may remain one of the last refuges of regular cursive use for a fair number of people – it’s key element of some zones of visual style in the form.
The mention of approved versions of letters reminds me of when I took the Polish state language exam. Just before handing out the exam sheets, the proctors said, “Write in cursive. Oh, and this is how you need to write ą, ę, and ł. The whole word will be marked incorrect if you write those any differently.” They then flashed a slide on a projector for all of about ten seconds. Immediately came a joint cry of dismay from the room, as few of us young-ish foreigners had ever closely studied Polish cursive as written by natives, and we had long since developed our own habits for writing those letters.
I later found out that my American z strikes Poles as weird/archaic, but evidently the possible variation in that letter didn’t bother the exam graders.
I was taught to write cursive in school; by the time I graduated, my hand had degenerated (in traditional medical style) to the point that even I could not read it fluently, and I deliberately remodelled it on the basis of my then girlfriend’s rather beautiful and very legible italic style. This in turn has progressively become less legible over the intervening decades. That’s entropy, man!
My late father-in-law, a prolific author and head of a university department, had handwriting that only his secretary could decipher accurately. His daughters could manage it so long as the genre was familiar.
I don’t know how far this goes back, but in my experience British cursive bears little to no resemblance to American. It is, as Lameen says, basically”joined-up print forms.” Some people don’t even know the word cursive; they called what they did some variation of “joined-up writing.” (The ones I’m thinking of were Scots, but that may be the case for some of the English too.)
@AntC,
Poring through Elizabethan documents was among my favorite pastimes in school. Yes, I did it voluntarily.
Cursive calligraphy communicates an extra dimension of rhythm and flow, creating an intimate form of visual music that resonates on an emotional and spiritual level, even if I cannot understand every word.
I’m terribly sorry to learn that there is so much school-based cursive trauma among the highly-educated readers of this blog. I imagine you all being beaten by the teachers on a regular basis.
And just to be clear, I hated it anytime any teacher tried to improve my penmanship, cursive or otherwise. Especially Russian cursive: Try writing лишишь in cursive and reading it while drunk. Then drink some more and try again.
In England in the 1960s, I was forced to labor over what was called ‘copperplate’ writing. How that relates to American cursive (not a word we knew) I can’t say. I wouldn’t call it “joined up print-forms.” The lower-case ‘s’ in copperplate was a strange species, unlike a small print ‘s’.
In any case, as with DE and AntC, my handwriting degenerated over the years into a scrawl that I can make out only with difficulty.
Ook, the salient point is not the school-based cursive trauma among the highly-educated readers of this blog but the unquestionable fact that people at large simply can’t use cursive — they don’t write or read it. E.g.:
Apparently younger people can’t read cursive anymore?
(N.b.: there is r/Cursive, where people regularly post things in cursive they can’t read, looking for help)
What students lost since cursive writing was cut from the Common Core standards
Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive (archived)
“You can’t read cursive? How did you make it through school?” (“How often is anything written in cursive anymore? Reading cursive is about as important as knowing how to blacksmith.”)
Etc. etc.; if you google you can find endless examples. This is not an invented problem.
That certainly looks like they were never taught to write, and it’s majorly disturbing.
In German, kursiv is a rather technical term that refers to… printed italics.
In the US, from what I’ve read, schoolkids used to be taught first to draw printed letters by hand, and then, after three years or so, they were taught a very calligraphic handwriting script with lots of extra loops, along with punishments for every deviation and lies like “you’ll need this every day in your adult life”.
I was never taught to draw printed letters by hand. At all. When we were taught to read & write, every letter was introduced in print form for reading and handwriting form* for handwriting. The American discussion over “cursive” was a major culture shock for me.
* Almost identical to this, but not slanted. Loopier and less German/Russian than the current version.
Such things differ between school systems/countries; compare the two Austrian versions to German.
For those of my generation who essentially never write in the very rusty cursive we were taught as childen in the Seventies, the question is how good our passive ability to read documents handwritten in at least that style of cursive would be at present. But (generalizing wildly) most of us very rarely are presented with documents handwritten in cursive so we don’t keep our reading skill sharp and may not have a very good gauge of how good or bad it is at this point. I have difficulty with 19th-century American cursive documents as scanned on historical-archive sites (can pick out some words easily; others are baffling even w/ some context) but that may in part reflect shifts in exactly what cursive style was in vogue even over a few generations. Or even how one naturally tended to write with the then-current level of pen technology rather than with a ballpoint, and frankly my cohort were probably mostly using pencils during the mandatory-cursive part of our early education.
Pretty much the only person who currently sends me handwritten correspondence with any frequency is my mother, who graduated from high school in 1956 and was educated under the ancien regime. But she doesn’t use cursive in that context.
Probably the majority of my cursive output in a year is notes on holiday cards. Now I’m wondering who can read them.
@David Marjanović: Those German-Austrian differences seem quite small, compared with the differences between the cursive I learned in the 1980s and what I see from Britons of a comparable age or younger. In contrast, the older British Copperplate script mentioned by David L falls clearly within the bounds of what could be considered normal American cursive. It’s not median American cursive, since classic Copperplate tends to have fewer loops on ascenders and descenders than typical American hands, and some of the majescule letter forms are unusual. However, both those aspects of a cursive hand tend to be individual and idiosyncratic. My mother, for example, has a looped minuscule t and a non-standard capital A (more like a typical Copperplate form) in her hand; my own capital I is written backwards.
I can only agree with what has been said here on the decreasing use of cursive. Back in school, we used Schreibschrift in tests and when submitting homework, and I regularly wrote letters. Then, at university, we had to submit everything typed (and later, typed on a PC and printed); over the years, the number of people I write letters and cards to dwindled (now down to one couple with whom we still exchange Christmas cards – the rest gets emails or WhatsApp messages); filling in forms by hand requires block letters; so the only regular use I still have for writing with any kind of cursive is shopping lists and taking notes during calls and meetings (still faster for me than typing). For that, I use a mixture of cursive and block letters, trying for an optimized mix of speed and legibility – the latter often suffers to such a degree that I myself can’t read my notes. So I sympathize with young people who don’t see the use of cursive.
I sympathize with them too, but I still mutter and grumble.
I can read cursive, if it’s very careful, or if it’s mine. Otherwise I say, “Cursive! Foiled again!”
When I learned to write in the early 90s, it was print until 2nd grade, when we were taught cursive (what Wikipedia calls D’Nealian), then from 3rd grade all our homework had to be in cursive (with the standard “this is how you will always write now” asserted to us). Then once we went from elementry school to middle school the teachers stopped caring, and almost everyone switched back to print.
I wound up re-adopting cursive when I went to university and found myself needing to write quickly to take notes during lectures. These days, university students probably don’t even have this pressure, since they seem to not take notes at all (let alone by hand), and simply rely on/demand PowerPoint slides from their profs.
If I’m going to get all old-man-yells-at-cloud, I feel more dispair at the loss of active note taking than at the loss of cursive.
My mother, for example, has a looped minuscule t
Speaking of mothers and the cursive letter t, my mother has a special form for a final t (or t סופית, as I think of it). It’s uncrossed and the last arc is concave down, as attested here. The site says is Spencerian or Palmer. Anyone else?
If generations are relevant, Mom isn’t going to see 90 again.
(As many here know, the Hebrew word is sofit or sōphīth or whatever you like. It comes from sof ‘end’ and describes the different forms some Hebrew letters have when at the end of a word.)
In the 1950s, every elementary/grammar school wall had posters like these:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Set-9-Confetti-Cursive-Writing-Bulletin-Board-Colorful-Alphabet-Wall-Strip-Teacher-Supplies-Classroom-Teaching-Tool-Homeschooling-Kids-Education/7967160297
My cursive writing was nearly illegible then, and degraded over time. I finally created a sort of hybrid italic-print alphabet that others could decipher.
I was taught to write joined up, and I think that’s a useful thing to know – I went back to what Americans seem to call ‘print’ for a while, and then back to a rather idiosyncratic joining because it’s just quicker. (I mean, I think you should know *how* to write at a useful speed, even if you then choose not to.)
But I can’t see any practical reason for learning to write the kind of proper Victorian cursive with loops and Qs like 2s – my grandmother was the last person I knew who did that, and she would have gone to school in the 1920s. (I don’t even find it pretty, or I would probably be arguing in favour of it for romantic sorts of reasons!)
We (UK, early ’60s) were taught italic handwriting, with a special nib that made thick and thin strokes. Though I admire the style, it didn’t seem to suit me, and as soon as they stopped enforcing it I made a conscious change to a more ‘joined-up’ style. I don’t think I would have a problem with reading ‘cursive’ – it’s the earlier ‘secretary hand’ that is tricky for modern people.
@Ook Poring through Elizabethan documents was among my favorite pastimes in school. Yes, I did it voluntarily.
Of course de gustibus non est disputandum. Your earlier post seemed to suggest studying Elizabethan documents was compulsory; and further it was a ‘better’ way to study history. Bosh.
Cursive calligraphy communicates an extra dimension of rhythm and flow, creating an intimate form of visual music that resonates on an emotional and spiritual level, even if I cannot understand every word.
Utter bosh. The only purpose of a shopping list is to be readable. (Or indeed of medical notes or prescriptions. I wonder how often DE got phoned up by a Pharmacist who couldn’t decipher which drug. Juniors presumably quailed and operated on the wrong eye rather than dare ask.)
In school in the 50s I learned a “Palmer” cursive that quickly degenerated, especially since I started school at age 5 and never got the hang of holding a pencil properly. In grad school I taught myself Italic chancery hand, with a broad-nibbed pen no less. I liked it for its crispness and its similarity to printing, from which of course it stood at only one remove. I no longer own an Osmiroid, but I still use a more-or-less chancery hand in the rare occasions I get to use cursive at all.
By “Elizabethan cursive” do we mean chancery, or secretary? The latter resembles Suetterlin, only squigglier, and drove me crazy when I (by the grace of God and a sympathetic dean) once got to examine John Dee’s rough drafts.
(at a slight distance from the main topic, but hobbyhorses are a local delicacy)
i may have mentioned this here before at some point, but one of the highlights for me of the YIVO yiddish intensive zumer-prográm was yankl salant’s weekly “hantgeshribene dokumentn” session: a big projection screen, a dozen students of varying levels, an excellent translator/copyeditor, and as many enigmatic handwritten documents as we could get through in a class period. it was rare for us to make use of less than six to eight of the languages known in the room, since yankl brought material from all over the world and yiddish writers are nothing if not linguistically omnivorous.
but the first lesson yankl taught us, which i haven’t yet encountered an exception to, is that when you see an inchoate blot of ink, it’s a mem. the two words at the center of the 2nd-to-bottom line of this fairly random image-search example illustrate it pretty well – the phrase is “hot men mir gezogt / האָט מען מיר געזאָגט” – and the image as a whole shows some excellent joined yiddish cursive.
In the ’60s? ’70s? ’80s? there was a higher-up librarian at the Bodleian Library (Keeper of Western Manuscripts?) who was known for using the sort of precise italic calligraphy Kate Bunting describes. All the official publications which he authored were offset-printed facsimiles of his manuscripts.
It may be further evidence of trans-Atlantic differences that the specific sort of cursive JenInEd calls “Victorian” and associates with her 1920’s-schooled grandmother was still being routinely taught to 1960’s-born U.S. schoolchildren in the 1970’s and quite probably thereafter. Although most of us in that cohort as noted above are not actually using it in later life.
@ə de vivre: What was unusual about D’Nealian writing was not the cursive script; that was just a slightly sparer* version of the Palmer script, without the loops at the tops of some capital letters. What was far more atypical was the printed letters children were taught in the D’Nealian method, which was developed by Donald Neal Thurbur,** a Michigan elementary school teacher and later principal.*** I don’t think it ever got a lot of uptake outside Michigan, but living in East Lansing for kindergarten and first grade, I was subjected to it. The essence was teaching kids printed lower-case letter forms with tails, as shown here, that they could later learn to connect up. (The k and w also are modified to more closely resemble the cursive forms. Some teachers went even further than Thurbur and insisted on a b with the loop drawn counterclockwise.) No one actually forced me to learn more standard printed letters when we moved to somewhere that didn’t teach D’Nealian, but I decided to do so on my own, since I had always deemed the D’Nealian letters rather silly.
* Autocorrect wanted this to be “spareribs.”
** One of my teachers thought “D’Nealian” was actually his last name (or at least pretended to think so).
*** That’s the headmaster,**** for those in the British Commonwealth.
**** I remember it being a “light bulb moment” when I realized that headmaster was a compositional compound word for a British speaker. Up to that point, it had seemed like a pleonasm,***** since Americans don’t use master to mean “schoolteacher.”
***** Often undesirable, but not nearly as bad as a neoplasm.
@Brett: *****My Gawd, Man. You can’t use the gendered “headmaster” any more. You need to use some ungendered workaround like “Head of School” which sounds even more pompous and ridiculous to an American ear with some minimal critical facility. There were, of course, under the ancien regime, sometimes headmistresses, who were like schoolmarms but much posher. Re your compositionality analysis, one must remember that “those who can’t teach, administrate.”
“Some people don’t even know the word cursive.”
Wasn’t the usual word in American English for such writing once :LONGHAND?
From Wikipedia, and also relevant to the private schools post:–
The Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), formerly known as the Headmasters’ Conference and now branded HMC (The Heads’ Conference), is an association of the head teachers of 351 private fee-charging schools (both boarding schools and day schools), some traditionally described as public schools.
The same here, for Germany in the mid-1960s. In the later grades of primary school (when I was 9 or 10) I was annoyed that some of the upper case letter forms were rather too ornate for my taste, and, moreover, S and L looked almost identical. I started to use printed letter forms in these cases (although still joined up to the rest of the word) and nobody minded. Legibility mattered, and being able to write at a relatively fast tempo mattered, aesthetics didn’t.
Illegible handwriting is nothing new. Just try to decipher a facsimile of the manuscripts of Hölderlin or Büchner. It took the latter’s editors almost a century to realise that the hero of his most famous play is called “Woyzeck” and not “Wozzeck”. Other writers — Kafka and, rather surprisingly, Rimbaud come to my mind — had a very legible handwriting. Some writers were rich enough to employ a secretary (“Schreiber”) to prepare the print-ready versions of their works. Goethe’s secretary John is well-known. Tolstoy used his wife to prepare legible versions of his manuscripts (and as modern editors found out, she also “corrected” his grammar).
As for Elizabethan handwriting: I think it’s the peculiarities of that style that explain some textual corruptions in the text of Shakespeare, for example in Hamlet, where apparently “ers” (arse) was misread as “etc” and printed as “etcaetera”.
I utterly refuse to write so fast that I can’t read it anymore. Once I failed a university exam for this reason alone.
I’m also simply unable to take notes – I can’t listen and write at the same time. When something is interesting, I tend to remember it anyway, and we got PowerPoint slides and/or paper handouts, but there’s one exam I failed all three times in writing and passed at the last chance (orally before a commission).
I made a kink into the tip of my fountain pen so I could turn the pen around and write in boldface, with varying width of the stroke* as a byproduct. Works so much better than underlining! I used that very sparingly, though.
* Singular, mostly. The whole point of handwriting, to me, is that it’s joined up so you don’t have to lift the pen and set it down again within a word. Indeed, byproduct is a single stroke, so is boldface…
See also: Für Elise – a misreading of Für Therese.
Yes, except that’s really everything that’s not shorthand, so it means “cursive” only if most writing is cursive.
How did this phonotactic monstrosity come about? Why not simply “the Thurbur method”, or in a hypothetical pinch or three “Nealian”?
@J.W. Brewer: Yes, I knew all that; I watch a lot of British television to help me get to sleep. As I recall now, in 1953 C. S. Lewis referred to the (female) lead teacher at the horrible Experiment House school as simply the “Head,” although that term evidently also applied to male equivalents at other schools.
By the way, whole notion from The Silver Chair that having both boys and girls at the same school would lead to a terrible bullying problem seems bizarre. It’s not just the obvious falsity of it. (My mother mocked it when we were reading the book together, when I was five or six. Not that she would actually know anything about the sociology of co-education; she never had a class with a boy until her junior year of college, when she cross registered for a class at Boston College. But even in kindergarten it seemed equally absurd to me.) No, what is really strange is how C. S. Lewis would have come to such a conclusion. He hated three of his four all-boys schools, more than perhaps anything else he encountered in his life. At the Wynyard School, the treatment of the boys was horrific even by the standards of English public schools in the period before the Great War. The school closed due to a lawsuit and the lack of pupils that followed from the bad publicity; and the headmaster was found to be criminally insane—although Lewis did say that the horrible experience engendered solidarity among the boys. However, at Malvern College, what he hated was primarily the bullying by the older students. So what made him think that educating girls and boys together could be so uniquely bad?
@David Marjanović: I don’t know why Thurbur thought “D’Nealian” was a good name. In kindergarten, I thought it was as dumb as the letter forms. Maybe he explained why he picked such an odd name (just so it could be trademarked?), but if he didn’t, we’ll never know.
Incidentally, this was one of the D’Nealian writing workbooks we used at my school. I think this one was for kindergarten, but I’m not positive; it says “Book 1,” but there could have been a “Book K.”
Illegible handwriting is nothing new. Just try to decipher a facsimile of the manuscripts of Hölderlin or Büchner.
Or Aquinas, or, to my eye, anything at all in Demotic Egyptian.
I wonder how often DE got phoned up by a Pharmacist who couldn’t decipher which drug. Juniors presumably quailed and operated on the wrong eye rather than dare ask
In my own case, never: having an unusual level of self-awareness for a surgeon, I have always PRINTED IN CLEAR CAPITAL LETTERS when called upon to write such mission-critical stuff.*
However, I did get asked to interpret my consultant’s handwritten notes when I was a senior house officer, by the teams which had asked him to come and assess an inpatient. (I’m not making this up; it happened on more than one occasion, too.) And it has not been unheard of at all for pharmacists to ring up prescribers to ask for decipherment hints. (This has happened to me, though it was rather because the pharmacists wanted to be sure that I really meant what I had written. Usually, the answer has been “Yes” …)
* I do draw the line at this modish modern insistence on not using Latin abbreviations in prescriptions, though. If it was good enough for Paracelsus …
“Are you sure you want to prescribe both MEPERIDINE and PHENELZINE?”
It’s an unequivocally good thing (seriously) that pharmacists nowadays feel empowered to do this.
It would have saved me some weeks of extreme anxiety if this had been the case when I was newly qualified, when (after three successive days with no sleep at all) I made a very serious prescribing error that could quite easily have killed a patient. And they say that there is no such thing as progress …
I was never taught to draw printed letters by hand.
My cohort was never taught the letter Q. Considered too controversial for sensitive youngsters at our level of socialisation, in the alphabet on display above the blackboard it was concealed under a page of jotter. We were promised that all would be revealed, Eleusinian-like, next year. But next year rolled around and Q had joined the throng without any gloss or fanfare. Surely this explains something in my present situation – but I’m at a loss to see quite what.
We “printed” until a certain year. Then, at about the time we moved from thick pencils to ridiculously diluted blue ink into which we dipped primitive cumbersome pens, the much-touted new “cursive script” was wheeled out. To this day I can’t see why it and not also the far more elegant running version of our seniors merited that designation. I felt cheated, and still do.
My handwriting is awkward – but I cope. If I have to write a note for Mrs Noetica I “print”, more or less. I discovered that most university students these days have no idea that non-cursive script can be called “print”, presumably because they have actual printers that do any printing that is called for, unlike us in our formative years.
If it was good enough for Paracelsus …
Printed in my brain is the time I ended up in Salzburg (year 2000), and eventually found mediaeval-seeming accommodation that turned out to be metres from the bones of Paracelsus, no less. My only regret is that if I tell Australians that, I rarely elicit anything more than a blank stare.
I’ll see you your “Einstein on the Beach” and raise you “Paracelsus at the Barbie” …
I only know one of those pharmacistical abbrevs: aqua q.sq is read as “water to make up the volume,” read as kvantum skvat in Danish tradition (source my aunt). It’s supposed to stand for quantum squālet, but I don’t quite get the semantics. Perhaps it was originally used for pills (not tablets).
aqua q.sq is read as “water to make up the volume,”
I know this only as aqua qs= quantum satis.
squalet means “is crawling with” in humus squalet serpentibus atris [Ovid].
…That’s eldritch. In actual Roman-era handwriting I still recognize one in every three or four letters, but this? You could have told me it’s a mirrored image of Special Syriac or Double-Secret Mandaic and I’d have believed it.
@Stu, I wouldn’t trust my aunt on medical Latin, since I was told that I’ve gained insight in the level of latinity of the shorter medical studies. Surgeons and the like may be able to conjugate transfundere, but ask a physiotherapist what venter is and they come up blank. He could name more muscles than I could, but I could tell him what the names meant.
quantum satis makes sense, but farmacists still called it kvantum skvat where skvat is Danish for ‘dollop’.
eldritch
Cuneiform looks like chicken tracks. So what ?
That’s just the familiar-though-not-to-me littera illegibilis of Aquinas, says the ‘net. Somebody has speculated that he was a lefty. Miraculous Catholic apology for his scrawl – thought faster than he could write etc.
I sure hope he thought faster than he could write…!
Indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen anything that looks particularly much like those images (in the sense of the letter forms of the consonants in particular) but those examples are trivial to read. But perhaps that is on purpose, so as not to scare people away from the many doubtless much more challenging examples.
I don’t imagine they care whether the writing is challenging or not as long as it gets transcribed.
@lars
Kvantum skvat sounds more like it is a corruption of quantum sufficiat.
I don’t imagine they care whether the writing is challenging or not as long as it gets transcribed.
How are the transcriptions “verified” ?
One possibility suggests itself – ensure that each writing sample is transcribed by different persons. Then programmatically compare all these transcriptions.
If there is no discrepancy, it is certain that any transcription errors (as identified by an expert later) have been consistently reproduced. All the transcribers made the same mistakes, if they made mistakes.
However, this is not worse than mistakes made by a single transcriber, as identified by an expert much later. See Woyzeck <-> Wozzeck.
Systematic errors are harder to recognize than single errors, but equally easy (or hard!) to correct.
OTOH, as I know from code reviews, systematic bad coding practices are easy to recognize, but it’s hard to dissuade people from using them. They invoke the dialect defense.
@david eddyshaw
Similarly in government offices.
Department secretary sends back a draft brief to minister with something scribbled in the margin.
Much anxious consultation on the floor: “what do you think this says?”
The one thing we cannot do is spend five minutes going back to the secretary to ask him what he wrote. Because the implied criticism of his writing might cause him to lose face.
Chinese whispers rules.
I won’t disagree that being able to read is indeed a superpower, but my grandmother’s extremely tidy handwriting from a century ago often just looks like a bunch of slanted lines to me, and to some extent I can only read it because I know the language. I think that style is called Kurrent. The American form(s?) of cursive in the article roughly just look like cursive in the sense of italic — it’s the other way around of course, italic fonts are based on a handwriting style, but either way.
Dutch cursive/joined-up handwriting is also fairly different, albeit more similar. I imagine that’s probably because they’re both roman cursives, as opposed to blackletter cursives.
@PP, you’re probably right.
That case is more complicated. It’s not just a mistake, Büchner’s handwriting (these are “foul papers”, not a manuscript for the printer) is genuinely illegible in many places. Büchner’s brothers, who first transcribed the manuscripts, read the name as Wotzuck or Wozzuck. They finally decided that the play was unpublishable. It was in 1875/8 that Karl Emil Franzos published a version of the play as “Wozzeck” (the manuscript is untitled). “Wozzeck ist insgesamt ein Text von Franzos unter Büchners Namen” (Ariane Martin, editor of the Reclam edition of Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke und Briefe). It was only in 1914 that Büchner’s main source was published, where the name is clearly Woyzeck. If you take a look at a facsimile of Büchner’s manuscript (with lots of abbreviations and a very irregular orthography), you’ll see that the letters y and z are basically identical in shape, and he even sometimes leaves out one of the two letters. So it is no wonder that the early transcribers, who didn’t know the real life case history that had inspired him (originally published in a medical journal), misread the name. It is a mistake any transcriber would have made.
All such people ought to be pilloried.
Quite so. (The German article is longer.)
Yes.
And not one of them had encountered the Polish name Wojciech?