02-16-2024, 01:23 PM
(02-16-2024, 12:52 PM)Byrd Wrote: Excellent points (and you beat me to several of them.) I agree that there needs to be more research to flesh out the findings.
...and like you, my handwriting is almost unreadable.
I understand that many people prefer to print (my own cursive style is a mix of printed and cursive letters) rather than to use cursive. It has a number of advantages; the main being that it's easier to read. But if we look at history, we can see that ancient Egypt had three different types of "similar" alphabets (demotic, hieratic, hieroglyphs) that were all used at the same time (much as we have cursive and print) and each had its own uses. Hieroglyphs are most similar to printing -- no one used them when writing long things on papyri. They're used for public announcements and proclamations. Hieratic was closest to our cursive (and can be darn hard to read, by the way)
Demotic arose much later (around 2,000 years later) as an "improvement"... didn't last, though, and was rapidly overtaken by alphabet systems with far fewer letters (there are well over 500 known hieroglyphs.)
Many thanks for applying your knowledge to the topic. I hadn't considered the application of a historical perspective on this. I imagine that people in the past had lots of trepidation when it came to actually writing things. It was not only a matter of training and skill, but some degree of pressure to step into a 'status' world where writing was constrained for a specific and 'official' purpose (religious storytelling, governance, for example) and not so much for formal learning, or creative impulse. I wonder if across the spectrum of 'writing' in the ancient past there was much "writing" by the general population, or was it all business and official record-keeping? Feel free to ignore the curiosity... I think I'm drifting off topic.
