<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">SignWriting List<div>December 15, 2008</div><div><br></div><div>On Dec 14, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Anne-Claude Prélaz Girod wrote:</div><div><div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(20, 79, 174); -webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">I'm not sure to understand what you mean by</span></div><div>HANDWRITING / HANDPRINTING and the examples I've seen don't really help me to understand clearly what difference ther is between the 2</div></span></blockquote><br></div><div>Hello Anny -</div><div>I guess I can try to answer your question...</div><div><br></div><div>Handwriting is a term, in English, that has several definitions and meanings...</div><div><br></div><div>One meaning for "handwriting" is cursive writing...meaning writing that "connects letters" in a quick and more relaxed fashion. That kind of handwriting, here in the US, is taught in schools around third grade...and when I moved to Denmark at age 19, I found out that the handwriting taught in Danish schools did not look like the handwriting taught in my school in the US...so cursive writing does vary from place to place, even when they are trying to write the same symbols, such as a or b or c...I could not read handwritten Danish for years because of this education difference...</div><div><br></div><div>But I could read "handprinting" in Denmark...When people took the time to write by hand in very slow and careful perfect letters that looked a lot like type that is printed by machine, then i could read a, b and c and understand the Danish written by hand...so based on that experience, I started using these terms:</div><div><br></div><div>Handprinting....Writing by hand that is as perfect as you can, making symbols as close to the printed machine form as possible...writing block letters...sometimes called block printing...</div><div><br></div><div>Handwriting...the SignWriting equivalent to a more relaxed "cursive" style of writing...</div><div><br></div><div>The problem is that SW Handwriting is not really cursive right now...it might be someday...there was an idea floating around in the late 1980s that maybe our Shorthand stenography system could become the "cursive" form of SW Handwriting, but at the moment SW Handwriting means writing that is not "perfect" but more relaxed...</div><div><br></div><div>Does this help at all? And can anyone explain it better? I bet you can...and please do ;-))</div><div><br></div><div>and I think the idea of using the stenography as a more cursive writing is a great idea, if we can adapt it to fit the ISWA symbols...</div><div><br></div><div>Val ;-)</div></div></body></html>