LL-L: "Scripts" LOWLANDS-L, 16.MAY.2000 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 16.MAY.2000 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: matthias e. storme [matthias.e.storme at vlaanderen.org]
Subject: LL-L: "Scripts" LOWLANDS-L, 16.MAY.2000 (01) [E/German]

>  Ian J. L. Adkins  wrote: Ich besitze ein Buch, das 1879 im Fraktur gedruckt
>wird, der das am schönsten gedruckte Buch I zu besitzen ist.  Es ist
>unglücklich, daß Fraktur nicht mehr verwendet wird.  Haben Sie irgendeine
>Hoffnung, daß Fraktur zum Gebrauch zurückgeht?
>

As I mentioned, there is an association in Germany which tries to
revive it ( http://www.e-welt.net/BfdS ).  Bund für
deutsche Schrift und Sprache.

It is very frequently used in titles etc, but not for standard text,
and is very rarely handwritten (as far as I know, I'm not living in
Germany).

>
>The other weird aspect is, in my opinion, that today Americans and others use
>Fraktur to create
>associations with Nazi-Germany, whilst the Nazi-regime itself had condemned
>the usage of the
>Frakture and did introduce the international standard.

In Belgium, the radical anti-Flemish, French-chauvinist party FDF,
did campaign some elections ago with big posters in Fraktur
"Bruxelles flamand, jamais" in order to try to link the Flemish (as a
germanic people) with the nazi regime - indeed not knowing that this
type of script was precisely forbidden by the nazis.

Matthias Storme

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Scripts

Ron

Opinions are obviously going to differ on any question of how easy something
is to learn. I had great trouble with German for the first six months or so
but then experienced a kind of breakthrough. But the Fraktur was not a part of
the problem, for me or for a class of averagely lazy 12-year-olds.

One of the difficulties in reading the hand-written version is that there
are some combinations of letters which are particularly difficult to decode,
eg in words like "immer", "nimmer". We touched on something similar last
summer: the English word "wun" (allegedly) became "won" because with a quill
pen the first spelling becomes more or less an indecipherable series of
vertical lines. In German Handschrift you get a similar effect but the
downstrokes are joined with a diagonal upstroke, which is identical with the
stroke used to join letters together and to start and finish a lot of them.
Now, "c" is basically a single downstroke, "n" is two downstrokes, "m" is
three. "i" is like a "c" but with a dot. "e" is like "n" but with no linking
upstroke (which is the origin of the two "dots" representing an Umlaut). "u"
is like "n" but has a mark over it to show that it isn't. In addition, "r"
differs from the printed form by having two vertical strokes. The loop of
the "d" isn't closed (it's written like a "c") and "h" is long like a Roman
cursive "f". There are a number of other smaller differences.

There is an interesting question here. How easy is it for someone who has
only learned printed forms of the Roman style to decipher cursive forms? I
would guess that it would be a lot easier than doing the same trick with
Fraktur or Cyrillic (those "t"s which turn into "m"s!). Does anyone know
where we could find some islands and a few pairs of twins to do the
experiment?

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Scripts

Georg wrote above:

> There is an interesting question here. How easy is it for someone who has
> only learned printed forms of the Roman style to decipher cursive forms? > I
> would guess that it would be a lot easier than doing the same trick with
> Fraktur or Cyrillic (those "t"s which turn into "m"s!). Does anyone know
> where we could find some islands and a few pairs of twins to do the
> experiment?

John, I think all this depends on where you come from, i.e., with which system
you started.  You will then tend to compare all related systems to it when you
learn them, such as seeing Fraktur script "n"s as looking like the "u"s you
know and Cyrillic script "t" as looking like the "m"s you know.  Relearning
something that looks similar to what you know can be harder than learning
something that is entirely new, something that you cannot relate to anything
you learned previously.  I remember older people who had learned the "German"
script having a really hard time writing Roman script, and they would
inevitably mix scripts and write Roman script in that pointy fashion.

But let's remember that all this general stuff is getting us a little too far
away from the Lowlands.

Best regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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