printed form and signwritten form

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
December 15, 2008

On Dec 14, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Anne-Claude Prélaz Girod wrote:
> I'm not sure to understand what you mean by
> HANDWRITING / HANDPRINTING and the examples I've seen don't really  
> help me to understand clearly what difference ther is between the 2

Hello Anny -
I guess I can try to answer your question...

Handwriting is a term, in English, that has several definitions and  
meanings...

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...

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:

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...

Handwriting...the SignWriting equivalent to a more relaxed "cursive"  
style of writing...

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...

Does this help at all? And can anyone explain it better? I bet you  
can...and please do ;-))

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...

Val ;-)
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