Paleography glee

[mme_hardy]

Need to read old handwriting? Check out BYU's "Script Tutorial", https://script.byu.edu/Pages/home.aspx . " The tutorials and​ materials gathe​red here are meant to help a varie​ty of people – students, researchers, historians, genealogists, and indexers – learn more about old scripts and how to make use of that knowle​dge to analyze and int​erpret the past. The concentration is on western European scripts, particularly those in use between 1500 and 1800. "

I found it when Googling; I dimly remembered that Germans wrote the number "1" in an unusual way. Here's where I wound up:
https://script.byu.edu/Pages/German/en/numbers-script.aspx

Not only does it describe what the number looks like, it has an animation of the number being written.

God, I love living in the future.

Comments

[caulkhead]

What a brilliant resource! I never even really managed blackletter fluently, let alone script, but I'd love to be able to.

[movingfinger]

That "1" is the reason for the crossed "7." As I suppose you know...

[mme_hardy]

No, I didn't! Thank you.

[movingfinger]

Such fun, thank you for posting this.

I don't think the 4 we learned as children has a loop in it (my handwriting, like all adults', has slewed a bit since then). In the western corner there where the direction change is.

[mme_hardy]

Huh. The 4 I learned as a child was one downstroke for the ascender, then a downstroke-right angle to make the body of the 4. (Or did you learn German numerals as a child?)

[movingfinger]

No, I think it had to have been Palmer, or a derivative of Palmer. I have a vague memory of having to downstroke first and then cross it, and that being difficult to gauge. Frustrating! I notice that I tend to start with the angled stroke, now.

Playing with it, I think the loop might be there (in the German numerals) because it prevents too much retracing and allows a smoother stroke? If you retrace your line with an inked nib pen, you're more likely to make a mess---either soak through, or tear the paper.

[kore]

Oh, very nice.

[adrian_turtle]

That's amazing. I didn't know the crossbar on the 7 and the overhanging eave of the 1 were German. In college, when I was writing on lined paper, I started to cross 7 to avoid confusion with 2.

I used to write 9 in the style shown at the link, not realizing it was gothic or german. (Maybe I picked it up from one of the printed fonts that had a rounded loop?) My fourth grade teacher believed 9 was properly written by starting at the top, drawing a loop, and extending the downstroke from the corner of the loop. We had an extended battle of wills wherein the only math problems she considered "correct" were the ones that did not contain the number 9, as she would not acknowledge numerals drawn in one smooth curve as in the linked animation.

[mme_hardy]

My father's a mathematician, so after elementary school crossed 7s were a thing. I also write the numeral zero with a slash to distinguish it from capital O, something I would have thought was unknown outside the math/compsci biz, but my son does it, too.

[sabotabby]

This is incredibly relevant to my interests, as I've just taken up calligraphy again. Thanks!

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

This is giving me flashbacks to the semester in grad school when I had to transcribe a lot of English Secretary Hand -- which has to be the most godawful script ever invented.