Good God, that's supposed to be Latin? Oh wait, the Romans clearly had a professional class. That explains why it looks more like dwarvish runes... (grin) Imagine have a prescription for eel's blood and getting bat's livers at the apothocary instead...
Reading it gets relatively easy once you know what to look for and can recognise quirks such as how sometimes Romans would write, say, three slanting, unconnected strokes to form an "M" instead of connecting them as below.
Bat livers! Now we know what really killed Stephanus: Helvius' handwriting.
Also pen-and-ink cursive is different than wax-tablet cursive, which is where you're more likely to see unconnected strokes. Sometimes Roman handwriting looks like Ogham :D
Here's an image I found here (http://www.unigre.it/pubblicazioni/lasala/WEB/T3_E.HTM) of a wax tablet from Pompeii:
When I was a wee freshman and only knew of CAPITALIS LATIN INSCRIPTIONS IN STONE, a friend in the dorm asked me to help him read a letter I think was purported to be in the Emperor Claudius' handwriting (or some other important person). A photocopy of it for a class, not the real thing. Then I visited the uni's rare manuscripts collection and saw a whole lot of real things. I'd already had some militant dissatisfaction about how high school history was taught as "times and places a lot of people died" (as opposed to those lower school social studies units we had such as "in the middle ages, people ate black bread"), but it was then that I realised how vastly more interested I was in how the ordinary folks lived than lists of kings and where the emperors and generals marched. I began to understand that some of the keys to understanding the development of cultures and human civilisation lie in the mundane, not just the territorial squabbling and who gets to erect a statue at the end of the day. That leads to understanding some of those marching generals a while lot better, too.
When I was studying Russian in college, I was appalled at the potential for abuse in cursive Cyrillic... I could write whole words, even sentences, which were long strings of slanted vertical lines looped together at the base -- and how the frick do you tell where the spaces are? At the time I joked that Russian doctors must be a disaster for writing prescriptions. Your strokes for "mille" above are obviously in the same class.
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Re: Trickier than you'd think
Date: 2007-03-30 02:21 am (UTC)Dr. Phil
Re: Trickier than you'd think
Date: 2007-03-30 03:01 am (UTC)Bat livers! Now we know what really killed Stephanus: Helvius' handwriting.
Re: Trickier than you'd think
Date: 2007-03-30 04:28 am (UTC)Re: Trickier than you'd think
Date: 2007-03-30 01:04 pm (UTC)Here's an image I found here (http://www.unigre.it/pubblicazioni/lasala/WEB/T3_E.HTM) of a wax tablet from Pompeii:
When I was a wee freshman and only knew of CAPITALIS LATIN INSCRIPTIONS IN STONE, a friend in the dorm asked me to help him read a letter I think was purported to be in the Emperor Claudius' handwriting (or some other important person). A photocopy of it for a class, not the real thing. Then I visited the uni's rare manuscripts collection and saw a whole lot of real things. I'd already had some militant dissatisfaction about how high school history was taught as "times and places a lot of people died" (as opposed to those lower school social studies units we had such as "in the middle ages, people ate black bread"), but it was then that I realised how vastly more interested I was in how the ordinary folks lived than lists of kings and where the emperors and generals marched. I began to understand that some of the keys to understanding the development of cultures and human civilisation lie in the mundane, not just the territorial squabbling and who gets to erect a statue at the end of the day. That leads to understanding some of those marching generals a while lot better, too.
Persnickety...
Date: 2007-03-30 06:18 pm (UTC)Re: Persnickety...
Date: 2007-03-30 07:15 pm (UTC)Dr. Phil
Re: Persnickety...
Date: 2007-03-30 07:59 pm (UTC)That is, if penmanship is still being taught in the United States....
Re: Persnickety...
Date: 2007-03-31 05:44 pm (UTC)Al-chan had a little cursive in grade school, in ONE year. It wasn't something they pushed.
Now, what they need to do, is MAKE children not only learn to read it, but write it well too.
My cursive isn't bad, but my print is easier to read. Hrm.
But then, I really try not to write by hand as much because I am far better with a keyboard than I am with a pencil.
It's just a sign of the times.
Re: Persnickety...
Date: 2007-08-13 11:45 pm (UTC)