52-589: Kappa ( / ˈ k æ p ə / ; uppercase Κ , lowercase κ or cursive ϰ ; Greek : κάππα , káppa ) is the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet , representing the voiceless velar plosive IPA: [k] sound in Ancient and Modern Greek . In the system of Greek numerals , Kʹ has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter kaph [REDACTED] . Letters that arose from kappa include
104-426: A cursive form of handwriting was used in writing on papyrus . It employed slanted and partly connected letter forms as well as many ligatures . Some features of this handwriting were later adopted into Greek minuscule, the dominant form of handwriting in the medieval and early modern era. In the 19th and 20th centuries, an entirely new form of cursive Greek, more similar to contemporary Western European cursive scripts,
156-483: A cut-down version of uncial in the famous Codex Basilicanus of Hilary , which contains sections in each of the two types of script. The terminology was continued in the mid-18th century by René Prosper Tassin and Charles François Toustain . Despite the common and well-fixed usage, half-uncial is a poor name to the extent that it suggests some organic debt to regular uncial, though both types share features inherited from their ancient source, capitalis rustica . It
208-469: A form of evolved Latin-based uncial hand that would probably be best compared to the later 7th to 10th century examples, though admittedly, the variations in Latin uncial are much wider and less rigid than Greek. Modern uncial has borrowed heavily from some of the conventions found in more cursive scripts, using flourishes, variable width strokes, and on occasion, even center axis tilt. In a way comparable to
260-636: A fully joined, cursive hand. Eighty-seven years later, in the middle of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln drafted the Gettysburg Address in a cursive hand that would not look out of place today. Not all such cursive, then or now, joined all of the letters within a word. In both the British Empire and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the typewriter, professionals used cursive for their correspondence. This
312-648: A particular way. Once pupils have learnt how to clearly form single letters, they are taught how single letters can be joined to form a flowing script. Characteristics of cursive and continuous cursive scripts: Whether cursive or continuous cursive is to be favoured remains a subject of debate. While many schools in the United Kingdom are opting to teach continuous cursive throughout the year groups, often starting in Reception , critics have argued that conjoined writing styles leave many children struggling with
364-584: A simplified form of non-cursive handwriting adopted by Hamburg schools. The Russian Cursive Cyrillic alphabet is used (instead of the block letters ) when handwriting the modern Russian language . While several letters resemble Latin counterparts, many of them represent different sounds. Most handwritten Russian, especially personal letters and schoolwork, uses the cursive Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet although use of block letters in private writing has been rising. Most children in Russian schools are taught in
416-891: A survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades in all 50 American states, 90 percent of respondents said their schools required the teaching of cursive, but a nationwide survey in 2008 found elementary school teachers lacking formal training in teaching handwriting; only 12 percent reported having taken a course in how to teach it. In 2012, the American states of Indiana and Hawaii announced that their schools would no longer be required to teach cursive (but will still be permitted to), and instead will be required to teach "keyboard proficiency". Nationwide Common Core State Standards (which do not include instruction in cursive) were proposed in 2009 and had been adopted by 44 states as of July 2011 - all of which have debated whether to augment them with cursive. Many historical documents, such as
468-468: A wave of state legislation between 2013 and 2023 that requires the incorporation of cursive handwriting into elementary education. Other states such as Idaho , Kansas , Massachusetts , North Carolina , South Carolina , New Jersey , and Tennessee had already mandated cursive in schools as a part of the Back to Basics program designed to maintain the integrity of cursive handwriting. Cursive instruction
520-430: A word one single complex stroke. Cursive is a style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined , or flowing, manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. This writing style is distinct from "print-script" using block letters , in which the letters of a word are unconnected. Not all cursive copybooks join all letters; formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive
572-585: Is insular , not uncial. Uncial Greek (commonly called "Byzantine lettering" by Greeks themselves) is commonly used by the Greek Orthodox Church and various institutions and individuals in Greece to this day. The Modern Greek State has also used uncial script on several occasions in official capacity (such as on seals, government documents, etc.) as did many of the Greek provisional governments during
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#1732779533687624-527: Is a combination of joins and pen lifts. In the Arabic , Syriac , Latin , and Cyrillic alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected (while others must not), sometimes making a word one single complex stroke. In Hebrew cursive and Roman cursive , the letters are not connected. In Maharashtra , there was a cursive alphabet, known as the 'Modi' script, used to write the Marathi language . Ligature
676-423: Is a combination of joins and pen lifts. The writing style can be further divided as "looped", " italic ", or "connected". The cursive method is used with many alphabets due to infrequent pen lifting and beliefs that it increases writing speed. Despite this belief, more elaborate or ornamental styles of writing can be slower to reproduce. In some alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected, sometimes making
728-491: Is also sometimes used to refer to manuscripts that have been scribed in uncial, especially when differentiating from those penned with minuscule. Some of the most noteworthy Greek uncials are: The Petropolitanus is considered by some to contain optimum uncial style. It is also an example of how large the characters were getting. For further details on these manuscripts, see Guglielmo Cavallo Ricerche sulla Maiuscola Biblica (Florence, 1967). Modern calligraphy usually teaches
780-400: Is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters . It varies in functionality and modern-day usage across languages and regions; being used both publicly in artistic and formal documents as well as in private communication. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive
832-444: Is characteristic of later uncial usage. As the script evolved over the centuries, the characters became more complex. Specifically, around AD 600, flourishes and exaggerations of the basic strokes began to appear in more manuscripts. Ascenders and descenders were the first major alterations, followed by twists of the tool in the basic stroke and overlapping. By the time the more compact minuscule scripts arose circa AD 800, some of
884-480: Is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive, and new cursive. Old Roman cursive, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet , and even by emperors issuing commands. New Roman, also called minuscule cursive or later cursive, developed from old cursive. It
936-570: Is encoded separately in Unicode for occasions where it is used as a separate symbol in math and science. In mathematics , the kappa curve is named after this letter; the tangents of this curve were first calculated by Isaac Barrow in the 17th century. These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style: Cursive Greek Cursive (also known as joined-up writing )
988-422: Is generally what people refer to when they say "cursive" in the context of English. Cursive italic penmanship—derived from chancery cursive —uses non-looped joins, and not all letters are joined. In italic cursive, there are no joins from g, j, q, or y, and a few other joins are discouraged. Italic penmanship became popular in the 15th-century Italian Renaissance. The term "italic" as it relates to handwriting
1040-551: Is more difficult than writing with curved lines and children would benefit from learning cursive first. Students with dyslexia , who have difficulty learning to read because their brains have difficulty associating sounds and letter combinations efficiently, have found that cursive can help them with the decoding process because it integrates hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and other brain and memory functions. However, students with dysgraphia may be badly served, or even substantially hindered, by demands for cursive. Up to
1092-651: Is not to be confused with italic typed letters. Many, but not all, letters in the handwriting of the Renaissance were joined, as most are today in cursive italic. The origins of the cursive method are associated with the practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill . Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. Steel dip pens followed quills; they were sturdier, but still had some limitations. The individuality of
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#17327795336871144-419: Is possible that Jerome was punning on this; he may conceivably also have been playing with the other meaning of codex , "block of wood". The term uncial in the sense of describing this script was first used by Jean Mabillon in the early 18th century. Thereafter his definition was refined by Scipione Maffei , who used it to refer to this script as distinct from Roman square capitals . The word, uncial ,
1196-490: Is required by grade 5 in Illinois, starting with the 2018–2019 school year. Some argue that cursive is not worth teaching in schools and "in the 1960s cursive was implemented because of preference and not an educational basis; Hawaii and Indiana have replaced cursive instruction with 'keyboard proficiency' and 44 other states are currently weighing similar measures." Maria Montessori argued that writing with straight lines
1248-535: Is some doubt about the original meaning of the word. Uncial itself probably comes from St. Jerome 's preface to the Book of Job , where it is found in the form uncialibus , but it is possible that this is a misreading of inicialibus (though this makes little sense in the context), and Jerome may have been referring to the larger initial letters found at the beginning of paragraphs. In classical Latin uncialis could mean both "inch-high" and "weighing an ounce", and it
1300-479: Is writing the letters of words with lines connecting the letters so that one does not have to pick up the pen or pencil between letters. Commonly some of the letters are written in a looped manner to facilitate the connections. In common printed Greek texts, the modern small letter fonts are called "cursive" (as opposed to uncial ) though the letters do not connect. In looped cursive penmanship, some ascenders and descenders have loops which provide for joins. This
1352-685: The Greek War of Independence . The height of uncial usage by the Modern Greek State was during the Greek military junta of 1967–74 , when even Greek Drachma coins had uncial lettering on them. Since the Metapolitefsi , the Greek State has stopped using uncial script. The term half-uncial or semi-uncial was first deployed by Scipione Maffei , Istoria diplomatica (Mantua, 1727); he used it to distinguish what seemed like
1404-459: The standard Bengali alphabet as it is free hand writing, where sometimes the alphabets are complex and appear different from the standard handwriting. Modi is a cursive script used to write Marathi that is thought to be derived from the Devanagari script. It was used alongside Devanagari until the 20th century as a shorthand script for quick writing in business and administration. Due to
1456-641: The 17th century, but its use was neither uniform, nor standardized either in England itself or elsewhere in the British Empire . In the English colonies of the early 17th century, most of the letters are clearly separated in the handwriting of William Bradford , though a few were joined as in a cursive hand. In England itself, Edward Cocker had begun to introduce a version of the French ronde style, which
1508-484: The 19th century, Kurrent (also known as German cursive ) was used in German-language longhand. Kurrent was not used exclusively, but rather in parallel to modern cursive (which is the same as English cursive). Writers used both cursive styles: location, contents and context of the text determined which style to use. A successor of Kurrent , Sütterlin , was widely used in the period 1911–1941 until
1560-500: The 21st century, some of the surviving cursive writing styles are Spencerian , Palmer Method , D'Nealian , and Zaner-Bloser script. One of the earliest forms of new technology that caused the decline of handwriting was the invention of the ballpoint pen , patented in 1888 by John Loud. Two brothers, László and György Bíró, further developed the ballpoint pen by changing the design and using different ink that dried quickly. Unlike older pen designs, this new invention guaranteed that
1612-843: The Nazi Party banned it and its printed equivalent Fraktur . German speakers brought up with Sütterlin continued to use it well into the post-war period. Today, three different styles of cursive writing are taught in German schools, the Lateinische Ausgangsschrift (introduced in 1953), the Schulausgangsschrift (1968), and the Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift (1969). The German National Primary Schoolteachers' Union has proposed replacing all three with Grundschrift ,
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1664-545: The Roman K and Cyrillic К . The uppercase form is identical to the Latin K. Greek proper names and placenames containing kappa are often written in English with "c" due to the Romans ' transliterations into the Latin alphabet : Constantinople , Corinth , Crete . All formal modern romanizations of Greek now use the letter "k", however. The cursive form ϰ is generally a simple font variant of lower-case kappa, but it
1716-484: The United States Constitution, are written in cursive—some argue the inability to read cursive therefore precludes one from being able to fully appreciate such documents in their original format. Despite the decline in the day-to-day use of cursive, it is being reintroduced to the curriculum of some schools in the United States . California passed cursive handwriting legislation in 2023, adding to
1768-511: The continued widespread use of the blackletter typefaces for written German until well into the 20th century, Gaelic letterforms, which are similar to uncial letterforms, were conventionally used for typography in Irish until the 1950s. The script is still widely used in this way for titles of documents, inscriptions on monuments, and other 'official' uses. Strictly speaking, the Gaelic script
1820-571: The derived Japanese kanji characters which are usually well separated by the writer. Uncial Uncial is a majuscule script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes . Uncial letters were used to write Greek and Latin , as well as Gothic , and are the current style for Coptic and Nobiin . Early uncial script most likely developed from late rustic capitals . Early forms are characterized by broad single-stroke letters using simple round forms taking advantage of
1872-551: The evolved uncial styles formed the basis for these simplified, smaller scripts. There are over 500 surviving copies of uncial script; by far the larger number of these predate the Carolingian Renaissance . Uncial was still used, particularly for copies of the Bible , until around the 10th century outside of Ireland . The insular variant of uncial remained the standard script used to write the Irish language until
1924-566: The first grade how to write using this Russian script. Cursive forms of Chinese characters are used in calligraphy; "running script" is the semi-cursive form and " rough script " (mistakenly called "grass script" due to literal misinterpretation) is the cursive. The running aspect of this script has more to do with the formation and connectedness of strokes within an individual character than with connections between characters as in Western connected cursive. The latter are rare in hanzi and in
1976-603: The high level of gross and fine motor coordination required. In the American colonies, on the eve of their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain , it is notable that Thomas Jefferson joined most, but not all the letters when drafting the United States Declaration of Independence . However, a few days later, Timothy Matlack professionally re-wrote the presentation copy of the Declaration in
2028-462: The ink would not smudge and did not require such careful penmanship. After World War II, the ballpoint pen was mass-produced and sold cheaply, changing how people wrote. Over time, the emphasis on using cursive declined slowly, and was later impacted by other technologies such as the phone, computer, and keyboard. Cursive has been in decline throughout the 21st century because it is no longer perceived as necessary. The Fairfax Education Association,
2080-522: The largest teachers' union in Fairfax County, Virginia, has called cursive a "dying art". On the 2006 SAT , an American university matriculation exam, only 15 percent of the students wrote their essay answers in cursive. However, students might be discouraged from using cursive on standardized tests because they will receive lower marks if their answers are hard to read, and some graders may have difficulties reading cursive. Nevertheless, in 2007,
2132-520: The middle of the 20th century approached. After the 1960s, a movement originally begun by Paul Standard in the 1930s to replace looped cursive with cursive italic penmanship resurfaced. It was motivated by the claim that cursive instruction was more difficult than it needed to be; that conventional (looped) cursive was unnecessary, and it was easier to write in cursive italic. Because of this, various new forms of cursive italic appeared, including Getty-Dubay Italic , and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting . In
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2184-698: The middle of the 20th century. In general, there are some common features of uncial script: In later uncial scripts, the letters are sometimes drawn haphazardly; for example, ⟨ll⟩ runs together at the baseline, bows (for example in ⟨b⟩ , ⟨p⟩ , ⟨r⟩ ) do not entirely curve in to touch their stems, and the script is generally not written as cleanly as previously. Due to its extremely widespread use, in Byzantine , African , Italian , French , Spanish , and "insular" ( Irish , Welsh , and English ) centres, there were many slightly different styles in use: There
2236-493: The new parchment and vellum surfaces, as opposed to the angular, multiple-stroke letters, which are more suited for rougher surfaces, such as papyrus . In the oldest examples of uncial, such as the fragment of De bellis macedonicis in the British Library , of the late 1st–early 2nd centuries, all of the letters are disconnected from one another, and word separation is typically not used. Word separation, however,
2288-478: The next minimises lifting the pen from the paper for dipping in ink. Some characters are "broken" versions of their Devanagari counterparts. Many characters are more circular in shape. The long 'ī' (ई) and short 'u' (उ) are used in place of the short 'i' (इ) and long 'ū' (ऊ) respectively. Roman cursive is a form of handwriting (or a script ) used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages . It
2340-507: The promotion of the Balbodh variant of Devanagari as the standard writing system for Marathi, Modi largely fell out of use by the mid-20th century. Since then there have been attempts to revive this script. A distinctive feature of this script is that the head stroke is written before the letters, in order to produce a "ruled page" for writing in lines. It has several characteristics that facilitate writing so that moving from one character to
2392-405: The provenance of a document (see Signature ) was a factor also, as opposed to machine font . Cursive was also favoured because the writing tool was rarely taken off the paper. The term cursive derives from Middle French cursif from Medieval Latin cursivus , which literally means 'running'. This term in turn derives from Latin currere ('to run, hasten'). Although by the 2010s,
2444-559: The use of cursive appeared to be on the decline, as of 2019 it seemed to be coming back into use. In the Bengali cursive script (also known in Bengali as "professional writing" ) the letters are more likely to be more curvy in appearance than in standard Bengali handwriting. Also, the horizontal supporting bar on each letter ( matra ) runs continuously through the entire word, unlike in standard handwriting. This cursive handwriting often used by literature experts differs in appearance from
2496-459: Was called a "fair hand", meaning it looked good, and firms trained all their clerks to write in exactly the same script. Although women's handwriting had noticeably different particulars from men's , the general forms were not prone to rapid change. In the mid-19th century, most children were taught the contemporary cursive; in the United States, this usually occurred in second or third grade (around ages seven to nine). Few simplifications appeared as
2548-541: Was developed. Cursive writing was used in English before the Norman conquest . Anglo-Saxon charters typically include a boundary clause written in Old English in a cursive script. A cursive handwriting style— secretary hand —was widely used for both personal correspondence and official documents in England from early in the 16th century. Cursive handwriting developed into something approximating its current form from
2600-545: Was first used around the 3rd century (if we don't consider its earliest example a transitional variant of the rustic script, as Leonard Boyle did) and remained in use until the end of the 8th century. The early forms of half-uncial were used for pagan authors and Roman legal writing, while in the 6th century the script came to be used in Africa and Europe (but not as often in insular centres) to transcribe Christian texts. Some general forms of half-uncial letters are: Half-uncial
2652-495: Was then further developed and popularized throughout the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries as round hand by John Ayers and William Banson. Today there is no standardised teaching script stipulated in the various national curriculums for schools in the United Kingdom, only that one font style needs to be used consistently throughout the school. In both the cursive and the continuous cursive writing styles, letters are created through joining lines and curve shapes in
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#17327795336872704-400: Was used from approximately the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; "a", "b", "d", and "e" have taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters are proportionate to each other rather than varying wildly in size and placement on a line. The Greek alphabet has had several cursive forms in the course of its development. In antiquity,
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