87-405: Cursive (also known as joined-up writing ) 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
174-626: A book named Barnaparichay to standardize Bengali alphabets. While efforts at standardising the alphabet for the Bengali language continue in such notable centres as the Bangla Academy at Dhaka ( Bangladesh ) and the Pôshchimbônggô Bangla Akademi at Kolkata ( West Bengal , India), it is still not quite uniform yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for
261-406: A conjunct together. Some consonants are compressed (and often simplified) when appearing as the first member of a conjunct. Some consonants are abbreviated when appearing in conjuncts and lose part of their basic shape. Some consonants have forms that are used regularly but only within conjuncts. When serving as a vowel mark, উ u, ঊ u, and ঋ ri take on many exceptional forms. These are mainly
348-426: 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,
435-636: 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
522-505: A large part of children's schooling is learning kanji. Moreover, Japan has tried to hold on to handwriting as an art form while not compromising the more modern emphasis on speed and efficiency. In the early 1940s, handwriting was taught twice, once as calligraphy in the art section of school curricula, and then again as a functional skill in the language section. The practical function of penmanship in Japan did not start to be questioned until
609-664: A later invention of the Middle Ages . The Phoenician alphabet also influenced the Hebrew and Aramaic scripts, which follow a vowel-less system. One Hebrew script was only used for religious literature and by a small community of Samaritans up until the sixth century BC. Aramaic was the official script of the Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian empires and 'Square Hebrew' (the script now used in Israel) developed from Aramaic around
696-408: A moment-to-moment visual guidance. Research in individuals with complete peripheral deafferentation with and without vision of their writing hand finds increase of number of pen touches, increase in number of inversions in velocity, decrease of mean stroke frequency and longer writing movement duration. The changes show that cutaneous and proprioceptive feedback play a critical role in updating
783-646: 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
870-656: A reed pen. The first known alphabetical system came from the Phoenicians , who developed a vowel-less system of 22 letters around the eleventh century BC. The Greeks eventually adapted the Phoenician alphabet around the eighth century BC. Adding vowels to the alphabet, dropping some consonants and altering the order, the Ancient Greeks developed a script which included only what we know of as capital Greek letters. The lowercase letters of Classical Greek were
957-456: A sign represents a syllable). Developing around the same time, the Egyptian system of hieroglyphics also began as a pictographic script and evolved into a system of syllabic writing. Two cursive scripts were eventually created, hieratic , shortly after hieroglyphs were invented, and demotic (Egyptian) in the seventh century BC. Scribes wrote these scripts usually on papyrus , with ink on
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#17327907212751044-582: 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
1131-458: A single letter case , which makes it a unicameral script, as opposed to a bicameral one like the Latin script. It is recognisable, as are some other Brahmic scripts , by a distinctive horizontal line known as a śirorekhā ( शिरोरेखा ) running along the tops of the letters that links them together. The Bengali writing system is less blocky, however, and presents a more sinuous and fluid shape than
1218-887: 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
1305-658: A variety of ways. The first made video for correcting messy handwriting especially for people with ADHD and or dysgraphia was "Anyone Can Improve Their Own Handwriting" by learning specialist Jason Mark Alster MSc. By the nineteenth century, attention was increasingly given to developing quality penmanship in Eastern schools. Countries that had a writing system based on logographs and syllabaries placed particular emphasis on form and quality when learning. These countries, such as China and Japan, have pictophonetic characters that are difficult to learn. Chinese children start by learning
1392-464: 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
1479-415: A word are also evenly spaced, but that spacing is much narrower than the spacing between words. Unlike in western scripts ( Latin , Cyrillic , etc.) for which the letter-forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা matra . The presence and absence of this matra can be important. For example, the letter ত tô and
1566-429: A word are connected, sometimes making 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
1653-459: Is called a স্বরবর্ণ swôrôbôrnô "vowel letter". The swôrôbôrnô s represent six of the seven main vowel sounds of Bengali, along with two vowel diphthongs . All of them are used in both Bengali and Assamese languages. The table below shows the vowels present in the modern (since the late nineteenth century) inventory of the Bengali alphabet: Consonant letters are called ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ bænjônbôrnô "consonant letter" in Bengali. The names of
1740-480: 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
1827-478: Is generally joined, but casual cursive 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
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#17327907212751914-424: Is generally joined, but casual cursive 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
2001-419: 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
2088-403: Is grammatically correct. The Bengali script has ten numerical digits (graphemes or symbols indicating the numbers from 0 to 9). Bengali numerals have no horizontal headstroke or মাত্রা "matra". Numbers larger than 9 are written in Bengali using a positional base 10 numeral system (the decimal system). A period or dot is used to denote the decimal separator , which separates the integral and
2175-548: 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
2262-585: Is more stylized than the Greater Seal. Chinese handwriting is considered an art, more so than illuminated manuscripts in Western culture. Calligraphy is widely practiced in China, which employs scripts such as Kaishu (standard), Xingshu (semi-cursive), and Caoshu (cursive). Chinese calligraphy is meant to represent the artistic personality in a way western calligraphy cannot, and therefore penmanship
2349-651: 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
2436-475: Is referred to as " handwriting ". The earliest example of systematic writing is the Sumerian pictographic system found on clay tablets, which eventually developed around 3200 BC into a modified version called cuneiform which was impressed on wet clay with a sharpened reed. This form of writing eventually evolved into an ideographic system (where a sign represents an idea) and then to a syllabic system (where
2523-487: 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
2610-779: Is the alphabet used to write the Bengali language based on the Bengali-Assamese script , and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal . It is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world (used by over 265 million people). It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic . It is used as the official script of the Bengali language in Bangladesh , West Bengal , Tripura , and Barak valley of Assam Until recently, it
2697-410: Is used similarly to italics in alphabetic scripts. Platt Rogers Spencer is known as the "Father of American Penmanship". His writing system was first published in 1848, in his book Spencer and Rice's System of Business and Ladies' Penmanship . The most popular Spencerian manual was The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship , published by his sons in 1866. This " Spencerian Method " Ornamental Style
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2784-462: Is valued higher than in any other nation. Standard Script ( Kaishu ) is main traditional script used today. Japanese writing evolved from Chinese script and Chinese characters, called kanji , or ideograms, were adopted to represent Japanese words and grammar. Kanji were simplified to create two other scripts, called hiragana and katakana . Hiragana is the more widely used script in Japan today, while katakana, meant for formal documents originally,
2871-458: The Devanagari script, which visually has harder edges in its orthography. The Bengali script can be divided into vowels and vowel diacritics , consonants and Conjunct consonants , diacritical and other symbols, digits, and punctuation marks . Vowels and consonants are used as letters and also as diacritical marks. The Bengali script has a total of 11 vowel graphemes , each of which
2958-568: The Marathi language . Ligature 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
3045-399: 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
3132-640: The "New Education in Penmanship" in 1908, called "the greatest work of the kind ever published." Many copybooks were produced in North America at the start of the 20th century, mostly for Business Style penmanship (a simplified form of Ornamental Style). These included those produced by A. N. Palmer , a student of Gaskell, who developed the Palmer Method , as reflected in his Palmer's Guide to Business Writing , published in 1894. Also popular
3219-641: 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
3306-484: 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
3393-499: 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
3480-419: The Bengali script so proper names are unmarked. An apostrophe, known in Bengali as ঊর্ধ্বকমা urdhbôkôma "upper comma", is sometimes used to distinguish between homographs , as in পাটা pata "plank" and পাʼটা pa'ta "the leg". Sometimes, a hyphen is used for the same purpose (as in পা-টা, an alternative of পাʼটা). Bengali text is written and read horizontally, from left to right. The consonant graphemes and
3567-541: The Brahmi-Sanskrit diacritics, phones and punctuation marks present in languages with Sanskrit influence or Brahmi-derived scripts. But now using বিসর্গ bishôrgô for making abbreviations is considered grammatically wrong and now dot is used for making abbreviations (as in কি.মি. for the word কি লো মি টার "kilometer", or ডা. for ডা ক্তার dāktār "doctor" which are respectively similar to "km" and "Dr" in English)
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3654-573: The Greeks in the third century BC, but became popular in Latin manuscripts by the fourth century AD. Roman cursive or informal handwriting started out as a derivative of the capital letters, though the tendency to write quickly and efficiently made the letters less precise. Half-uncials (minuscules) were lowercase letters, which eventually became the national hand of Ireland. Other combinations of half-uncial and cursive handwriting developed throughout Europe, including Visigothic , and Merovingian . At
3741-840: 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 ,
3828-482: 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
3915-820: The United States. Penmanship became part of the curriculum in American schools by the early 1900s, rather than just reserved for specialty schools teaching adults penmanship as a professional skill. Several different penmanship methods have been developed and published, including Spencerian, Getty-Dubay, Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting, Icelandic (Italic), Zaner-Bloser, and D’Nealian methods among others used in American education. Writing systems developed in East Asia include Chinese and Japanese writing systems. Chinese characters represent whole morphemes rather than individual sounds, and consequently are visually far more complex than European scripts; in some cases their pictographic origins are still visible. The earliest form of Chinese
4002-429: The components, the following descriptions are concerned only with the construction of the conjunct, and not the resulting pronunciation. (Some graphemes may appear in a form other than the mentioned form due to the font used) Some consonants fuse in such a way that one stroke of the first consonant also serves as a stroke of the next. Some consonants are written closer to one another simply to indicate that they are in
4089-448: The derived Japanese kanji characters which are usually well separated by the writer. Penmanship Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument . Today, this is most commonly done with a pen , or pencil , but throughout history has included many different implements . The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called " hands " while an individual's style of penmanship
4176-488: The dot above the i was added in order to differentiate it from the similar pen strokes of the n , m , and u . Also, the letter u was created as separate from the v , which had previously been used for both sounds. Part of the reason for such compact handwriting was to save space, since parchment was expensive. Gothic script, being the writing style of scribes in Germany when Gutenberg invented movable type, became
4263-418: The end of the eighth century, Charlemagne decreed that all writings in his empire were to be written in a standard handwriting, which came to be known as Carolingian minuscule . Alcuin of York was commissioned by Charlemagne to create this new handwriting, which he did in collaboration with other scribes and based on the tradition of other Roman handwriting. Carolingian minuscule was used to produce many of
4350-405: The end of the twentieth century; while typewriters proved more efficient than penmanship in the modern West, these technologies had a hard time transferring to Japan, since the thousands of characters involved in the language made typing unfeasible. Handwriting requires the motor coordination of multiple joints in the hand , wrist , elbow , and shoulder to form letters and to arrange them on
4437-402: The first consonant in the conjunct is shown above and/or to the left of the following consonants. Many consonants appear in an abbreviated or compressed form when serving as part of a conjunct. Others simply take exceptional forms in conjuncts, bearing little or no resemblance to the base character. Often, consonant conjuncts are not actually pronounced as would be implied by the pronunciation of
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#17327907212754524-511: 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
4611-413: The fractional parts of a decimal number. When writing large numbers with many digits, commas are used as delimiters to group digits, indicating the thousand (হাজার hazar ), the hundred thousand or lakh (লাখ lakh or লক্ষ lôkkhô ), and the ten million or hundred lakh or crore (কোটি koti ) units. In other words, leftwards from the decimal separator, the first grouping consists of three digits, and
4698-482: The full form of vowel graphemes fit into an imaginary rectangle of uniform size (uniform width and height). The size of a consonant conjunct, regardless of its complexity, is deliberately maintained the same as that of a single consonant grapheme, so that diacritic vowel forms can be attached to it without any distortion. In a typical Bengali text, orthographic words, words as they are written, can be seen as being separated from each other by an even spacing. Graphemes within
4785-473: The government introduced a Romanized version of Chinese script, called Pinyin . However, by the 1960s, people rebelled against the infringement upon traditional Chinese by foreign influences. This writing reform did not help illiteracy among peasants. Japanese also has simplified the Chinese characters it uses into scripts called kana. However kanji are still used in preference over kana in many contexts, and
4872-527: The group of Brahmic scripts for romanisation in which the true phonetic value of Bengali is never represented. Some of them are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration or "IAST system", "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards), and the extension of IAST intended for non-Sanskrit languages of the Indian region called
4959-602: 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
5046-522: The individual components. For example, adding ল lô underneath শ shô in Bengali creates the conjunct শ্ল , which is not pronounced shlô but slô in Bengali. Many conjuncts represent Sanskrit sounds that were lost centuries before modern Bengali was ever spoken as in জ্ঞ . It is a combination of জ ǰô and ঞ ñô but it is not pronounced "ǰñô" or "jnô". Instead, it is pronounced ggô in modern Bengali. Thus, as conjuncts often represent (combinations of) sounds that cannot be easily understood from
5133-457: 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,
5220-420: The invention of copperplate engraving. Engraving could better produce the flourishes in handwritten script, which helped penmanship masters to produce beautiful examples for students. Some of these early penmanship manuals included those of Edward Cocker , John Seddon , and John Ayer. By the eighteenth century, schools were established to teach penmanship techniques from master penmen, especially in England and
5307-520: 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,
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#17327907212755394-493: The letters are typically just the consonant sound plus the inherent vowel অ ô . Since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters' names look identical to the letter itself (the name of the letter ঘ is itself ghô , not gh ). Clusters of up to four consonants can be orthographically represented as a typographic ligature called a consonant conjunct ( Bengali : যুক্তাক্ষর/যুক্তবর্ণ juktakkhôr / juktôbôrnô or more specifically যুক্তব্যঞ্জন ). Typically,
5481-524: The majority of handwriting textbook sales in the US, A Beka, Schaffer, Peterson, Loops and Groups, McDougal, Steck Vaughn, and many others. Italic Styles include Getty-Dubay Italic (slightly slanted), Eager, Portland, Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting , Queensland, etc. Other copybook styles that are unique and do not fall into any previous categories are Smithhand, Handwriting without Tears, Ausgangsschrift, Bob Jones, etc. These may differ greatly from each other in
5568-539: The manuscripts from monasteries until the eleventh century and most lower-case letters of today's European scripts derive from it. Gothic or black-letter script, evolved from Carolingian, became the dominant handwriting from the twelfth century until the Italian Renaissance (1400–1600 AD). This script was not as clear as the Carolingian, but instead was narrower, darker, and denser. Because of this,
5655-519: 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
5742-558: The model for the first typeface. Another variation of Carolingian minuscule was created by the Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, called by them littera antiqua and now called humanist minuscule . This was a combination of Roman capitals and the rounded version of Carolingian minuscule. A cursive form eventually developed, and it became increasingly slanted due to the quickness with which it could be written. This manuscript handwriting, called cursive humanistic , became known as
5829-423: The most frequent in Bengali texts, shown with its percentage of appearance in the adjacent table. In the script, clusters of consonants are represented by different and sometimes quite irregular forms; thus, learning to read is complicated by the sheer size of the full set of letters and letter combinations, numbering about 350. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar introduced punctuation marks in Bengali language and wrote
5916-406: The most fundamental characters first and building to the more esoteric ones. Often, children trace the different strokes in the air with the teacher and eventually start writing them on paper. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there have been more efforts to simplify these systems and standardize handwriting. For example, in China in 1955, in order to respond to illiteracy among people,
6003-661: The motor memories and internal models that underlie handwriting. In contrast, sight provides only a secondary role in adjusting motor commands. Types of writing Studies of writing and penmanship Penmanship-related professions Other penmanship-related topics Bengali alphabet Lores Genres Institutions Awards Folk genres Devotional Classical genres Modern genres People Instruments Dance Theater Organizations People The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet ( Bengali : বাংলা বর্ণমালা , romanized : Bangla bôrṇômala , Meitei : বেঙ্গলি ময়েক , romanized: Bengali mayek )
6090-418: 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
6177-415: The numeral ৩ "3" are distinguishable only by the presence or absence of the matra , as is the case between the consonant cluster ত্র trô and the independent vowel এ e . The letter-forms also employ the concepts of letter-width and letter-height (the vertical space between the visible matra and an invisible baseline). According to Bengali linguist Munier Chowdhury , there are about nine graphemes that are
6264-404: The page. Holding the pen and guiding it across paper depends mostly upon sensory information from skin, joints and muscles of the hand and this adjusts movement to changes in the friction between pen and paper. With practice and familiarity, handwriting becomes highly automated using motor programs stored in motor memory . Compared to other complex motor skills handwriting is far less dependent on
6351-506: 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
6438-403: 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,
6525-486: The same sounds. Romanization of Bengali is the representation of the Bengali language in the Latin script . There are various ways of Romanization systems of Bengali, created in recent years but failed to represent the true Bengali phonetic sound. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, they have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese or Sanskrit. The Bengali alphabet has often been included with
6612-441: The subsequent groupings always consist of two digits. For example, the English number 17,557,345 will be written in traditional Bengali as ১,৭৫,৫৭,৩৪৫. Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke দাড়ি dari (।), the Bengali equivalent of a full stop, have been adopted from western scripts and their usage is similar: Commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, etc. are the same as in English. Capital letters are absent in
6699-828: The third century AD. The Romans in Southern Italy eventually adopted the Greek alphabet as modified by the Etruscans to develop Latin writing. Like the Greeks, the Romans employed stone, metal, clay, and papyrus as writing surfaces. Handwriting styles which were used to produce manuscripts included square capitals , rustic capitals , uncials, and half-uncials . Square capitals were employed for more-formal texts based on stone inscriptional letters, while rustic capitals freer, compressed, and efficient. Uncials were rounded capitals ( majuscules ) that originally were developed by
6786-539: The typeface Italic used throughout Europe. Copperplate engraving influenced handwriting as it allowed penmanship copybooks to be more widely printed. Copybooks first appeared in Italy around the sixteenth century; the earliest writing manuals were published by Sigismondo Fanti and Ludovico degli Arrighi. Other manuals were produced by Dutch and French writing masters later in the century, including Pierre Hamon. However, copybooks only became commonplace in England with
6873-500: 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
6960-656: Was Zaner-Bloser Method , introduced by Charles Paxton Zaner (15 February 1864 – 1 December 1918) and Elmer Ward Bloser (6 November 1865 – 1929) of the Zanerian Business College . The A. N. Palmer Company folded in the early 1980s. Modern Styles include more than 200 published textbook curricula including: D'Nealian Method (a derivative of the Palmer Method which uses a slanted, serifed manuscript form followed by an entirely joined and looped cursive), Modern Zaner-Bloser which accounts for
7047-458: 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
7134-541: 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
7221-467: Was taught in American schools until the mid-1920s, and has seen a resurgence in recent years through charter schools and home schooling using revised Spencerian books and methods produced by former IAMPETH president Michael Sull (born 1946). George A. Gaskell (1845–1886), a student of Spencer, authored two popular books on penmanship, Gaskell's Complete Compendium of Elegant Writing and The Penman's Hand-Book (1883). Louis Henry Hausam published
7308-543: Was the usual script for the Meitei language in Manipur , but is being replaced by Meitei mayek . two of the official languages of India . From a classificatory point of view , the Bengali writing system is an abugida , i.e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters, but as diacritics modifying the vowel inherent in the base letter they are added to. It is written from left to right and uses
7395-493: 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
7482-400: 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,
7569-432: Was written on bones and shells (called Jiaguwen ) in the fourteenth century BC. Other writing surfaces used during this time included bronze, stone, jade, pottery, and clay, which became more popular after the twelfth century BC. Greater Seal script ( Dazhuan ) flourished during 1100 BC and 700 BC and appeared mainly in bronze vessels. Lesser Seal script ( Xiaozhuan ) is the precursor of modern complex Chinese script, which
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