Sometimes-Crossed Letters

[Bob Johnson]

My handwriting has the following features:
[...]
often confused.

Are you a doctor?

[Declan]

Greek reminds me of some mathematical symbols, I've been having some problems when partial derivatives, and vector rhos in my handwriting recently, and having lots of unit vectors, I've lots of things with ^ above them and ~ below them. I think I've it pretty much sorted now, drawing the delta for partial derivative from the top and finishing with the circle, and doing the same symbol upside-down but drawn in the opposite direction got them to fit on the lines correctly. I've been considering just dropping ~ from under unit vectors when I have ^ above them, but I'm not sure yet.

[jal]

I started crossing my z's (how to write the plural of "z"?) after a teacher couldn't reach my answer to a question because I wrote "20 x zo groot" which he read as "20 x 20 groot", some time when I was 14 or so. Incidently I later learned that a crossed z in Polish is a substitute for z-with-dot-above. Writing a 1 with an upstroke is being taught in schools here, but not with the rediculous upstrokes e.g. the French have. I'm not sure about crossing the 7, which I also do (usually also connecting the bottom of the downstroke to the left of the crossing). The lower case q I write with a short diagonal upstroke attached to the bottom of the downstroke. It is a very uncommon letter in Dutch though.


JAL

[Qwynegold]

How do you people write your 4s btw? Like 4, or with the top part unconnected? I used to write 4 when I was little, but now I do it unconnected.

[Jipí]

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
2 · 2 = 4   3 · 7 = 21
Ich hätte gerne 2× Zucker
 zum Kaffee.
Je ne sais pas ce que je
 pourrais écrire.

[Bob Johnson]

gerne

Your handwriting has keming problems.

[finlay]

z's (how to write the plural of "z"?)

that's the usually-accepted form, although the most prescriptive will posit things like "z"s, which looks stupid. "Zs" is the form for the capital version.

[Chuma]

In Swedish we tend to use colons - z:s. In case you were wondering.

X is crossed.

Extra-crossed, then.
Actually the more I think about this one, the more I suspect it was a dream.

I've seen those too, in some fonts. I think that's just for esthetic reasons, tho.

[Ser]

Yes, I have a scanner, but I can't be arsed to use it. So:



A) is the common way to write it in Europe and Latin America. Including San Salvador. B) is how the French do it (what Io referred to as almost looking like <A>s).

C) is how you cross <X> and <x>. I have rarely ever seen this though.

D) is how I write <u>, E), <v>, and F) the labiodental approximant. The <v> is pointed, the labiodental approximant is very curvy.

For those who use cursive or at least ever used cursive, how do/did you write <r>? Both G) and H) are common in San Salvador, I used G) myself.

Finally, my numbers. Yes, I'm actually arsed to do the horizontal line in every <1>, and to use old-fashioned differences in height (0-2 are like an o, unless it's absolutely necessary to distinguish it from an <o>, then it's a tall ring: <0>; 3-5, 7 and 9 are like q; 6 and 8 are like d).

[Nesescosac]

B) is how the French do it (what Io referred to as almost looking like <A>s).

It's not just the French - I've seen it in Italy too.

[TaylorS]

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
2 · 2 = 4   3 · 7 = 21
Ich hätte gerne 2× Zucker
 zum Kaffee.
Je ne sais pas ce que je
 pourrais écrire.

That's how you Frenchies write "1"? LMAO!!!

[TaylorS]

Here is the closest approximation of my numbers and letters I can do on Paint:

New Bitmap Image (3).gif (10.01 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

[Ser]

Yeah, most people here write just like that^, too. Including that <q> with a curve towards the right. (Since I do my <q> crossed, they tend to interpret it as a <g>, much to my amusement.)

That's how you Frenchies write "1"? LMAO!!!

Guitarplayer is German... so it may be more extended than that. I've also seen some Frenchies doing the upwards stroke longer the downwards one, making their <1> look a lot like an <A>, quite:

[Astraios]

I do 1s as a single downstroke in strings of numbers, but when it's by itself then I put on an upstroke at the beginning, the same as Guitarplayer. And my r's look like Serafín's B) version of 1.

[finlay]

done in paint

[Io]

[Io]

As for Hellenic letters we had a thread fairly recently http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38539

By the way, my handwriting is atrocious mainly because I write in a weird neurotic way, hard to explain, it's just really difficult to control my hand, sometimes it comes out nicely without much effort.

[daan]

That's how you Frenchies write "1"? LMAO!!!

Guitarplayer is German... so it may be more extended than that. I've also seen some Frenchies doing the upwards stroke longer the downwards one, making their <1> look a lot like an <A>, quite:

I can confirm this for Germany. Writing the 1 with such a long hook, up to the point that it almost looks like an A, is quite usual there.

[MisterBernie]

Voilà, crappy photo of crappy handwriting (yeah, no scanner).



So, as you can see, I don't have a lambda-one.

[Skomakar'n]

I don't know, but I know that Swedish crosses the number 7() to distinguish it from number 1 ()

Can't be a Swedish thing, can it? I know lots of people who don't cross their sevens. I do it, though. I don't see how ‹1› and ‹7› (both without being crossed) could be mixed up except when written by a child just starting to learn how to write. I do put a perfectly horizontal dash below my ‹1›, though.

I cross quite a lot of letters, actually. Not only for distinction, but also for decoration. I didn't write by hand very often until fairly recently (not because of difficulties, but because I'm young enough to have used computers a lot in school and at home), so I've always liked to make it as fun as possible when doing it, which, for me, has meant that I've developed a lot of sexy ascenders and other unnecessary, but pretty, stuff in my handwriting. I love to end the final letter of a line with some very extended stroke, letting the tip of the pencil lick the surface of whatever I'm writing on!

I'll list the letters and numbers I cross through below. Capital letters mean that I cross through their capital forms, and the same goes for the small ones.

‹G I J Q q Z z 7 0›

‹0› gets a diagonal dash, of course. I don't cross ‹g›, but I do write it in the style with two circles, and I also have a two-stroke "ascender" on top of it. ‹z› gets a small line above, as well as a tail. It's fairly similar to ‹え›, but with that top dash through it rather than above it. I put excessive ascenders and serifs on most of my letters.

@Io:
'The quick brown f9x?'

You usually write small what like that?

My non-capital ‹e› is like your capital one. That is, the middle and top lines don't intersect. My capital ‹E› is a mirrored ‹3›.

I guess I could add that I use both ‹ſ› and ‹s› (although ‹ſ› often gets a bottom curl, making it look more like ‹ʃ›). I only use ‹s› word-finally and right after a ‹ſ›. Not sure how I would handle an Icelandic word like ‹eldhússskápur› (if that's a proper word).

How do you people write your 4s btw? Like 4, or with the top part unconnected? I used to write 4 when I was little, but now I do it unconnected.

Connected. I might have written it unconnected when I just started learning how to write, but I'm not sure.

[Io]

>You usually write small what like that?

Aye, eye, i.

My «o» in «fox» doesn't look like a «9», if you look at «brown» and «over» you'll see my «o» is a bit like that as well.

[Skomakar'n]

>You usually write small what like that?

Aye, eye, i.

Ah! Yeah, I guess I could add that I don't write any dot above any of ‹i j› when writing in a language that doesn't distinguish their absence and presence, like Turkish (and I don't know Turkish, so far).

My «o» in «fox» doesn't look like a «9», if you look at «brown» and «over» you'll see my «o» is a bit like that as well.

I was just teasing you. e;

–

EDIT:
Here's some Hungarian I wrote the other day, for a look at my Latin handwriting:



It's a little sloppy in this case, since I don't have any lines, making it all a bit wavy and uneven, but yeah. As you can see, my ‹d› looks somewhat like like ‹ð› without the dash through it, or like ‹δ›, but without the hard edge up there. Kind of like ‹∂›? Thus the only difference between my ‹d› and ‹ð›/‹đ› is the dash, which I like, since it looks a lot more consistent (and this style for ‹d› is much prettier to me anyway).

I also have a second style of writing where I only use capital letters (but making the 'capitals' bigger in size), for when I have to write down stuff very quickly (or simply make it a little more readable to others).

[Declan]

Might as well try my scanner!
For German, Irish and French they're a quotations from songs I like, my nu and upsilon didn't really come out properly. I normally use the first r, I occasionally (and more in the past), used the other r. T and F have a few variations. The heights of my letters seemed to go more askew the more I wrote, it's normally the opposite. But, d, p, t are supposed to be lower than all other ascenders, but bigger than r.

[Qwynegold]

I don't see any G or Q. How the fuck do you cross those?

[Ulrike Meinhof]

EDIT:
Here's some Hungarian I wrote the other day, for a look at my Latin handwriting:

That's Tengwar.