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A quick and possibly silly question.
Several writing systems, such as Devanagari and its ilk, the Mongolian alphabet, and so forth, attach the letters to a stem that runs the length of the word. However, I am confused as to whether, in writing a word, the stemline is drawn first, to be followed by the bodies of the letters, or if the bodies are drawn first, or if each letter and stem is drawn separately. Does anybody know the answer?

In Devanagari, the 'top bar' is written after the letters themselves have been written -- i.e., it's an added final step in Devanagari which other (related) Indian scripts don't have.

Mongolian (and Uighur, Manchu, etc.) don't actually have a single-stroke 'spine' like that -- the apparent 'backbone' of a word is simply formed as you write each letter.

Thank you.

As far as I can tell, Mongolian is a cursive script based on Arabic turned 90°. It has a vertical line because its letters are all joined together. It's perhaps more obvious than the Arabic one because a) in Arabic some letters don't join to the next and b) it's vertical, and therefore strange.

finlay wrote:As far as I can tell, Mongolian is a cursive script based on Arabic turned 90°.

Nope.

Aramaic >> Sogdian >> Uighur >> Mongolian

kuroda wrote:In Devanagari, the 'top bar' is written after the letters themselves have been written -- i.e., it's an added final step in Devanagari which other (related) Indian scripts don't have.

Minor nitpick, while the order of writing the characters and drawing the line after the word is completed is correct for Devanagari, in the Bangla script often the line is drawn as you go along with each character, which is why you get the funny wavy line in handwritten Bangla (see for example. Often this is done in cursive Devanagari too by older people, though most people of my generation don't (maybe it's influenced by seeing less and less handwritten content, and basing handwriting off of printed text).