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by LorenPechtel
1376 days ago
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Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off. I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore. For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand. |
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The few people alive today who actively still use cursive to write are just as equally capable of handwriting in a block or printed format, it's not a language or even a dialect.
And nothing of import today is written in cursive. (Not books, or literature, or legal texts, or contracts, nothing)