[demetrius]

I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.

Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.

[ubermonkey]

>I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell. Is my impression here based on (a) an opinion of my Russian prof expressed as a universal rule or (b) a thing that's universal in Russian specifically, but not Belarusian Cyrillic or other similar contexts, or... something else?

I'm inferring from your post that you are a native user of Cyrillic who has also learned English. I'm the reverse (well, at least I took Russian in college; I was never fluent then and remember almost nothing now). Something interesting happened to my cohort of Russian learners back then, and I wonder if it's common for folks going the other way.

After we got comfortable with writing Russian in cursive, we found that Cyrillic letters worked their way into our English script. Often, we wouldn't even notice, even when reviewing our notes later. I discovered I'd done this when I loaned some political science notes to a friend, and he couldn't read them because I'd unconsciously mixed Cyrillic and English script. I could read them fine, and so could my Russian-class friends.

We mentioned this to our Russian prof, and he laughed and said it happened to people every year, but he could never figure out who would be prone to it. Sometimes it was top students; sometimes it was people who were struggling.

(It was in this era that I ended up pretty much abandoning cursive, because Cyrillic never crept into my printed handwriting. 35 years later, my cursive is abysmal.)

Did you end up mixing script in your native handwriting inadvertently?

[cyberax]

> Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell.

It's entirely optional. In practice, there are very few words where т/ш pairs are needed for disambiguation.

> Did you end up mixing script in your native handwriting inadvertently?

Not really, but that's mostly because I have a somewhat personal style of English cursive, cobbled together from German and English hands.

[pillmillipedes]

not op, but from my experience overlined ts are a thing from a bygone era I'm afraid. my parents sometimes do it, but I don't know anybody under 30 who would write it this way. on the other hand I do sometimes see it written like a print т.

what you said about mixing up cursives is really interesting! I think the only case where I mix up mine is when writing a p instead of an р (the russian version typically doesn't have a loop).

[usrnm]

> I always underline ш and write a line over т

Interesting. I think this style completely died out in Russia, I wasn't taught it and never really seen it outside of some old letters and documents. Interesting to hear it survived in Belarus

[demetrius]

Our Belarusian teacher actually ш/т wrote it like that, I got it from her. It’s not very common in Belarus, either.

I think the real strongholds of this style are Serbia and [North] Macedonia. They even underline и and write a line over п (they can do this since they use ј instead of й).

[roman-kashitsyn]

> I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

I used to do it as well! But I gave up on it for the same reasons I described in the article: impaired working memory.

> лишили лилии

That’s a tough one, but I think it’s possible to make it legible with careful choice of spacing to indicate the groups: the distance between the strokes within a letter should be noticeably smaller than the distance between letters.

> I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.

I also like this variant of ∂, though I eventually switched to the version with a descender. It doesn’t annoy me because it introduces only a short pen lift.