18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 32

[cahn]

:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

Comments

Kurrent Stuff

[prinzsorgenfrei]

Hi! Sure, I can put a digital version together once I'm done. I'd probably make one for the people from Wust anyway, so it wouldn't be much of a hassle to share it ^^ Don't know when it will be done though.

From what I've seen, learning how to write Kurrent is a solid first step to learning how to read it (worked for me and some of my friends, also looks fancy on greeting cards), so if you have the time for it, that could be a fun project. Most alphabet samples I've seen online were for Kurrent around 1900, but the changes in the 400 years before that weren't too significant, so it's still a good point to start. This one's nice because it also has some ligatures, like the st:



The annoying parts are usually:
1. that people just write the capital letters however they want (see: The B in the Keith transcript, "Oriane", any K ever...)
2. es, ns, rs, vs... that really weird u from the Keith transcript that looked like a swirly S...
3. random Latin script instead of German script (mostly for names and words in other languages) that could be an entirely different word in the same hand's Kurrent (is it an s? is it an h? maybe a t? fuck if I know! Especially annoying if you don't actually know which name the word is supposed to be)

But it's fun. So far I know that Hans Heinrich von Katte had four dozen plates and 16 bowls polished in 1726 and possibly bought a box. And a lot of lemons and mussels.

Re: Kurrent Stuff

[mildred_of_midgard]

Awesome, thanks!

Don't know when it will be done though.

Not to worry, it's not like my writing-system-challenged self is in a particular hurry to learn it! I just realized I had an opportunity here to approach it the way my brain learns things and not the way I would almost certainly be forced to approach it if I tried to formally study paleography.

From what I've seen, learning how to write Kurrent is a solid first step to learning how to read it (worked for me and some of my friends, also looks fancy on greeting cards), so if you have the time for it, that could be a fun project.

See, this is the exact thing that does not work for my brain, not even a little bit, and will guarantee that I never learn it at all. *g* What I need are reams of samples of "problem" (Kurrent) and "solution" (transcription), so that I can unleash my passive pattern recognition skills at it.

Re: Kurrent Stuff

[cahn]

Oh, huh! This (writing not working as a way to learn reading it, and more generally speaking physical reinforcement not working as a way to reinforce other learning) is sort of foreign to me, but I guess it makes sense with your non-physical-world-engaging brain, interesting!

Re: Kurrent Stuff

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yup. :) If I have to engage with the physical world to learn something, I will nope right out of it in 5 minutes or less.

But even worse than that, or maybe as a specific application of that, learning writing systems gives me literal headaches and nausea. That severely limited what languages I could do in my Indo-European PhD (read: I had to stick to the ones with an alphabet).

Now that I have a better idea of what works and doesn't work for my brain, I think I could make more headway on the more difficult writing systems, by not doing it the way the professors assigned. But at the time, I told the head of my program that if I had to read any more Devanagari (which is more complex than an alphabet, and which was required to get your PhD), and in particular if I was responsible for being able to read in it on my Sanskrit qualifying exam, I was quitting the doctoral program and switching to Classics. Fortunately, it wasn't required, so I squeaked through on Sanskrit. :)

more generally speaking physical reinforcement not working as a way to reinforce other learning

Lets just say physics and chemistry labs were a nightmare. ;)

Re: Kurrent Stuff

[cahn]

Heh, this is kind of hilariously annoying for me because it's just enough like the English cursive script I learned as a child that I keep getting thrown -- me: "a, b, okay, those look entirely reasonable! c... umm, maybe okay... d OKAY WTF IS THIS, and why is e a scribble that looks to me extremely like n and u??" I can only guess how I'd feel about the capital letters being basically whatever.

/paleography clearly not being my thing

Anyway, glad it is fun, and thank you! :D