Re: Feminine handwriting


Ar an dara lá déag de mí Lúnasa, scríobh juuitchan@xxxxxxxxxxx:

> I do not know if this is the right place to ask this, but I don't know
> of any better one.
>
> Many women seem to prefer to write with large, loopy, sometimes barely
> legible letters, and their Arabic numerals are sometimes a joke. A
> feminine "2" quite often looks more like a mirror "6" than like
> anything else.

I’m not a woman, and I wrote like this until the amount I wrote with a pen
became a tiny fraction of the amount I typed. (Now, my handwriting is spiky
and barely legible.) Like most gender differences not directly related to
reproduction, I suspect it may hold for a majority, but it isn’t predictive
in any useful way.

> I wonder why so many women seem to prefer loopy letters with a
> disproportionately large x-height.
>
> Let's face it: our alphabet was created pretty much only by men, now
> was it? I wonder how many nuns in medieval times worked as scribes.
>
> What would a women's script look like? I have heard of Nu Shu, so I
> should probably ask: what would a women's alphabet or syllabary look
> like? Would the digits that go with it be legible?

Murasaki Shikibu wrote in a script that, at the time she was writing, was
viewed as something for women only; since her writings are among the early
high points of Japanese literature, it may be reasonable that modern
Japanese kana reflects best a time when it was used mostly by women, but I
don’t know, and would welcome confirmation or dismissal from the more
informed.

Cf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murasaki_Shikibu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana

--
Russian has no phoneme that corresponds directly to Germanic /h/. As a
result, for a not-insignificant number of people, the Second World War
involved the Soviet Union defeating Адольф Гитлер, “Adolf Gitler.”
.

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