At 04:12 PM 7/2/99 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Fraktur is practically unknown among the under 40 year old Germans
> (including math graduates)

So those poor students never had much money in their hands -- only coins,
but no bank-notes (bills for Americans) having the Word "Banknote"
in Fraktur conspicuously written on both sides. And they never had the
time  to go to a pub or buy a bottle of beer (of whom many are advertized
with inscriptions in Fraktur). :-)

At 04:12 PM 7/2/99 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> If I see a handwritten fraktur form used by a professor on a blackboard
> and later the printed fraktur version in the word processed exam sheets,
> then I will have great difficulties in recognizing them as being the same
> letter.

Probably, the handwritten form was not Fraktur, which has been printed
since the days of emperor Maximilian and can only be hand-written with
a special pen, but rather "Deutsche Schreibschrift" (German Script;
"Schreibschrift" means handwriting). Indeed, the cursive script style
differs considerably from the printed Fraktur style -- as with any hand-
writing, cursive style (compare U+2118 with U+0050), all the more as
popular variants of Fraktur fonts (such as A. Dürer's) have some fancy
decorations (such as the curl in the U+212D example glyph).

For those interested in Fraktur, I recommend the beautiful (and inter-
esting) book "Fraktur : Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften"
(=Fraktur : Form and History of the angular fonts) by Albert Kapr,
ISBN 3-87439-260-0.

Am 1999-07-02 um 20:33 hat Asmus Freytag geschrieben:
> use of Fraktur was still common in some text books and reference works.
> I still have one of the latter in my posession, last re-printed in 1976.
> In Figure 392 it uses Sütterlin for labeling the unit-vectors u, v and w,
> and in the text referring to these vectors the letters are given in
> Fraktur.

A quick research in our library over lunch revealed that this figure and
text were still unaltered in the 16th edition (of 1976), and the whole
chapter on vector algebra coherently used this notation. In the 19th
edition (of 1979), the whole chaper was rewritten and the figures redrawn,
using small latin letters for the vectors. (I haven't seen the 17th
through 18th editions.)

Given that the average math, or physics, student has bought his/her
Bronstein-Semendjajev (for those who did not recognize the book from
Asmus' hints, the ISBN for the vectors-in-Fraktur versions is 3-87144-
016-7 and for the vectors-in-Latin versions is 3-87144-492-8) at the
age of 21, Markus' magic age line is quite a reasonable estimation
(not considering bank-notes and beer as sources of knowledge, as dis-
cussed above).

> I also remember that as students we had to all dedicate some time to
> get used to all these special alphabets. I.e. we all had to learn the
> Sütterlin letters (a,b,c,d,e,i,n, u,v,x,y,z, but not most of the others)

Just for the record: Sütterlin is a particular style of German Script,
that was developped early in this century for teaching in elementary
school (cf. the book "Neuer Leitfaden für den Schreibunterricht" (=New
Guide for the Teaching of Writing) by Ludwig Sütterlin, Berlin: Verlag
(=Publisher) Albrecht-Dürer-Haus, 1917; reprints 1922 and 1926). Though
"Sütterlin-Schrift" is often used as a synonym for "Deutsche Schreib-
schrift", this is not correct. German script, in general, is much older,
and Sütterlin is just a particular style of this script.

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz