On Tue, Jan 04, 2000 at 03:47:36PM -0800, Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> If I understand this correctly, I will see a small T in a regular font,
> and "m" if I switch to italics?
Exactly. Should be easily verifiable by looking at almost any Russian
newspaper. Children are taught to write "m" in handwriting and in
primary school you'll get you mark down if you write small
'blockprint' "T".
As a side note: you can still see older people writing underbar under
SHA and SCHA (and, rarely, under I) and overbar over TE (and, rarely,
over PE), and I believe chidren were taught to do this several decades
ago (I recall I saw this in my mother's old schoolbooks).
The practice really makes sense if you consider runs of handwriting
like:
|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| - that should be 10 |/ elememts
In fast handwriting curves of SHA, TE, I, PE &c and, as well,
connections between letters become indistinguishable and writing bars
helps to identify the above as "ÔÉÛÉ" (tishi):
Ô É Û É
___
|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|
- --- -
It also helps a lot for the writer himself to avoid "banana" problem.
When I write this word in this "m"-style, I can't help but break in
the middle and go back counting stems to understand which letter I'm
writing.
> Still, they're visually so completely different that, you hardly can
> call them glyph variants.
They _are_ glyph variants. E.g. I always write 'blockprint' small "T"
in my handwriting (I also underline my SHAs) and my wife always writes
"m".
Another example is, perhaps, small DE which in italic font is almost
always looks similar to U+2202 PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL (that's how I
write it). OTOH, children in school are taught to write it like latin
small "g" (that' how my wife writes it).
SY, Uwe
-- uwe@ptc.spbu.ru | Zu Grunde kommen http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/ | Ist zu Grunde gehen
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