Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye? Letter for letter I can see the relation to the handwriting I was taught in Dutch in the 80s, but as a text it looks like sanskrit to me. Obviously learnable, like learning greek or other foreign ciphers. But I would not imagine a neighbouring language written down less than a century ago to seem so foreign.
A few years back I decided to finally learn correct cursive so I was able to sign my name to documents correctly. When I discovered there were multiple types of cursive, I landed on Kurrent (the predecessor of Sütterlin) and now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.
I'm sure there's some sort of point I'm making about the absurdity of a signature being used to verify anything (when the nice old lady volunteering at the polling station makes me sign again because it doesn't quite look like my signature even though I have photo ID and have arrived in person at the correct polling location I want to do a backflip, but I of course don't because I want to be nice to the old lady), but mostly it just makes me smile.
OK time to brag big time. I was not taught Sütterlin in school but I learned it anyway while in 5th grade simply because it was fun. I arranged with my teachers to be allowed to do homework in it and most of them agreed, seeing it as (at least somewhat) educational.
Despite, I have not retained fluency in it. By 8th grade I'd stopped using it and then fell out of practice.
Sütterlin was used to denote vectors and matrices in my linear algebra class at university in Germany in the 1990. We got a cheat sheet with all letters in the first lecture (also included all Greek letters).
I still have the sheet. And it’s so weird to see vectors and matrices denoted with Latin letters. I still use Sütterlin.
Surprisingly, ChatGPT is fairly good at deciphering an image of this handwritten text. I snapped an old postcard from 1930s and it was able to read it.
My grandfather left Germany in 1927 with his mom and stepfather, his father stayed behind. I have a three-page letter written in sütterlin sent in 1948 describing life in Berlin in the aftermath of WWII, it also congratulated my Opa on the birth of his first child (my dad). Thanks to the internet I was able to finally translate in the early 2000s with the help of an online forum. This post reminded me I should frame it as the handwriting is beautiful and the story a reminder of family struggles and hope. Thanks for sharing.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadI'm sure there's some sort of point I'm making about the absurdity of a signature being used to verify anything (when the nice old lady volunteering at the polling station makes me sign again because it doesn't quite look like my signature even though I have photo ID and have arrived in person at the correct polling location I want to do a backflip, but I of course don't because I want to be nice to the old lady), but mostly it just makes me smile.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939165
Despite, I have not retained fluency in it. By 8th grade I'd stopped using it and then fell out of practice.
I still have the sheet. And it’s so weird to see vectors and matrices denoted with Latin letters. I still use Sütterlin.