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.
Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.
> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.
When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.
Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.
A friend of my uncle used to sign his cheques "Mickey mouse"
My understanding is that under English law (probably inherited by the US) anything you intend to act as you signature is legally your signature. So the joke was on him, because his signature was Mickey Mouse.
This goes back to the days where people were illiterate and would sign by writing an X. But that was fine, because they only had to sign a handful of legal documents in their entire life and could remember each one.
For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.
I don't get the punchline. Are you not named that? Did they care that you signed by writing a random person's name, or were you imitating a specific person you knew or so?
The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.
I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.
But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.
I've never had to sign while voting. This seems bizarre. How do people with Parkinson’s vote? Or other motor issues? I have the motor skills of a spastic five-year old, and my signature ("signature") never matches exactly.
i learned kurrent out of interest but also to improve my handwriting. the straight lines and sharp corners are a lot easier to write than the round lines of regular hand writing so i got good results with less effort than with regular handwriting which eventually motivated me to improve my regular hand writing too. i also had access to a collection of old dip pens with various types of nibs allowing me to really duplicate the writing style of the time, if only at primary school level. eventually i adapted my signature too, but unlike you i never got any backslash for that.
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.
AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).
This can't be fully correct, though, at least for my (as-remote-as-it-gets) area. My father was born in '52 and had to learn it in school here. He still writes the small 'z' in Sütterlin, and it looks really nice.
Hmm, I believe you. The article also says "Sütterlin continued to be taught in some German schools until the 1970s but no longer as the primary script.[citation needed]"
Looks similar to the cursive z I learned - I guess in the late 70's/early 80's - in Scotland. It's still in my signature, although that's a right scrawl.
> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?
Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.
Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.
Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.
In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group).
I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...
If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.
I second this. As someone who still learned "Schreibschrift" in school, I have a tiny bit of a head start but a lot of letters changed or at least changed in style drastically but I can reverse-engineer as you described.
I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.
Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.
A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.
I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.
I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.
What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!
That makes a lot of sense, given that in the Kurrent era it was actually considered proper to use a "Romance" (and hence "modern-looking") script even for non-Germanic loanwords in German text, mirroring the Fraktur/Antiqua distinction in print typesetting!
In a way, this could also be compared to the present-day use of katakana for loanwords and hiragana for native text in Japanese (which ironically only crystallised as a universal convention after WWII).
My (German) grandmother used to write me letters in English using this script. I didn't find it too difficult to read, probably because I understood the context (names of other family members, questions about my day-to-day activities, updates on her life in Germany).
I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.
They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.
Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.
I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.
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.
Wasn't it Fraktur in printed materials? I studied physics in the early 2000s and we still learned the convention, but rarely read anything that used it. To me, the incongruity of using an archaic font in a fast-moving science like physics was fun. Probably convenient at the time (early 1900s) because printers routinely had Latin and Fraktur fonts available. Germany was the country of physics around 1900, even the journals were in German! Some of them still have German names to this day (even more so in chemistry), but the contents are all in English.
I can kind of read Fraktur - my motivation was that we had an old (1930s or so) crafts book at home that I wanted to read. I cannot read Kurrent or Sütterlin. Not only do I not know the letters, they all look so damn similar! I would've noticed if these vectors or matrices had been printed in Sütterlin, because I'd have had much more trouble reading them.
I don’t remember what was used in printed materials. Probably Fraktur as you suggest. In high school we used Latin letters with arrows.
At university in the 1990s, they gave us a photocopied sheet with handwritten Sütterlin and Greek letters in the first lecture. The professor wrote the lecture notes onto a blackboard and we copied them by hand. It was definitely Sütterlin. But I believe nowadays people use Latin letters.
I see, Sütterlin makes sense in handwriting. I don't think I've ever seen that used except maybe as an aside in the intro course where we learned the old conventions (among other things).
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.
Maybe they didn't have to write down as many randomly generated passwords yet and so context always acted as a checksum? Like if I write "its a blue sky" you still know what I mean from context, same as with typos/writos
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.
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.
Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.
There's some poetic beauty in the difficulties of understanding the nuances of spoken Danish be matched by the same in reading. :)
Once when interrailing I asked my compartment-mates (compartmates?) for their languages' worst tongue-twisters. And the Danish one was God-awful.
Danish tungebrækkere: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungebr%C3%A6kker Jeg plukker frisk frugt med en brugt frugtplukker.
Why does the c have a breve above it!?
> I landed on Kurrent
This is madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent#/media/File:Deutsche_K...
> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.
When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.
Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.
A friend of my uncle used to sign his cheques "Mickey mouse"
My understanding is that under English law (probably inherited by the US) anything you intend to act as you signature is legally your signature. So the joke was on him, because his signature was Mickey Mouse.
This goes back to the days where people were illiterate and would sign by writing an X. But that was fine, because they only had to sign a handful of legal documents in their entire life and could remember each one.
For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.
I don't get the punchline. Are you not named that? Did they care that you signed by writing a random person's name, or were you imitating a specific person you knew or so?
Ron Paul was a US presidential candidate in 2008, so I guess that's who they were signing as. Especially given their username...
Oh! Right, I had looked at the username to see if it was related but even that didn't make the name click. I must just have never heard it before
The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.
I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.
But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.
I've never had to sign while voting. This seems bizarre. How do people with Parkinson’s vote? Or other motor issues? I have the motor skills of a spastic five-year old, and my signature ("signature") never matches exactly.
i learned kurrent out of interest but also to improve my handwriting. the straight lines and sharp corners are a lot easier to write than the round lines of regular hand writing so i got good results with less effort than with regular handwriting which eventually motivated me to improve my regular hand writing too. i also had access to a collection of old dip pens with various types of nibs allowing me to really duplicate the writing style of the time, if only at primary school level. eventually i adapted my signature too, but unlike you i never got any backslash for that.
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.
AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).
When I went to school, the one I learned was Schulausgangsschrift https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schulausgangsschrift...
To me, the Sütterlin sample on Wikipedia is completely incomprehensible.
This can't be fully correct, though, at least for my (as-remote-as-it-gets) area. My father was born in '52 and had to learn it in school here. He still writes the small 'z' in Sütterlin, and it looks really nice.
Hmm, I believe you. The article also says "Sütterlin continued to be taught in some German schools until the 1970s but no longer as the primary script.[citation needed]"
Looks similar to the cursive z I learned - I guess in the late 70's/early 80's - in Scotland. It's still in my signature, although that's a right scrawl.
> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?
Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.
Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.
Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.
In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group). I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...
If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.
I second this. As someone who still learned "Schreibschrift" in school, I have a tiny bit of a head start but a lot of letters changed or at least changed in style drastically but I can reverse-engineer as you described.
I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.
Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.
A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.
I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.
I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.
What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!
That makes a lot of sense, given that in the Kurrent era it was actually considered proper to use a "Romance" (and hence "modern-looking") script even for non-Germanic loanwords in German text, mirroring the Fraktur/Antiqua distinction in print typesetting!
In a way, this could also be compared to the present-day use of katakana for loanwords and hiragana for native text in Japanese (which ironically only crystallised as a universal convention after WWII).
My (German) grandmother used to write me letters in English using this script. I didn't find it too difficult to read, probably because I understood the context (names of other family members, questions about my day-to-day activities, updates on her life in Germany).
I grew up in Germany and was taught handwriting there, and I get the same feeling as in seeing the relationship, but being entirely unable to read it.
This is what is taught in german schools: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schreibschrift#/media/Datei:De...
Oh wow, I had the exact image you linked photocopied and glued to the first page of my German folder. Has been ages since I saw this, thanks!
Even the lower-case x like that?
I was taught lower case x starts at top left, does the arc to bottom left, then goes to top right, arc to bottom right, all in one stroke.
The upper case X didn't have a horizontal line in my case, otherwise it's all pretty much the same as this 1941 doc.
This is useful in Maths, where that letter can be confused with the multiplication sign.
Probably not, at least in my case it is just some lower left to top right line, then the crossing line starting from the top left
I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.
They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.
Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.
I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.
In the US we used Spencerian Copperplate before the 1930s and then Palmer Cursive after the war. (Palmer was based on an 1800s German Schulschrift)
It's easier than Kurrent[0], but not by a lot.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent
No. I was taught Sütterlin in elementary school, but I couldn't even begin to read the sample on Wikipedia.
I can read about 50% of the words.
I'm in my late 20s, 0 chance of reading anything.
Not at all, no. And I still learned cursive at least.
Not really readable, I can guess some words but it's hit and miss, at most 50% of words I can figure out.
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.
Wasn't it Fraktur in printed materials? I studied physics in the early 2000s and we still learned the convention, but rarely read anything that used it. To me, the incongruity of using an archaic font in a fast-moving science like physics was fun. Probably convenient at the time (early 1900s) because printers routinely had Latin and Fraktur fonts available. Germany was the country of physics around 1900, even the journals were in German! Some of them still have German names to this day (even more so in chemistry), but the contents are all in English.
I can kind of read Fraktur - my motivation was that we had an old (1930s or so) crafts book at home that I wanted to read. I cannot read Kurrent or Sütterlin. Not only do I not know the letters, they all look so damn similar! I would've noticed if these vectors or matrices had been printed in Sütterlin, because I'd have had much more trouble reading them.
I don’t remember what was used in printed materials. Probably Fraktur as you suggest. In high school we used Latin letters with arrows.
At university in the 1990s, they gave us a photocopied sheet with handwritten Sütterlin and Greek letters in the first lecture. The professor wrote the lecture notes onto a blackboard and we copied them by hand. It was definitely Sütterlin. But I believe nowadays people use Latin letters.
I see, Sütterlin makes sense in handwriting. I don't think I've ever seen that used except maybe as an aside in the intro course where we learned the old conventions (among other things).
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.
I write all my secret letters in Sütterlin because nobody can read it, including myself.
It seems like "mm" "nnn" and "cccccc" would be indistinguishable.
Maybe they didn't have to write down as many randomly generated passwords yet and so context always acted as a checksum? Like if I write "its a blue sky" you still know what I mean from context, same as with typos/writos
Whose sky? (jk of course)
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.
This page probably needs to be updated now that wikipedia has a dark mode. I can't see the example letterforms!
The lowercase e and n look extremely similar!
fun fact: the german umlaut dots come from putting a sütterlin "e" on top of the letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut#Orthography_an...
See also perhaps yesterday's "The End of Handwriting":
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939165
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