Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help

Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by MarkusWandel on Saturday January 18, 2025 @12:13PM (#42749748)

Curious, how hard is the sample in the article meant to be? I grew up (in the 1970s) in a world in which cursive still ruled. But the variant that we were taught in school was already considerably evolved from the one used by my grandparents, and those were modern compared to the archaic German script ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin ) so I've never thought of myself as good at reading cursive. And of course haven't written (or read) much of it in the decades since.

It took about one minute to decipher the first sentence in the sample. Is that considered good these days?

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by t1amat on Saturday January 18, 2025 @12:19PM (#42749789)

For me, the first sentence was almost immediately readable, I just had to slow down a bit to decipher the name

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by ggddv on Saturday January 18, 2025 @12:20PM (#42749792)

I’ve found much of the “reading” of cursive of my teachers was just basically snobbery. If it’s illegible but curly, well I just read it wrong! Illegible but straight, you makes it wrong!

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by TheRealPomax on Saturday January 18, 2025 @12:36PM (#42749908)

They're not "meant to be hard", they're just normal texts. The question is literally "can you read this?" because if you can: "Cool! Want to help transcribe it because the constraining factor when it comes to digitizing cursive is literally how many humans we can get to help out".

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by cvoss on Saturday January 18, 2025 @01:03PM (#42750086)

Someone with practice at reading old cursive would likely be able to read a sample such as this one at least at a pace suitable for reading aloud. An expert, of course, could do it as fast as if it were their "native" script.

Here is an example of a non-expert compared to an expert reading aloud [0].

I learned cursive in school in the early 2000s, but I could never read my grandmother's handwriting. Whenever she mailed me a card, I would have to have my mom read it to me.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRhDClIs8XE&t=165

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by beala on Saturday January 18, 2025 @08:31PM (#42752855)

I learned cursive in school (born in the 80s), and the first sample was indecipherable.

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