People be writing words with the letters all connected in cursive so the quill didn’t have to lift up or whatever.

How come they didn’t do that with the digits in numbers?

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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    5 hours ago

    Uppercase letters in succession don’t work in cursive. And almost nobody uses lowercase numbers, even back then.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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      5 hours ago

      Finally an answer. Thank you.

      Edit: wait a second… If lowercase numbers did connect, and were once used, why not any more?

      I can’t find any results for “connecting cursive numbers” or “joining cursive numbers”.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    6 hours ago

    Traditionally numbers in text should be written out fully, so “three hundred and twenty seven” instead of “327”

    Also western Arabic numerals are relatively new to English, before we used Roman numerals, which are all upper case.

    • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      In typesetting, numbers ten and under are always spelled out, and also numbers at the start of a sentence of any size. Numbers one, through ninety-nine are hyphenated if spelled out, ninety-nine percent of typesetters agree. Also, the “and” is frowned upon. It should be “three hundred and twenty-seven”, if quoting, if that is what was said, but three hundred twenty-seven otherwise.

      However, numerals in text is fine, outside of the limitations above, and there are lowercase numerals in many classic typefaces that are less jarring to the eye in body type than the uppercase numerals.

      Consider the number, 1,234,567. Spelled out, it’s one million two hundred thirty-four thousand five hundred sixty-seven. That’s cumbersome. That would almost always be written with numerals, and not spelled out. And, a sentence including it should be written to keep it from the beginning.

      (Yes, children, I said sixty-seven, please try to contain yourselves.)

      • Eddyzh@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        In a legal setting even those long numbers are still spelled out in contracts in many jurisdictions.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          … You apparently haven’t been around the kids who push this annoying meme? They absolutely would count “sixty seven” as “six seven” without a split second of thought.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
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        6 hours ago

        but three hundred twenty-seven otherwise

        Depends on the dialect. That “and” is a requirement in British English.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        It’s not hard rules, though. There’s a myriad of publishing styles. Each define different rules and guidelines to when and where numbers are spelled out. Hyphen was dropped from several guides, for example. The and has also been optional for certain publishing houses for a while, but in England it is still mandatory. Academic and literary will differ in how they enforce this guides and exactly what they are. Language is relative, changing and fluid, and this was all different mere 30 years ago. It moves with the expectations of the audience.

        Also, it is six seven. Respect the memes guidelines.

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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        5 hours ago

        The “and” is necessary in British English at least (saying that the US constitution uses it)

        (In older forms it would be three hundred and seven and twenty)

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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        6 hours ago

        I don’t know how universal it was, but in old documents it’s common to see dates written out fully in the form of “on the thirty-first day of January in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-six”

  • CallMeAl (Not AI)@piefed.zip
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    7 hours ago

    First off, only a subset of cursive systems connect all letters. These are called Continuous Cursive. Second, many cursive writing systems do include numbers.

  • GreyShuck@feddit.uk
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    7 hours ago

    I’d imagine that whereas you can guess at confusing cursive letters in words from the others around them, you can’t do that with digits.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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      6 hours ago

      Me. I couldn’t find any examples when I searched.

      I thought I remembered cursive numbers too.

          • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Just Google image cursive numbers

            Not all of them are dramatically stylish but neither are all letters.

            a cursive e can look mostly like a regular e too depending on the style

            • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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              5 hours ago

              They are not connected.

              Someone elsewhere in the thread wrote that numbers are considered capital letters in cursive and capital letters don’t connect. So I guess that’s why.

              • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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                4 hours ago

                Yeah I think it’s a clarity thing. Numbers are often going to be the most important parts of the document (price, date, identification) and they need to be clear and differentiable from the other text.

                Also older cursive was much more flamboyant than what we learned a few decades ago. Only calligraphic numbers will still look fancy, cursive writing will just slant the number and also you learn to write them perfectly consistently

                Modern cursive is almost entirely just normal letters modified to have connectors (and being slanted) but there are a few weird letters like r, s, f, z which wouldn’t be connectable written normally.

                So we’ve definitely been shifting to everything looking standardized anyway.

                • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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                  4 hours ago

                  I’ve been thinking about it a bit and I think it would be pretty easy to connect multiple zeros at the top, and maybe a few other numbers, but that explanation makes sense as for why numbers were not connected usually.