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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
People do connect multiple zeros at the top
The real thing with zero is you’re supposed to use a slash across it so it’s impossible to mistake for a o or O
Edit: not a real slash but a diagonal line like this (maybe it is a slash but when I look it up I get this symbol instead Ø)