I know that varies by region, but schoolchildren are generally taught cursive as a faster way to write. It already requires some memorisation with some glyphs being different from block letters. Why not make an additional step and completely replace it with shorthand, making writing an order of magnitude faster?
The argument that I’ve heard put forward about learning cursive is that it improves fine motor control and writing across the board; I’m not sure that the resulting messy combination of two glyph styles is “improved”. Why not teach calligraphy then? Shorthand is at least practical.
This makes sense, but I don’t know shorthand at all. Is it as legible as printing if you know it?
The other argument for learning cursive is A LOT of historical documents have been written in cursive. Not teaching someone cursive means their literacy becomes handicapped.
I guess the same could be said for shorthand.
“Students must learn latin so they can read the bible”
Its in English, not Latin
That’s the Bible?
No, its a historical document that is written in english cursive.
Who were you quoting?
I was quoting religious cultists
for americans yes, it is their holy bible
Id love for you to find an example of a single historical document that is relevant to someone today and hasn’t already been transcribed hundred of times on the internet.
https://www.loc.gov/item/mss351210535/
This is labeled # Frederick Law Olmsted Papers: Speeches and Writings File, 1839-1903; Undated; On religion, fragments
According to wikipedia:
This is why I specified relevant. Just because something was once written down, doesn’t make it worth reading.
That was just the first result after a search. Its going to depend on who is trying to find historical documents, their goal, what they’re researching, who they’re researching, the time period they’re researching, the types of documents they’re researching.
For example, there are a lot of historical documents during the slavery era written by free african americans. The Library of Congress has a lot of it scanned and available as images, but not transcribed into digital text yet.
Choosing here to reply because I agree with you about the fine motor control, and I also agree with @9tr6gyp3 about being able to read historical documents (roll credits).
One argument I’d bring up in the whole cursive/shorthand debate is whether there are any other languages that have glyph sets that have already been described with Unicode that would be just as fast as shorthand? I’d also want to consider the ease of doing OCR on the documents for digitization. I don’t see how shorthand would be good at either of those things.