Why do some alphabets/written languages place so much emphasis on the way/sequence a letter/character is written?

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I know that at least in written English, there’s a more or less “standardized” way to teach writing the alphabet, and I can understand that idea for individual “letters”, so to speak, but once the alphabet is learned, almost everyone finds or develops their own way of writing each letter or number or punctuation mark through habit or idiosyncrasies.

But why is it that seemingly for languages like Chinese the sequence in which the lines are written/drawn for characters/words is so much more important? Doesn’t it still ultimately mean the same thing regardless of the sequence? Or am I just accustomed to seeing “guides” and videos about how they “should” be written but it isn’t that important?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

All writing systems were developed with the human body used to produce the written form. As a result, they all have their own forms of “cursive” to assist with being able to produce written language relatively quickly when needed.

CJK languages for example (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) all have very stylistic forms of their written languages. Look up “cursive Chinese,” “cursive Japanese,” or “cursive Korean.” You’ll find a large variety of styles where the original form of the letter, symbols, characters, or morphemes are practically unidentifiable in their cursive forms.

Arabic calligraphy is another example of taking the style of writing to elevated forms of art, too.

In general, you can find examples of very good calligraphy if you search for cursive or calligraphy for the language in question.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Also consider how these stroke orders reflect the way they were written historically. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written with the right hand, going downwards, and with the left hand unravelling the scroll. The stroke order was developed to facilitate this specific limitation. The strokes are meant to flow into each other in a way that the writer would not smudge the paper.

While languages like English have more individual differences in writing, our strokes are similar in function. Writing with a pen is easier when the pen (originally a quill, but same applies to modern pens) is pulled down towards the writer, and more difficult to push up the page. Most writers write “I” by going down, not up.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In Chinese, there’s no alphabet. So how do you organize a dictionary? You might think you could go by sound and invent a pseudo alphabetical order, but Chinese dialects have different sounds, even though they use the same characters. 

The answer: organize by stroke order. If you want to be able to find anything in a dictionary, you need to be quite strict in following the stroke order and you need to standardize as well as enforce the standards in education.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I was scratching my head a bit and wondering what you were asking until the second paragraph.

I can’t speak for Asian languages nor Arabic. The Latin alphabet is teaching strokes because that’s just the most efficient way to make the shape of the letter. The strokes aren’t necessarily the same for an individual letter when you change scripts (font/lettertype). For example a cursive lowercase e is started at the beginning of the center horizontal line and then makes a curve all the way around till the end of the tail. In black letter/gothic script you would start at the top of the e, go down left untill the tail, then return to the top and make the bulge. All strokes in black letter are seperate, the pen is lifted from the paper. Cursive is written in one swoop.

The strokes in letters written in the latin alphabet have no meaning beyond form or efficiency. Much is also dictated by the writing equipment. A traditional stub nib isn’t good at being pushed over the paper, you always pull the pen, never push. A brush used for writing has the same “problem”, it cannot be pushed forward. I’m going on a guess here, but I think that might be one of the reasons for the stroke order in Asian languages. For right handed people, pulling from left to right is easier than from right to left.