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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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.
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