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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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.
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