Why is the “a” on a keyboard different from the lowercase a we write by hand?
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Languages and writing evolve over time.
During that process we found easier ways to write letters, basically, we write in cursive nowadays.
Cursive allows for less pen strokes, so we write faster than if we were to use traditional Roman letters like we do on a computer.
Humans are incredibly good at simplifying a task in minute ways.
I personally feel that the “a” we write in running cursive goes with the flow. But the “a” on the keyboard requires continuity break and hence we find it a tad-bit tedious.
The more complicated one was a product of trying to write a capital A faster. The other was a cursive simpler way of writing that.
If you have a font with a real cursive, you will see that the letters not only slant, but really become like the one you do by hand a *a* e *e* g *g* but I don’t know if that works here.
This requires a little bit of a history lesson.
1200 years ago back in the 8th century there were some very clever monks in france that invented a type of writing called Caroligian minuscule (named so because the ruling dynasty was founded by Carolus Magnus aka Charles the Great aka Charlemagne).
Carolingian minuscule looks like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule#/media/File:Carolineminuscel.jpg) which was a vast improvement over the previously popular writing style (gallo-roman script). Eventually Carolingian minuscule died out and was replaced by Blackletter (if you think “medieval book” this is probably the writing style you’re thinking of). This could have been the end of it.
However, some 500 years later there were a bunch of people who loved the roman era so much (and wanted to be the new romans so much that they named their timeperiod the Renaissance, which means Rebirth). And they looked at carolingian minuscule and thought “That’s so easy to read! And to write! Super advanced and stuff. It must have been invented by the romans!” (it wasn’t, but they thought so).
Being the “romans are great, let’s copy them” type of people that they were they decided to make a similar way of writing. They called that [humanist minuscule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_minuscule#/media/File:Book_of_Hours_Bentivoglio.jpg). Do you recognize that little “a”? Doesn’t it look exactly like our printed “a”? That’s not a coincidence.
Because at the same time we have a guy called Johannes Gutenberg, and he invented the first european printing press (a machine used to print books, so you don’t have to write them all by hand like people had been doing before). To use the printing press you had to make [Movable type](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*6qc8o8MSQzPdkZ3i.jpg), little lead pieces with letters on them that you smeared with ink and then pressed against paper to make words, sentences and entire pages that you could stamp again and again to make lots of identical books.
And the people who made that movable type. They looked at humanist minuscule and said “Yeah. We love that humanist minuscule. So we’re going to make lots of movable type that looks exactly like that and print lots of books with it!”. And so they did, and humanist minuscule became sufficiently influential that in print we still use very similar letters today (because they are reasonably pretty and very easy to tell apart).
For handwriting however the humanist minuscule fell out of favor and we went on to use different types of handwriting that we thought were prettier and/or faster to write.
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