Conjuncts And Spencerian

[Mickey]

'She who must be obeyed' has a 45 minute commute to and from work. During this time, she has done various things, but her present diversion is learning to write Hindi. (Devanagari) It give her an excuse to use her fountain pens (and an excuse to buy new ones). One of the features of the written language is conjuncts, clusters of letters joined together according to a system a bit more complicated than most if not all Western cursive scripts. (Salman, I imagine, could explain this much better.) In any event, it got me thinking.

 

So what does that have to do with Spencerian? Simply put, I noticed in my own practice that certain pairs or groups of letters present difficulties when written together that they don't seem to present singly, or at least not so glaringly. Try to get the 2 Ls in 'llama' to match. That's hard enough and pretty obvious, but try writing the word 'khan' or worse still 'lakh' (sorry for the Hindi binge). Trying to get the ascenders to harmonize is difficult, or at least it is to me. I wrote an entire page this morning trying to produce a few decent examples of each. (I admit to being hypercritical, especially of my own practice.)

 

So, here's the challenge. Share your bêtes noires with the rest of us. Give us some grist for our practice sessions, a short word or two which present the sort of difficulty I mention above. Here's mine for today: 'the', written with the wedge t. Producing a graceful wedge is difficult enough, but getting the slant consistent may be more difficult. It's surprisingly difficult to get all three letters to visually agree. Being the most commonly used word in English, perfecting your 'the' could pay large dividends.

 

 

[Skagit]

Great idea Mickey...I would love to see this. Some of my bigger questions in Spencerican come from chaining letters together.

 

Rob

[Nanny]

Spencerian is not my thing, but I have a few old Spencrerian samples, one especially beautiful. It looks on close examination that all letters are not joined. I wonder if the idea that all letters should be joined within a word is a convention of the past 100+ years.

 

When I started to practice calligraphy I decided to concentrate on italic, knowing that practice is critical, and that historically, scribes used one method of letter formation in a lifetime.

[caliken]

When I started to practice calligraphy I decided to concentrate on italic, knowing that practice is critical, and that historically, scribes used one method of letter formation in a lifetime.

Attractive writing can give great pleasure to both the writer and the reader.

 

On this forum, there are many who are equally adept at more than one style of writing.

 

I can see no point or virtue in restricting oneself to writing just one specific hand and personally, I enjoy writing in all styles.

 

Ken

Edited October 26, 2013 by caliken

[Mickey]

Spencerian is not my thing, but I have a few old Spencrerian samples, one especially beautiful. It looks on close examination that all letters are not joined.

They are not all joined for the simple reason that the page was moved every few characters to maintain optical and physical alignment. Because the point is already moving when it contacts the page, joins are not always perfect. BTW, thanks for hijacking a thread by the 2nd reply. That may be a record.

[WestLothian]

Back to the original topic - I thought that I was the only one filling pages of practise "the the the the.."

Others that are hard (for me) include lines of "move more", "commendation animates" and "destroyed".

On the second topic, the Universal Penman shows many examples of joined words as well as joined letters.

[D B Holtz]

Practice bigrams plus.txtThis may not be exactly what you were looking for, but when I was relearning how to write in cursive I found a list of the most common two- and three-letter combinations on some cryptanalysis websites. Just like WestLothian, I wrote many lines of each of these, just to try and get the letters and connections properly done. Other words I use for practice are Double Letter Practice.txt posted in "About Engorsser How To Write Rr To Make It More Beautiful" and Alphabet Sentences.txt posted in "Are There Any Lauren Script Writers Here?" (Sorry, I don't know how to link directly to them.)

 

I hope these help.

 

DB

[WestLothian]

The links:

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_id=208999

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_id=192038