@Bookworm blowin' its way to the HNQ

@verbose Answered by our resident expert on Zephyr.

@Randal'Thor Yup, that would be me. Alas, poor Zephyr; I knew him, Randolphio. 💀

Ha :-D

Someone upvoted the Tagore answer a bare minute after I posted it. They couldn't possibly have read the damn thing before clicking the button.

I read fast :-)

(Two and a half minutes, from the time stamps.)

Out of interest, what does the capitalisation signify in the transliteration of "kaNikaa"?

There are two letter n's in the Sanskrit / Devanagari script. One is a nasal produced by placing the tongue against the alveolar ridge (just like the English "n"). The other, less common and found mainly in words held over from Sanskrit, in a retroflex or flap. Curl the tongue back and place it against the ridge, and/or quickly tap the ridge with the back of the tongue while articulating a nasal. You get the Sanskrit N.

Ah, interesting. I was guessing maybe it's something about the structure of the word, capitalisation indicating a new part of the word or something, rather than "n" and "N" being different letters. I suppose the original script is one that doesn't have distinct "lower-case" and "capital" versions of the letters? (Now I wonder why the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts do, but that might be a question for Linguistics or History.)

In the Devanagari script (Sanskrit/Hindi/Nepali/Bengali), you have न vs ण . In the Bengali script (Bengali/Assamese), it's ন vs ণ . In Gujarati, it's ન vs ણ . They're just different letters (pronounced differently). My Guyanese or Fijian friends don't hear/make the distinction, btw.

Nope, no lower- or uppercase distinction in the Indic scripts afaik

Certainly none in the scripts I do know

Same in the Arabic script (that's also used for Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Sorani, etc.). I wonder how many scripts in the world do have that distinction vs how many don't.

ooh I dunno why I said the Devanagari script was used for Bengali. It's not. I meant Marathi. It's late, 'moff to bed. gn sweet prince

Goodnight!

@Randal'Thor Wikipedia has some information (see particularly the "Bicameral script" and "History" sections), although it's not very detailed.

In an oversimplified nutshell, the Greek and Latin alphabets were originally what we know as uppercase; over time, cursive versions developed for ease of writing, which became what we know as lowercase; but uppercase was still used sometimes for emphasis, including at the beginnings of paragraphs.

@DLosc REALLY? I CAN'T IMAGINE HOW USING UPPERCASE WOULD ADD EMPHASIS

Y'know it's just weird to me how few people write in cursive any more. I had to stop putting comments in cursive on student papers (back when submissions were still hard copy) because some couldn't read it. But it takes s o l o n g to write each letter individually.

It's rare for me to write anything by hand at all... I do when studying sometimes, because it's supposed to help you remember things, but I haven't noticed any significant advantages in information retention when writing things by hand vs. typing them.

I'm just waiting for the day I accidentally re-ask a Lit.SE question I've already asked because I didn't remember writing it.

I still make grocery lists and to-do lists by hand. I take notes by hand during meetings unless I need to distribute the notes later. I find that the clacking of keys on the keyboard can be a distraction in the latter case though.

Of course I have reasonably nice handwriting so I like to keep in practice.

I don't (: My hands have never been very steady in the first place, and computers were ubiquitous enough when I was little that handwriting was never a priority.

@Mithical Jack B Nimble once did that on SFF.

@verbose I learned a variant form of cursive that kept the letter-forms a lot closer to their printed versions, just with lines connecting them. My writing now tends to be a cross between that and scribbled printed letters.

@DLosc oh interesting. Care to share a sample? Pics or it didn't happen, as the kids say

@Mithical what prompted that? The VtC?

There was a VTC?

I've just asked several hundred questions and I don't remember all of them super well, so it's plausible that I could come across something again and re-ask it.

@verbose I think the unsteadiness of my hand is apparent here: i.sstatic.net/KHyNl.jpg

Very much not neat handwriting :P

@verbose I can try, but my flip phone doesn't have a very good camera :)

@DLosc Probably has a better camera than a landline...

True that

Several elements of how I write were borrowed from various sources, now that I think of it. In particular, I added the loops on g and f (and y) because I liked a professor's handwriting in college.

I think @DLosc has the best handwriting among the three just posted :-)

(sorry verbose)

@Randal'Thor It's a good thing I rely on my keyboard more than the pen.

I'm out of drafted questions, though.

You'll have to rely on volunteer questions then.

ba dum tish

Ha!

I guess I should join in the handwriting-sharing craze: i.sstatic.net/8BSzB.jpg

(didn't know what to write so I just described the people I saw)

Positively legible :)

@Randal'Thor I think mine's neater, his more legible

I agree

My writing has gotten noticeably scribblier over the past decade or two.

Mine has gotten less angular and more rounded. The pic was the one I happened to have on my phone. I took a pic recently coz I needed to buy a string (and didn't want to carry around the notebook), but the handwriting itself is from about 15 years ago.

Oh, interesting

with a fountain pen, which I affect on occasion.

Another author casually drops by to answer a question about her work. Three now, iirc. Nalo Hopkinson and Tomasz Jedrowski are the others I recall

Right now I'm practice kanji every night (both writing the kanji, and writing their readings) which means I write far more Japanese than English

There are two languages I can read and type, but cannot write at all: Bengali and Gujarati.

If the notes are meant for me to use later but wouldn't work in a normal text editor (e.g. math lecture notes) then I'll struggle with LaTeX