Thread: Greetings from Wyoming!

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

I write stuff in Russian script (л м и ш get scary sometimes, lol), and I memorized all the keys so I can type Russian on an English keyboard (the green letters on my diagram).

When I took Russian waaay back in college, they made us write in cursive Cyrillic all the time, and this is absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if you rarely use cursive longhead when writing in English. I just wish I had learned Cyrillic touch-typing at the same early stage! I totally recommend getting in some practice with both cursive and touch-typing early in your Russian studies.

P.S. Just for fun, did you know that the Я actually started out as a ligature of Iota + Alpha, to represent the vowel combination "ia"? One of the historical intermediate forms looked kind of like a very, very "manly" letter A, if you get my drift, with the Iota hanging down between the two legs of the Alpha:
Ѧ

That's how it would've been chiseled into wood or stone. But with brush and ink, it was written like this:



If you squint at it, you can see how that was later standardized into the modern Я form. And there a few other letters in the modern alphabet (Ы, Ю, and maybe Ж) that originated as two older letters combined in a ligature -- just in case you were wondering how they came up with these forms. Throw in a couple Hebrew letters -- namely ש (shin) and צ (tsadi), which were respectively borrowed and modified to create Ш, Щ, Ц, Ч -- and you've got the whole Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

When I took Russian waaay back in college, they made us write in cursive Cyrillic all the time, and this is absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if you rarely use cursive longhead when writing in English. I just wish I had learned Cyrillic touch-typing at the same early stage! I totally recommend getting in some practice with both cursive and touch-typing early in your Russian studies.

P.S. Just for fun, did you know that the Я actually started out as a ligature of Iota + Alpha, to represent the vowel combination "ia"? One of the historical intermediate forms looked kind of like a very, very "manly" letter A, if you get my drift, with the Iota hanging down between the two legs of the Alpha:
Ѧ

That's how it would've been chiseled into wood or stone. But with brush and ink, it was written like this:



If you squint at it, you can see how that was later standardized into the modern Я form. And there a few other letters in the modern alphabet (Ы, Ю, and maybe Ж) that originated as two older letters combined in a ligature -- just in case you were wondering how they came up with these forms. Throw in a couple Hebrew letters -- namely ש (shin) and צ (tsadi), which were respectively borrowed and modified to create Ш, Щ, Ц, Ч -- and you've got the whole Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

LOL about the "manly" letter A! But yeah, that really adds up now so thanks for the heads up about that!
I do a lot of cursive handwriting in Russian and it's getting easier. It gets kinda confusing sometimes when "И", "Ш", and "Л" are together but that will probably be easier to deal with as my vocabulary expands. I got side-tracked by Russian culture and history but now I'm back to learning the language, yay! And my Russian vocabulary (of memorized words and dialogue) is expanding really fast!

@ Specter.
Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of Greek/Latin symbols in maths at school and I'll probably see tons more when I get enrolled at a university. It's really interesting stuff!