Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.

> I landed on Kurrent

This is madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent#/media/File:Deutsche_K...

> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.

Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.

The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.

I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.

But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.

i learned kurrent out of interest but also to improve my handwriting. the straight lines and sharp corners are a lot easier to write than the round lines of regular hand writing so i got good results with less effort than with regular handwriting which eventually motivated me to improve my regular hand writing too. i also had access to a collection of old dip pens with various types of nibs allowing me to really duplicate the writing style of the time, if only at primary school level. eventually i adapted my signature too, but unlike you i never got any backslash for that.

AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).

When I went to school, the one I learned was Schulausgangsschrift https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schulausgangsschrift...

To me, the Sütterlin sample on Wikipedia is completely incomprehensible.

> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?

Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.

Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.

Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.

In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group). I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...

If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.

I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.

Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.

A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.

I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.

I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.

What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!

I grew up in Germany and was taught handwriting there, and I get the same feeling as in seeing the relationship, but being entirely unable to read it.

This is what is taught in german schools: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schreibschrift#/media/Datei:De...

I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.

They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.

Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.

I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.

In the US we used Spencerian Copperplate before the 1930s and then Palmer Cursive after the war. (Palmer was based on an 1800s German Schulschrift)

It's easier than Kurrent[0], but not by a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent

No. I was taught Sütterlin in elementary school, but I couldn't even begin to read the sample on Wikipedia.

I can read about 50% of the words.

I'm in my late 20s, 0 chance of reading anything.

Not at all, no. And I still learned cursive at least.

Not really readable, I can guess some words but it's hit and miss, at most 50% of words I can figure out.

Wasn't it Fraktur in printed materials? I studied physics in the early 2000s and we still learned the convention, but rarely read anything that used it. To me, the incongruity of using an archaic font in a fast-moving science like physics was fun. Probably convenient at the time (early 1900s) because printers routinely had Latin and Fraktur fonts available. Germany was the country of physics around 1900, even the journals were in German! Some of them still have German names to this day (even more so in chemistry), but the contents are all in English.

I can kind of read Fraktur - my motivation was that we had an old (1930s or so) crafts book at home that I wanted to read. I cannot read Kurrent or Sütterlin. Not only do I not know the letters, they all look so damn similar! I would've noticed if these vectors or matrices had been printed in Sütterlin, because I'd have had much more trouble reading them.

Maybe they didn't have to write down as many randomly generated passwords yet and so context always acted as a checksum? Like if I write "its a blue sky" you still know what I mean from context, same as with typos/writos

fun fact: the german umlaut dots come from putting a sütterlin "e" on top of the letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut#Orthography_an...