Reading old german handwriting...

[3 ladybugs]

Okay in my quest to find a good cursive program for my son (in english) I was looking at what he will ultimately be doing with said knowledge. One of the biggest reasons I want him to know cursive is so he can read original source documents. Those are typically in cursive. My son is also learning German though, so I was looking at cursive and the history of "cursive" in Germany. 

 

Most old handwriting seems to be a bit more choppy in German then we had in english. However then I read that because of the cultural shift as a result of the Nazi's banning one form of handwriting, that many young today can't even read their grandparents handwriting. :( I have looked at examples of Kaiser Wilhelm's, Martin Luther, Hitler and Himmler's handwriting and it seems that if my son can understand Palmer, he can understand their writing. Oh and yes I know that it is very rare to have Martin Luther grouped with those other people but honestly that was all I could think of in German history. 

 

If you are German, how are you overcoming this? I am fairly confident in what form of cursive I want to teach my son (Palmer) but I would like to eventually teach him so he can read original source material in German too. What programs are out there to teach Fraktur, the script banned by the Nazi's?

 

I plan on asking the teacher/principle at my son's german school tomorrow about this, but I thought I would also ask on here. BTW if my son had his way he would learn Spencerian.  :laugh:

[ikslo]

If your son wants to learn Spencerian, I would let him learn Spencerian. 

[3 ladybugs]

I am worried that if I started to teach him Spencerian he would get frustrated and not be able to continue to do it. I saw Palmer as a gateway to Spencerian. 

[Matryoshka]

Fraktur script is nothing like Palmer or Spencerian.  I learned it myself from a list of the upper and lowercase letters that were in the back of my German math book, as they were used as variables in math there, much like Greek letters are.  I do not know any modern-day Germans that were taught or bothered to learn Fraktur script, although I'm sure there must be some - but I'm guessing it would be self-taught, like I did.  Even knowing the letterforms and having played around quite a bit myself writing it, I have a hard time sometimes reading it, as real people's handwriting deviates quite a bit from the standard taught.  Also, the m, n, and u all look almost identical, and the e is almost like them as well (it is not a loop like in any other handwriting).

 

Here's a pic of all the upper and lower-case letters - the Fraktur ones are on the bottom, the upper ones are a traditional English script (not sure which one).  That lower-case 'e' is really different, as are many of the other letters.  There are two different versions of lower-case 's', one which is used at the beginning or middle of words or syllables, and the other which is used only at the end of words or syllables (this is also common in much older English scripts).  The lower-case 'a' and 'g' are not closed at the top.  Anyway, there are lots of reference images online if you wanted to self-teach like I did from my math book. ;)  And yes, now I'm the only one that can even attempt to decipher the old family correspondence...

 

 

ETA: The person who wrote this has the two lower-case 's's backward - the loopy one is at the end of a word or syllable; the one that looks like a big line is at the beginning - as you can tell when she writes 'sch' and 'st' at the bottom.  You can tell from her writing below with the 'Sp' how easy it is as well to confuse the lower-case 'p' and the 'y' in Fraktur script...

[Steven]

The old German script was already dying out before the Hitler era. My wife's grandmother and her siblings were given a choice when they were in school before WWI as to which script they wanted to learn, German or Latin (as our style of script was then called in Germany). Her grandmother opted for German, her brothers for Latin. My wife was never able to read her grandmother's writing.

 

Very few Germans know how to read it today. There is some interest in Germany in this script and in recent years books have been published to teach people how to write in the old script. I taught myself to read and write it because I possess extensive family documents written in it. 

 

Quite frankly, it is not very practical except for doing genealogical research. I find it very illegible because so many of the letters are based on the same strokes: u, m, n, c, and i can look very much alike (u often has a line over it to distinguish it from n). 

 

More practical would be to learn to read the printed script as one may still stumble across old books printed in Fraktur (mainly in university libraries that have not bought new copies of the classics since WWII). 

 

Here is a link to Amazon Germany for a book that teaches how to read and write in the old script: http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/3426667533?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=od_aui_detailpages00. The book is called  Deutsche Schreibschrift: Lehrbuch (by Herald Süß) 

 

 

Edited November 28, 2015 by Steven

[Guest EugenieMagid]

If your son would like to learn Spencerian then do not force him to learn German. He is well known that which language is better for him rather than you. Hopefully he will never let you down. 

Edited December 1, 2015 by EugenieMagid

[3 ladybugs]

If your son would like to learn Spencerian then do not force him to learn German. He is well known that which language is better for him rather than you. Hopefully he will never let you down. 

My son wants to do both. He loves German, and he thinks Spencerian is cool. He is driving this. 

[mumto2]

When I was just starting out I ordered some teaching materials in old German script per dh. I think they came from either Clay Bookstore or Rod and Staff. I can't remember anything beyond the fact that dh told me to that whatever I had was useless...he is the German teacher.