[OT] handrwriting conventions

Below suggests something else going on with 'u'

"The lowercase letters u and v ? These letters have a common origin and were once written according to the location in the word rather than the sound. The v came first; the u originally had a loop extending to the left and was only used to start words. All other locations for either u or v were written with the latter. In Germany (especially southern Germany), Austria and Switzerland, lowercase u is often written with a horizontal stroke or swish over it (?, ?), to distinguish it from n."

I first took it to mean someone was empahasing the character was an underscore in an email address , not a hyphen, but that was not the case. So next attempt in the bouncing em train, will be a v in that position

It was not the sort of person, who would because he could , create an valid email address with a conflated, by backspace, v and an underscore into one character

It may be a convention from medical background, as plain v was correct for this person of medical training. Like a barred z comes from maths background, the slashed zero is pretty universal

The other complication , mainland Europe uses a bar on 7 and then a flick to the left at the top of the 1. Then in the UK that flicked 1 is interpreted as 7, as we don't use the bar, but on the other hand , we don't have a way of telling a 1 from a lower case l it would seem, other than prehaps some people but an underscore to the 1

Slash zero, I believe, originated with Teletype / Western Union usage.

Since Baudot / Murray uses 5-bit coding, the Alphabet [Letter Shift] is Upper Case (All Capitals, no lower case).

I thought that decades ago Microsoft had a convention of slashing an oh to distinguish from zero (while others did the inverse). Maybe they had to fall in line, for once!

Mike.

Is it Norwegian that has a slashed oh? Having a slashed zero (although that is what I often write) could be confusing.

Perce

Here in the US, we have very few such 'conventions' as they tend to confuse some and annoy others. We manage to get along, however.

We also tend to find their use pretentious and/or a refuge for those with e xtremely bad handwriting.

DO NOTE, however: Some manufacturers with mixed (alphanumeric) serial numbe rs do mark their Zeros either with a slash or bar to distinguish them from a capital O.

O0

Other possible confusions are not really: 1I, 2Z, 71 not so much.

Which makes good sense in that context.

Now, consider the Euro-British U in words such as colour, Neighbour, and mo re.

First started when? Some sources state 1100 AD. How many billions of them u sed? Cost per hundred? Remember, these Us use ink, or require time to write , or typeset, and take up paper space. So, I expect that $0.01/100 is quite conservative.

Let's be entirely arbitrary and say that such U use comes to about one bill ion instances per year, on average, for the last 900 years. And the cost is US$0.01 per 100. Comes to US$90,000,000. Now, as we are averaging, that re ally comes to an average of $45,000,000 for the entirety.

As we do not have reliable statistics prior to 1700, let's used that date.

$1 then would be worth $4,000 today. Now, let's use 3% as the average inter est rate and compound it for 900 years. The numbers get quite staggering.. . That first $1 would be worth $514,420,131,371.79 at 3% compounded monthly . That is US TRILLIONs with a T.

And, it is still going on. All that ink, paper and time being pissed away.

And we worry about bars on 7s.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

Interesting, we should ban the "U"s after Qs then as being redundant - save trillions, ban letters! (ducking)

Silent letters! Knife = Nif. Knight = Nit (silent 'e's, eh?)

While we are at it what is with 'to, too, and two'? Should be just one - 'to'.

Many more trillions saved...

John ;-#)#

While we're about it, let's get rid of "c": with few exceptions it has the sound either of "k" or of "s"; and get rid of "x" as well, and replace it by "ks" (as in Russian).

Perce

I think you'd have to bring back the 'x' to represent the 'ch' sound that you will have lost with the 'c'.

Personally I like all these distinctions. But that is perhaps because I read the words 'directly'. That is, I do not read by moving my lips and making the sounds silently to myself and then recognise the words as if said. If you do that then you have to resolve differences (to, too, two) by context because you have lost the hint that different spellings would have given you.

Mike.

Maybe its a K that has fallen over?