I find the concept of cursive writing kinda funny. like who looked at print handwriting and thought “I wish this was easier to write but nearly impossible to read”?

okay so it occurs to me that I’m not sure whether print came before cursive of vice-versa. I had it in my head that print came first because the Latin alphabet was originally designed for carving into things like stone tablets of soft clay, but now I’m not entirely sure. I’m looking it up but haven’t found any results about the origins of print vs. cursive yet

okay wait no I was right! the Latin alphabet started as only uppercase letters and cursive seems to have come much later

I wonder if printing is only possible today because we have ball point pens to write with. I wonder if whatever writing implement (quills?) cursive was originally developed for, makes printing very very impractical or impossible

okay yes so:

The origins of the cursive method are associated with the practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. Steel dip pens followed quills; they were sturdier, but still had some limitations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive#Origin

but now the question is: did the ancient Romans (who, as far as I know, created the Latin script in the first place) write on paper/papyrus/etc. using {something like a quill}? I already found something saying that Romans didn’t write using cursive until the middle ages, but I’m curious if:

• the Romans just didn’t have the technology to write on paper with a quill, so there was no pressure to adapt their writing system to that task
• the Romans did have quills and paper, but chose to write in print anyway. either because they valued clarity that much, or because writing in that was was rare enough that there was no reason for them to invent a whole new writing system for the task

here’s a letter written in {what I assume is ancient Greek?} on papyrus from around 300 BCE. interestingly, the letters are joined. this shows that:

• the concept of cursive (or proto-cursive or whatever this is) existed at the time
• they had the technology to write on paper (or papyrus, anyway. that’s basically paper)

so what I suspect at this point is that the Latin alphabet probably always had two writing systems: cursive for quill-and-paper, and print for wax tablets, stone, clay, etc.

they had to adapt their writing system to two separate uses, which is why cursive was invented (not necessarily by the ancient Romans or Greeks). but then of course we invented much better writing tools like ball-point pens and cursive became pointless because there is no longer any compelling reason to prefer it over print, and it’s demonstrably much less readable. so it’s almost anachronistic at this point

@kasdeya It's usually recorded to ephemeral media, limiting the archaeological record a bit, but it probably started with the Romans. And it got curlier and less intelligible as the empire shrunkeded: https://hmmlschool.org/latin-classical-antiquity/

The curly stuff retained usefulness for drafting until a few centuries after the printing press, back when typesetting was still labor intensive. Then from about Reconstruction to the Selectric it dwindled in various fast drafting niches before becoming a true novelty.