I’m not ready to attempt learning Greek yet, but I would like to remove one obstacle by teaching myself a decent penmanship. Is there a model that I might follow? Penmanship sounds kind of old-school, but I deliberately didn’t ask about calligraphy. Functionality and clarity are my aims, and if my English penmanship (destroyed forever by the Palmer method) is any indication, I’ll never have “beautiful writing.”
Thanks,
Scall
“Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence.?
When, hopefully within a year, I can find the time to begin studying Greek, it would make it that much easier if I already had installed the alphabet in my subconscious, both in terms of reading and writing. Trying to learn grammar and vocabulary in another language is difficult enough without having to get one’s brain to decode the symbol first, in my opinion.
If I had an appropriate model, I could practice the alphabet every day, instead of doodling.
Not a big deal, to be sure. I’m just curious if there’s one “font” that would be better to practice than others.
There is a discussion on forming the greek letters on the web site http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/pens/
You have to go down the scroll bar, pretty much near the last fifth towards the bottom of the web page to find the discussion there.
Also, in the introduction of Athenaze, Volume 1, there is a discussion of how to write the greek letters, including where to start the strokes, and in what direction, for each of the letters.
You could also check this. This site is obviously about learning modern Greek but since the alphabet hasn’t changed you may find the short “videos” showing a hand writing the letters useful (click on each letter and the video will start playing. Disregard the pronunciation guide; it’s for modern Greek)
Note that some letters (like the second lower case pi and kappa or the second upper case delta) are “callicraphic” alternatives of modern Greek only so you are not likely to see anything hand-written in AG by any other nationality containing them
Edit: I just thought I’d mention that neither I nor anyone else I know make the letters so nice and round and it seems we all take “shortcuts” when writing some letters (e.g. you make a sort of rounded little fish or rounded lower case gamma if you wish and you have a very nice little lower case alpha if you ask me )
Interesting. Is that the common way to write upper case omega in modern Greek? Was it written like that at all in ancient Greek? It looks a little like a qoppa to me. As for those last letters drawn for kappa and pi – I would probably confuse that kappa with a mu and the pi with an omega. I guess that probably all comes from my seeing nothing but typed Greek (and certainly never calligraphic modern Greek). Do they seem obvious to you when you see them?
The first one yes, it’s, I think, the most common “shortcut” to creating omega. As far as I know the Ancient Greeks didn’t utilize such a “shortcut” but I may be mistaken. The second one (with the little connecting line) is not all that usual. In fact the classic omega (the one like the typed one I mean) is far more common. Neither of the latter is as common as the first one with the “flying” circle.
The second capital Ω is same to Korean ‘오’ which sounds /o/ just as in Greek. What a coincidence! In Korean the circle above is a null consonant just like the smooth breathing of classical greek and the bar underneath plus the short connecting line constitute the vowel /o/.
In Korean the circle above is a null consonant just like the smooth breathing of classical greek and the bar underneath plus the short connecting line constitute the vowel /o/.