paleography - History of the Latin alphabet
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- paleography - History of the Latin alphabet - Ancient paleography
- paleography - History of the Latin alphabet - Medieval palaeography
- Prior to the time of Charlemagne several parts of Europe had their own handwriting style. His rule over a large part of the continent provided an opportunity to unify these writing styles in the hand called Carolingian minuscule. Simplistically speaking, the only scripts to escape this unification were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic), which survived into the 12th or 13th century, the Beneventan, which was still being written in the middle of the 16th, and the one that continues to be used in traditional Irish handwriting, which has been in severe decline since the early 20th century and is now almost extinct (the printed form was abolished by the Irish government in the 1950s).
- paleography - History of the Latin alphabet - Modern palaeography
- These humanistic scripts are the base for the antiqua and the handwriting forms in western and southern Europe. In Germany and Austria, the Kurrentschrift rooted in the cursive handwriting of the later Middle Ages. With the name of the calligrapher Ludwig Sütterlin this handwriting counterpart to the blackletter typefaces was abolished by Hitler in 1941. After World War II it was taught as alternative script in schools only in some areas until the 1970s; it is no longer being taught.