People be writing words with the letters all connected in cursive so the quill didn’t have to lift up or whatever.
How come they didn’t do that with the digits in numbers?
People be writing words with the letters all connected in cursive so the quill didn’t have to lift up or whatever.
How come they didn’t do that with the digits in numbers?
Just tried it and it looks crap - I can’t imagine how to write “321” clearly in cursive, for instance. I think that’s why.
Roman numerals kind of work in cursive (sometimes i to x are written in lowercase, e,g in document indexes) so maybe it’s all downstream of our numbers actually originating from arabic calligraphy?
Follow-up: I think people historically, and today, want numbers to take up not much space - historically so they fit in ledgers, but also because calculations take up so much space on paper so small numbers helps.
When people were doing bookkeeping they generally work slow and carefully, and can therefore afford to focus on legibility rather than resorting to cursive.
Cursive just opens up more potential for mistakes - misreading your own working, for instance.