Handwriting Runes

- 3 mins
handwriting future chinese shavian runes

When learning runes, you will eventually venture into the world of handwriting. And one of the things you may notice is that it is a bit harder than handwriting latin letters. It’s definitely more laborious than writing Shavian letters which are just one stroke per letter!

Let’s quantify this in terms of strokes per word.

Word Latin lowercase Latin upppercase Shavian Runes Chinese
love 4 6 3 5 10 or 13
tomato 8 9 6 12 or 14 21
apple 5 10 4 4 16 or 30
woman 5 6 5 8 5
light 6 8 3 8 6
computer 9 13 7 16 15 or 26
TOTALS 37 52 28 53 or 55 73 or 101

There’s a few things to note in this simple test.

  1. Shavian is much easier than runes
  2. Runes are similar to writing all uppercase Latin letters
  3. Chinese is much harder than runes

Let’s think about the place of handwriting in Chinese society. Other than their own names, most adults in China do not write Chinese characters on a day-to-day basis. It’s true that in school, the Chinese write characters by hand. But this is mostly for memorization purposes. Today, most people just type Chinese characters one way or another.

Now let’s think about how technology has changed our communication priorities over time.

Importance 1800 1900 2000 2100
1st Face to Face Handwriting Typing Face to Face
2nd Handwriting Face to Face Telephone Handwriting
3rd - Telephone Face to Face -
4th - Typing Handwriting -

From the 1900’s to the 2000’s, our communication technology and preferences have seemingly completely inverted.

As our technology progresses, we are returning more and more to a pre-modern mode of communication. The difference is that we are able to fully simulate a face-to-face communication across distance rather than requiring travel.

Needless to say, the place of handwriting has changed. Where it was once an essential tool for communication across distance, today it has been relegated to a kind of strange, forgotten middle ground. When you do write, you are typing it on a screen. When you write something by hand, it naturally takes on a special kind of significance because it is not the norm. And when something is special, it’s okay if it requires more effort.

But what if the power goes out? What if you want to unplug? If you wanted to reduce the amount of electronics in your life, Shavian would certainly assist you there. It is a tool for incredible efficiency of writing by hand.

Perhaps in the 2100’s, people will embrace actually writing by hand and seek a solution more like Shavian for that purpose. Or perhaps the advanced technology will continue to make handwriting mostly irrelevant. It’s easy for me to imagine a future in which technology enables us to mostly forget about the written word. As scary as it sounds, one can almost survive this way today.

The written word could essentially become a machine-only tool with an elite group of people that are literate just for the purposes of maintaining the machines.

As of today, handwriting remains of very little relevance to me. Runes may strike a nice middle ground between being just laborious enough to be special, and not quite laborious enough to be painful.

What do you think? Join the Rune School Discord server and let me know!