Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye? Letter for letter I can see the relation to the handwriting I was taught in Dutch in the 80s, but as a text it looks like sanskrit to me. Obviously learnable, like learning greek or other foreign ciphers. But I would not imagine a neighbouring language written down less than a century ago to seem so foreign.

AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).

When I went to school, the one I learned was Schulausgangsschrift https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schulausgangsschrift...

To me, the Sütterlin sample on Wikipedia is completely incomprehensible.

> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?

Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.

Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.

Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.

In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group). I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...

If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.

I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.

Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.

A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.

I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.

I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.

What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!

I grew up in Germany and was taught handwriting there, and I get the same feeling as in seeing the relationship, but being entirely unable to read it.

This is what is taught in german schools: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schreibschrift#/media/Datei:De...

I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.

They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.

Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.

I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.

In the US we used Spencerian Copperplate before the 1930s and then Palmer Cursive after the war. (Palmer was based on an 1800s German Schulschrift)

It's easier than Kurrent[0], but not by a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent

No. I was taught Sütterlin in elementary school, but I couldn't even begin to read the sample on Wikipedia.

I can read about 50% of the words.

I'm in my late 20s, 0 chance of reading anything.

Not at all, no. And I still learned cursive at least.

Not really readable, I can guess some words but it's hit and miss, at most 50% of words I can figure out.