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The most recent example in relation to written records is probably the switch of Germany, under the Nazi rule, from the traditional blackletter Fraktur script a
by aasasd 8y ago
The most recent example in relation to written records is probably the switch of Germany, under the Nazi rule, from the traditional blackletter Fraktur script and its cursives Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin to the ‘Latin’ script. Soon enough, people didn't know how to read their grandparents' handwriting.
Try for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin
But it seems that Hitler's rationalization of “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” came to be fulfilled.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThis example is a little bit softer than the ones I mentioned. 'Latin' German is, I assume, letter-for-letter identical to blackletter German, just with noticeably different glyphs. Given, say, a box of correspondence, a German who'd never been trained to read blackletter could probably puzzle it out. Akkadian and Sumerian were thousands of years old (and, obviously, long dead) when they got wiped out. And while Mycenaean Greek is not much different from classical Greek (with a gap of only a few centuries), it is written using a writing system entirely unrelated to that of classical Greek, which we assume was originally developed for some other unknown language because it fits Greek so poorly. > “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” I don't see why this would make any difference. We trade with Japan (and had been doing so for centuries before Hitler). Recognizing the letters in a German contract isn't much good if you can't understand the words.