Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> * Kenneth Whistler
[...]
> | Many of them are just cursive forms for the Han characters --
>
> This raises a new question: what does "cursive" mean as applied to
> Chinese characters? It doesn't seem to be the same as for Latin ones.
It means pretty much the same thing: literally, "running" (hand).
In cursive Chinese characters, the brush tends to rarely leave paper and,
consequently successive strokes often get joined together. In some cursive
styles each character is traced with a single complex brush stroke.
While each katakana letter derives from a piece of kanji, each hiragana
letter derives from the cursive simplification of a *whole* kanji.
_ Marco
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