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In Russian cursive, there is some ambiguity from the fact that several lowercase cursive letters consist (entirely or in part) of the Latin cursive letter i without the dot (or a half of the cursive letter u), namely и, л, м, ш, ц, щ, ы. As a result, there are examples of different words that become absolutely identical in their cursive form. Do Russians have ways to avoid this ambiguity when writing or do they always sort the ambiguity out based on context when reading? An example: https://m.imgur.com/Jyj4Gma

I am particularly interested in this because I usually write vocabulary lists when learning a new language and I can foresee that a Russian vocabulary list written in cursive letter will be tricky to use for memorizing words if there is spelling ambiguity.

A tip I heard today is to write the cursive л in a slight alternate way, putting a small horizontal line between the line that goes up and the other that goes down, making it look like a little more similar to the print л. Other tips are welcome.

Alan Evangelista
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    Alan, you can provide example of some particular text written in cursive and what exactly letters seem similar to you in that snippet of text. For instance, м and л differ actually as much as n and m in English - in cursive or not. The same about ы, asking how ш differs from щ is pretty much how to ask what's the difference between j and i. – shabunc Sep 11 '19 at 06:56
  • Some words e.g. шиш can be difficult to break up into individual letters when written in cursive but I am yet to see a case of a real ambiguity when a cursive word can be interpreted as more than one legit word. – Sergey Slepov Sep 11 '19 at 07:42
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    Some people put a horizontal line over т and under ш to help group the spikes visually as in this signature of Leo Tolstoy: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Signature_of_Leo_Tolstoy.jpg – Sergey Slepov Sep 11 '19 at 07:46
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    Nowadays people rarely write the way we are taught. Most people omit ligatures and write certain letters in a way closer to printed letters. For example, л is commonly written as ^ (a bit bigger and not elevated, but you get the idea) and т can be written exactly as a printed version. Here's an example of simplified cursive: https://www.e-reading.club/illustrations/1009/1009049-doc2fb_image_0300000B.png – Alissa Sep 11 '19 at 11:15
  • @shabunc I have added an image with an example of text that I have a really hard time reading. Regarding sequences of m/n, I agree they are ambiguous in cursive form (eg environment and amnesia); however, they are certainly not in script form. The ambiguity comes from the stroke which connects adjacent m's and n's. As you can see from the two example words I have just mentioned above, there is no such a stroke in script form and therefore no ambiguity. I guess that increasing a bit the connector stroke makes easier to differentiate MN from NM and the same could work for Russian cursive. – Alan Evangelista Sep 11 '19 at 11:27
  • @shabunc regarding щ , I probably was not clear enough. I see no ambiguity in the small J in the right lower corner of the letter. The problem is its "i" shapes: when they get mixed with other letters, they cause ambiguity between ц and щ. Example: мщу ("I avenge") and лицу (dative of лицо "face"). – Alan Evangelista Sep 11 '19 at 11:35
  • @SergeySlepov I see that T is written differently in that signature from what I learned. Confusing between Cyrillic cursive T and ш is like confusing between Latin cursive N and W and never happens if people write them right. Therefore, it seems to me that this horizontal bar above or below the letter is only helpful to writers who have this different writing style (and readers of those writers)? – Alan Evangelista Sep 11 '19 at 11:41
  • In case someone else is interested in this, I got some answers here: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/avoiding-spelling-ambiguity-in-cursive-%D0%B8-%D0%BB-%D0%BC-%D1%88-%D1%86-%D1%89-%D1%8B.3613805/ – Alan Evangelista Sep 17 '19 at 03:33

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