Cursive - characters running together

[realmayo]

Are/were common characters ever run together in everyday cursive writing? Say, a note to a flatmate explaining where you are - merging 点&钟，or 时&候, for example. Inputting pinyin with predictive text makes this seem an obvious thing to do.... Or might you at least make the second of the two characters super abbreviated, on the grounds that it's obvious what it's supposed to be?

[Jim]

On 1/26/2022 at 12:47 PM, realmayo said:

Or might you at least make the second of the two characters super abbreviated, on the grounds that it's obvious what it's supposed to be?

There's that thing where you just do a couple of dots or a cross to show a repeated character, not sure if you count that. Found this example from brush calligraphy but you see it in biro too:

[Publius]

On 1/28/2022 at 9:17 AM, Jim said:

a couple of dots or a cross to show a repeated character

Yes, kind of like ditto mark (〃) in tabulation. This convention is kept well alive in Japanese even in print. It's so prevalent they treat iteration mark almost like kanji: 人々、神々、日々、時々、徐々、延々、堂々、凛々、度々、次々……

[Jim]

On 1/28/2022 at 2:52 AM, Publius said:

Yes, kind of like ditto mark (〃) in tabulation. This convention is kept well alive in Japanese even in print. It's so prevalent they treat iteration mark almost like kanji: 人々、神々、日々、時々、徐々、延々、堂々、凛々、度々、次々……

Ah, 々 is what I meant by the cross when I knew it really wasn't quite that - was tempted to say it looks a bit like the symbol used by the Scottish Nationalist Party but that's probably even more obscure (and it's actually not that similar!). I see it's described as “同”字的异体字.

[Tomsima]

I've always thought of it as an 二 (although I don't know if that is etymologically correct), a little bit like how simplified was designed with using the same kind of notation to represent repetition of a component in some characters. Ones that come to mind are 馋 for 饞 (repetition of 兔-like component)or 枣 for 棗. Perhaps we might even consider simplifications like 戋 for 戔 as a form of this too. 

[Tomsima]

In answer to the original question, I'm inclined to think that this only appears today in the usage of abbreviation using pinyin letters, eg. SB, TMD (sorry, couldnt think of anything else of the top of my head...) It very rarely happens in calligraphy, as the texts being written are almost exclusively classical Chinese, meaning compound usage is very low. No tradition built out of this for modern Chinese compounds as a result, but super cursive forms are still used for very common characters. This means that today you might see a compound word where one character is written in kaishu, then the other is written in caoshu. Writing short forms for high frequency compounds is also problematic from an aesthetic point of view: while there are definitely plenty of run ons for common sequences in classical (eg. anything with a 之 gets squiqqled together with the characters it joins), in modern writing the L-to-R direction cuts off this flow. If you were to make the join it would likely leave a / stroke between the characters of the compound - less than desirable. Lastly, everyone's typing now so there's no need to maintain any short forms that might otherwise have developed in the modern 白话文 era.

[realmayo]

Ah yes, I hadn't thought how the left/right change would elimate any such elisions, supposing they did actually exist.

 

I just remembered what was at the back of my mind: from the Wang Fang-yu cursive book:

 

[anonymoose]

I know this isn't everyday cursive writing, but...