Lowercase Hebrew Letters

Zephyros

In day to day affairs in Israel, the uppercase letters are usually not used in handwriting, but the lowercase, informal letters. Looking at them today I suddenly had a yen to try and see if the shapes of the letters corresponded to their meanings. To my surprise, in the majority of cases they actually did illustrate them more than the uppercase, formal type.

I'm no linguist, obviously, but it was a nice experiment. I couldn't make them all fit, but attached are my results
 

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Richard

Hang on. I need to do a little research, but I'm kinda half-asleep right now. Weren't the upper case Hebrew block letters imported from another language (possibly a Hebrew cognate)?
 

Zephyros

Hang on. I need to do a little research, but I'm kinda half-asleep right now. Weren't the upper case Hebrew block letters imported from another language (possibly a Hebrew cognate)?

I honestly don't know, I guess I need to as well. I just came to it by noticing Lamed looked more like a whip in lowercase than upper, driving me to draw them all. The Aleph especially looks like an ox, but I can't research right now either.
 

Richard

The Hebrew block letters are an adaptation of what linguists call Imperial Aramaic. So what? It was indigenous to what is now Israel. I still wonder about the origin of the lower case script, however.
 

Ross G Caldwell

This page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew
explains that it developed naturally over time, and gives a chart showing its evolution (taken from the article "Cursive Writing" in the Jewish Encyclopedia 1901-1906).