So today, we celebrate the 7th birthday of The Language Closet, with something new!

You may have noticed that for some posts where I introduced a writing system, the featured imaged would be a handwritten header in my own handwriting, or at least the best I could get on a computer mouse, since I do not own a drawing tablet. I have decided to actually reveal my handwriting in some select writing systems, and updating it every year to see how my handwriting changes.

Something I have realised over the years of note taking was how my handwriting changed over time, and I thought it would be cool to share the “evolution” of my penmanship here. As a taster, here is my handwriting reveal for the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, Japanese hiragana and katakana, and Tamil. For now, I think this could be used as a reference image to keep track of how my handwriting evolves.

I would also like to thank you all for your readership, as we explore topics in various languages you may, or more often, may not be aware about. Diving into topics like these has been fun, as we look at things that are interesting, bizarre, or so often taken for granted (and unnoticed).

In addition to the handwriting evolution project I announced earlier, I would also like to bring up other content topics I am interested in doing for the coming year or two. I have encountered some interesting claims and phenomena when learning some languages, and I want to do a deep dive into some of them to examine their respective origins, and discuss if it could be actually true. I would not say that this would be a definitive factcheck, however. Over the past year, I found an interest in reading up on such phenomena like the nihongo jouzu phenomenon, and some Internet memes and claims about language that interest me more than others.

Lastly, there are some topics which I promised a follow-up post on, but I have not really got around to posting. I would also be catching up on these “backlogged” posts, as I gather literature and readings to synthesise. Posts covering topics such as the etymology of California, and Japanese orthographical reforms will be in the works, and due to be published later this year.

It has been a fun year diving into various etymologies and origins of certain words or particular aspects of languages and orthographies. Once again, thank you all so much for your time and readership, and take care!

— Zui