Hasta

Hasta la vista, baby.

He hasta visit the doctor.

A prudent prayer, and a vigorous dance, with many interwoven leaps and twirls and pirouettes, and hastas all around.

In Table I the hastae of n and m are regularly vertical and of the same height, while in II a and II b they vary in height and are often out of the perpendicular.

In the 12th century in Persia and later in Anatolia a new style of monumental kufic becomes the rule, with the tall hastae of the letters plaited.

On Mamlūk metalware, inscriptions appear not only in continuous and intersecting bands which may occupy a considerable part of an object, but also in a circular arrangement in which the hastae of the letters point towards the centre.

The “stem and leaf” motif covering the area between the long hastae of the letters is delineated by a quick curving stroke with curls, “comma-shaped” leaves and dots, which resemble the sprays on Fatimid lustre-wares (fig.2.). […] The long hastae of the letters on the Ḥamā piece are not emphasised by parallel strokes but seem to belong to less elaborate writing styles, while the curling stem between the alif and lām finds its exact parallel on Fāṭimid lustre-painted vessels, of the 11th-12th century.

In the following chapters of the Literatum Latinarum Mercator then develops a prescriptive guide how to perform the ductus of writing by measuring the individual letters of the alphabet against these ideal proportions of the letter y and analyzing them according to his categorization of the line types into elements (‘hastae’ and ‘codae’), all of which, however crooked they may be, can always be accurately calculated. The cursivization of the hastae, the ligature of the letters by means of hairlines and the spaces separating the letters are most precisely covered by his rules.

The Π of CE 3 has a shorter right hasta and the horizontal bar projects to the right, while in CE 1, the hastae are equal or almost equal in length and the horizontal bar varies, sometimes projecting, sometimes not.

The uppercase letters of the classical Latin alphabet, as well as the lowercase forms that evolved later, more often than not begin with a hasta on the left side and have a coda to the right. […] We refer to letters with a hasta to the right of the coda as b-type letters.