> and word recognition, not letter recognition

That's how most people read printed text as well. You're not sounding out every word, are you?

Yes, that's the point. People can get the meaning even if the legibility is degraded, but this can only go so far. People scan the sentence, and if that doesn't work they scan groups of words, and if that doesn't work they read each word, and when that doesn't work they're stuck at sounding out each letter individually.

If someone's not familiar with 1800s cursive they're going to struggle and they're going to resort to trying to decipher individual letters - they will end up sounding out not only every individual word, but every individual letter.