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But in Chinese, “every character has to be adjusted,” says Su of Justfont. “Each one is its own image, with its own design needs.” That's a key concept not onl
by ilamont 9y ago
But in Chinese, “every character has to be adjusted,” says Su of Justfont. “Each one is its own image, with its own design needs.”
That's a key concept not only for font design, but also for learners of Chinese. For certain characters like 醫 you have to scale down or elongate the radicals to be balanced within a unified whole. Add the importance of stroke order and simplified vs. traditional characters, and learning basic writing skills (let alone calligraphy) gets really tricky.
- on_and_off 9y agoSorry if that is a very ignorant question but why not move to a system closer to the latin alphabet with only a handful of signs ?
- innocenat 9y agoYou mean apart from thousand years of history/records and billions of users?
- on_and_off 9y agoI mean like Hangul
- innocenat 9y agoAnd Hangul was also developed long time ago. And Korean(s) has way less users than Chinese.
- brandmeyer 9y agoWhy should the number of users matter? The work factor per person is the same no matter how many people there are.
- lifthrasiir 9y agoHangul was possible because it explicitly targeted a single unified language (Korean was politically unified since circa 900 and the language was stuck).
- ilamont 9y agoQuick answer: China does have a romanization system called pinyin for the Mandarin dialect which is quite accurate as long as you know the tones. Problems: * Pinyin can't be used for other dialects, meaning someone in Guangzhou won't understand written pinyin. * There are only something like 400 sounds in Mandarin, which means there are a lot of homonyms which makes pinyin not suitable in certain contexts. * Switching a highly literate society with more than a billion people to a different writing system would be a massive undertaking. The Vietnamese made such a switch from Chinese characters to a Romanization system based on Portuguese, but at a time when literacy in Chinese characters was relatively low and a colonial power (France) dominated the country and its bureaucracy.
- on_and_off 9y agoI am not speaking about romanization, although it would surely be nice if all the cultures in the world used the same writing system. I am referring to what korea did with hangul. Of course you address some of the pain points like the fact that China is way more literate than Korea was when Hangul was introduced.
- codedokode 9y agoI don't know Chinese but I guess the text will become much more difficult to read. At least in Japanese there are many characters that have the same reading but different meaning. So with roman alphabet all those characters will be written the same way.
- brandmeyer 9y agoIMO, its because Han characters are a fundamental part of the national identity, and China has a fierce national pride.
- lifthrasiir 9y agoChinese is not a single language but spans a large subset of the Sino-Tibetan language family. They tend to mostly differ in their phonologies and not much in syntax and vocabulary, so written logograms could enable communication otherwise impossible. The script was also adopted by, for example, Koreans so they could do the non-verbal communication in written Chinese. You probably cannot expect this kind of uniformity across the whole Indo-European languages.
- pcrh 9y agoNoob question here... why is stroke order important? Surely if the final result is the same, why should the order in which the strokes were formed matter?
- sh4z 9y ago(subjective experience) When writing fast the result will be easier to read if you wrote with the correct order. Writing a character on your phone with the correct stroke order will increase the chances of finding the character you want.
- jhanschoo 9y agoStroke order is less important than you might think, and than what most learning materials make it out to be. But an idea on the general order is crucial to writing fast, and also, quick writing that does not follow either (1) the standardized word order or (2) a traditional word order can look weird to native eyes. Note that when the PRC standardized its stroke order, it ended up with stroke orders that differed from calligraphic tradition: most notably 右 and 必. In addition, different calligraphic styles and regional variations sometimes have different character variants and different stroke orders. In short, whereas there are a few mainstream ways to write words in Chinese, just like how there are a few mainstream ways to handwrite disconnected Latin letters, there are many variations that one is expected to be able to recognize, just as how one is expected to recognize a wide variety of Latin letterforms (copperplate, Palmer, blackletter, closed vs. open a/g, etc.)
- buckminster 9y agoWrite an English T. If you do the horizontal stroke first it's really easy to ensure the vertical stroke starts exactly on the horizontal stroke. The other way round is harder. This matters in Chinese because there are lots of similar characters and sometimes the only difference is whether lines meet or cross. Even when there are other differences, getting it right helps the reader.