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The long process of creating a Chinese font

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Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#41

Post by dheera »

IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?

To a great extent it exists because of cultural inertia. The English language has a huge number of inconsistencies as well, especially in spelling; far more inconsistent than, say, Spanish, which is highly phoenetically-consistent. But nobody is editing the English language because their edited version of the langauge wouldn't fly in a formal setting. So even if English or Chinese could be made better, it's not going to happen in a heartbeat. Python2 to Python3 is enough of a pain to deal with maintainence, let alone re-learning a human language.

There are some advantages to Chinese typography over a phoenetic system. Phoenetically written languages like English go from symbols to sounds to meaning. Chinese goes directly from symbols to meaning. Eschewing the sound stage means that as sounds evolve over time, the symbols, whose meanings change on a much slower time scale, are still comprehensible for a long period of time. This means, among other things, that Chinese formal writing is mostly common to all dialects, whereas a pronounciation-based system could only serve a single dialect. For example, in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is the de facto spoken dialect of choice, I, as a Mandarin-only speaker, can still understand all the signage even though I cannot interact with a Cantonese-only speaker. 1000+ year-old texts are reasonably accessible to well-educated high school students.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#42

Post by jessriedel »

dheera wrote: post #41
IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?

To a great extent it exists because of cultural inertia. The English language has a huge number of inconsistencies as well, especially in spelling; far more inconsistent than, say, Spanish, which is highly phoenetically-consistent. But nobody is editing the English language because their edited version of the langauge wouldn't fly in a formal setting. So even if English or Chinese could be made better, it's not going…

OK, but the major advantage you've suggested for Chinese typography, that the meaning of written words drifts much less over hundreds of year by allowing fast-change sound to change independently, is much less valuable today, right? Modern tech means we expect less drift overall, and less problems for a given amount of drift. Furthermore, the cost of drift is not felt by the people using the language at the time, so this advantage won't influence the choices people make.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#43

Post by Nitramp »

azernik wrote: post #17
nsonnad wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm the author of this piece. It's a very good question, and the answer may simply be that script systems are inferior, but anecdotally I would say there are two advantages: First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred t…

It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you. But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.

Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.

That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.

In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#44

Post by jessriedel »

gizmo686 wrote: post #19
gozur88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.

I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".

Sure, but the script speed-reading advantage only comes at the level of having single symbols for single meaning. Once you need to combine symbols to get the (additional) meanings, you're not any faster than phonetics.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#45

Post by anon4 »

meric wrote: post #39
IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?

Well, politically speaking a script system, by nature of its inertia, looks like it can hold a nation together a lot longer than Latin. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but evolution over the centuries means written Romance languages are no longer mutually intelligible. Today the former Roman Empire is split into dozens of states. Whereas, for Chinese, the number of states[1] is three. China, Taiwan, Singa…

Whether huge states vs lots of small states are desirable or not is another topic entirely though.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#46

Post by jiyinyiyong »

amake wrote: post #30
nsonnad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for the comments, I have fixed both points. The first one I assure you was just a typo, the second, I read too quickly and could have sworn there was another stroke there originally...

> I read too quickly and could have sworn there was another stroke there originally Funny how the meaning ended up basically the same either way. I'm reminded of a situation where I made a similar mistake (misread one character for another) but the meaning ended up the opposite: There was a hotel room listing that noted 设有电视 ("equipped with TV"). At the time simplified hanzi were still a bit new to me, so I misread ⻈…

As a Chinese I would say "带电视" or "配有电视", rather than "设有电视".

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#47

Post by jiyinyiyong »

gizmo686 wrote: post #19
gozur88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.

I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".

Yeah, just like the words "handwriting", "television", "sunshine", "seafood", the meaning of the whole character can be inferred from the parts.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#48

Post by swang »

desdiv wrote: post #29
amake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji. Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.

To add to that, China's simplification process happened during the 50s and 60s, back when China was deeply impoverished, had massive famines thanks to the Great Leap Forward[0], and had basically zero international influence (didn't even have a UN seat). They weren't in a position to influence Japan in any way. Not to mention that Japan was in the opposite camp during the Cold War. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…

I mean what you're saying is correct, but I never said China instantly switched everyone over to simplified once China decided in the 50s/60s.

I am saying the superpower it has since become has "forced" most other countries to defer to using simplified rather than traditional.

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#49

Post by meric »

anon4 wrote: post #45
meric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, politically speaking a script system, by nature of its inertia, looks like it can hold a nation together a lot longer than Latin. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but evolution over the centuries means written Romance languages are no longer mutually intelligible. Today the former Roman Empire is split into dozens of states. Whereas, for Chinese, the number of states[1] is three. China, Taiwan, Singa…

Whether huge states vs lots of small states are desirable or not is another topic entirely though.

It's nice because otherwise I wouldn't be born, with each side of my family from different parts of China. :-)

Re: The long process of creating a Chinese font

#50

Post by azernik »

Nitramp wrote: post #43
azernik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you. But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.

Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters. That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as…

And the tradeoff is that it's not quite as well optimized for the pattern-matching fast path. The systems just have very different performance/usability characteristics.
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