Re:The long process of creating a Chinese font
by gozur88 on Friday December 18, 2015 @09:48PM
(#10762403)
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.
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Re:The long process of creating a Chinese font
by gizmo686 on Friday December 18, 2015 @10:00PM
(#10762431)
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".
Re:The long process of creating a Chinese font
by jessriedel on Saturday December 19, 2015 @10:49AM
(#10763851)
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
by jiyinyiyong on Saturday December 19, 2015 @11:30AM
(#10763974)
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
by mazerackham on Friday December 18, 2015 @10:26PM
(#10762476)
Characters aren't necessary words. In Chinese, a lot of phrases are expressed in groupings of 2 characters and 4 characters.
Especially in these 4 character groupings, you can find a lot of efficiency and elegance. It expresses ideas & meaning that would take 20-100 words to fully express.