no, I'm not going with the obvious title

December 22, 2015 8:14 PM

The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font - Nikhil Sonnad
posted by the man of twists and turns (24 comments total)

via Language Log
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:14 PM on December 22, 2015

A major strength of Chinese ideograms is that the written language is able to survive massive pronunciation shifts, even to very very low levels of mutual intelligibility between dialects.

A major weakness of Chinese ideograms is that there is practically no correlation between the language as it is written with how it is spoken.

For a long time, I used to imagine how much more powerful and pervasive written Chinese could be if it had a phonetic basis, like Korean (and Japanese, sort of) has. Nowadays I have no idea whether it would be, in net, strengthened by a real phoneticization or weakened by it.

But I do know that the life of typeface designers would be much easier if it were.
posted by chimaera at 8:33 PM on December 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh man, I'd forgotten about Language Log! This is really interesting, thanks for sharing!

...what's the obvious title, though? I feel like I'm missing something.
posted by teponaztli at 8:51 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, what's the obvious title?
posted by d. z. wang at 9:11 PM on December 22, 2015

they say hard work

Builds character
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:12 PM on December 22, 2015 [32 favorites]

I'm going to go with "Ancient Chinese Secret"?

The idea that written language was independently arrived at three times (the Middle East, which gives us most writing systems; the Chinese; and the Mayans) is astounding. The more that I learn and think about language, the more fascinating the topic is.
posted by koavf at 9:52 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

The obvious title surely involves Chinese finger traps.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:24 PM on December 22, 2015

CHINESE AS SHE IS SPOKE

or

ITS ALL GREEK TO ME
posted by Doleful Creature at 12:11 AM on December 23, 2015

When I studied Japanese, it was explained that the kanji were imported from China during the Tang dynasty, and that the "chinese readings" of the characters ("on", rhymes with "phone", from the Japanese word for "sound") have been preserved more phonetically from that period than any other source we have.

When there are reading competitions for ancient Chinese poetry, you often get to pick which spoken dialect/era you want to read in. Lots of competitors from Japan come with a heavily Tang-informed reading and occasionally sweep up all the medals (or at least so claimed a very proud Japanese teacher).

Incidentally, simplified Chinese is the result of an attempt to make the language more syllabic that kind of stalled in the 1960s. I especially recall a professor of modern Chinese history explaining that the characters from the phrase meaning "Chairman Mao's Long March to the Sea" became the only valid characters for the various syllables in that sentence. I can't imagine what this does to Cantonese or other Chinese spoken languages.

Okay, that's just my long tangent to try and flood out all the tacky chinese restaurant "jokes".
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:23 AM on December 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

A journey of ten thousand glyphs begins with a single serif.
posted by XMLicious at 2:39 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

dang though are there any hard-fought ancient poetry competitions in the US? Any language — Chinese, Latin, Greek, Old English even. So long as it's ancient poetry and so long as people are competing hard for medals, I'm there.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:46 AM on December 23, 2015

dang though are there any hard-fought ancient poetry competitions in the US?

The closest thing that comes to mind is Harvard's Latin oration at commencement. The orator is chosen by a competition, but it's not exactly an open field.
posted by jedicus at 6:41 AM on December 23, 2015

became the only valid characters for the various syllables in that sentence.

both Japan and Mainland China went through a series of reforms in the postwar . . .

e.g. 體 → 体; 國 → 国

which since I learned the simplified forms first appear perfectly reasonable.

So when I later came across the Chinese simplifications, e.g.

書 → 书; 長 → 长; 樂 → 乐; 車 → 车; 興 → 兴; 東 → 东

my reaction was 'WTH', the originals weren't that bad (in many cases Japan has IMO a 'better' simplification, e.g. 樂 → 楽) and the new characters are abominations.

But people learning the new characters first are probably perfectly happy with them.

Hanzi/kanji is endlessly fascinating to me. I think all kids should learn 1000 or so in school, more useful than a lot of other crap we have to study.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:13 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

To an outsider like me, the "simplified" set just means even more hanzi to learn. (Something like "東 → 东", which Heywood noted, strips away a visual mnemonic -- sun rising behind a tree -- that helps you remember the "complicated" version. And it doesn't look as good.)

A related Language log post describes a "Chinese restaurant shorthand" where someone in a hurry might substitute a simpler character with the same sound for a complex one.
posted by kurumi at 8:51 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

>書 → 书; 長 → 长; 樂 → 乐; 車 → 车; 興 → 兴; 東 → 东

my reaction was 'WTH', the originals weren't that bad (in many cases Japan has IMO a 'better' simplification, e.g. 樂 → 楽) and the new characters are abominations.

To Westerners familiar with Japanese, the new Chinese characters appear not so much as simplifications as, well, castrations. The stroke reduction, in some cases, is so extreme as to appear as acts of brutality (again, from an outsider's perspective). At least in the case of post-war Japanese simplifications, there's an organic link between the new character and the old one. For the post-Mao Chinese characters, this link is often obscure.

Mao's simplification program was guided by an urgent need to enhance literacy, and it's true that the new characters, with their reduction of strokes, are easy as all get out to write. But, is this important anymore in the age of smartphones? When you're thumbing text into a smartphone, it doesn't matter whether a character is two strokes or twenty. So, theoretically, if China reverted to the old characters, smartphone users would be unaffected.

Perhaps it's time for Japan, China, and Korea to revive the old, pre-World War Two characters, with their top-heavy, chunky (and gorgeous) multiplicity of strokes. Nobody using a smartphone or computer would be affected--they could always simplify when writing on paper, as people have been doing for millennia--and travelers between the three countries would have a leg up on reading the scripts of their destination country, leading to better happiness and harmony all around.
posted by Gordion Knott at 9:35 AM on December 23, 2015

I can't read any of these languages but I've always found the Japanese style the most aesthetically appealing.
posted by atoxyl at 11:27 AM on December 23, 2015

And Hangul has had a good 600 years to catch on so I don't see anyone going back on that anytime soon.
posted by atoxyl at 11:45 AM on December 23, 2015

The thing about Chinese is that (even accounting for tones) it is a language with many homophones. Consider the famous poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den", whose title is "施氏食狮史", or phonetically "shi shi shi shi shi". In fact the whole poem consists of "shi". Even with tones it's incomprehensible.

It's a contrived example but a purely phonetic writing system for Chinese would likely have frustrating ambiguities. You would almost need an irregular spelling system like English which is almost as hard as learning thousands of characters imo.
posted by vogon_poet at 12:30 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

My impression is that there has been an explosion of Chinese fonts online. Several years back a famous actress published a font based on her own handwriting, and made quite a splash. But of course the OSes still come with very few fonts.

Wiki has quite a comprehensive article on the Mainland's simplification effort in the 1950s.
posted by of strange foe at 12:52 PM on December 23, 2015

Oh man, I'm so excited to read this, it's been a long standing blind man's elephant for me. I know just enough about the various elements to have frequently thought "gee, making a Chinese font must be a hell of a lot of work", but never been able to learn much beyond that.
posted by lucidium at 7:03 PM on December 23, 2015

Japanese font makers sometimes "cheat" when making variations of a font family. Since Japanese is a mix of phonetic kana characters and Chinese kanji characters, foundries will sometimes do one big complete family in multiple weights, but then variations of that family where the 2000+ kanji stay the same, but the 26 phonetic kana are a stylized variant.

The fonts are still a pain to license. In recent years, bigger Japanese foundries like Morisawa have been making people by the fonts on a year-by-year expiring license, so customers would have to keep renewing the license every year. Pretty costly, but it has been nice seeing a few Morisawa fonts show up in Adobe's TypeKit webfont service this past year. Much cheaper than buying from Morisawa, plus Adobe servers dynamically build webfonts on the fly to strip out unused characters (because if they didn't, Kanji web fonts would basically be impossible).
posted by p3t3 at 10:21 PM on December 23, 2015

The complete beginner's guide to Chinese fonts is also a cool page!

It's a contrived example but a purely phonetic writing system for Chinese would likely have frustrating ambiguities. You would almost need an irregular spelling system like English which is almost as hard as learning thousands of characters imo.

I apologize for the linguistic pedantry that is about to follow but I find that there's a significant amount of misunderstanding of Chinese linguistics and it's one of my pet peeves -- I really don't think either of these statements has a great degree of truth.

Not only is the "stone den" poem extremely contrived, it's not even written in modern Chinese; it's written in a constrained form of classical Chinese (this is essentially the equivalent of presenting a constrained word-play form of Latin as "French"). The first line of the poem is "石室詩士施氏," which is unintelligible in modern standard Chinese: the equivalent would be something more like "有一位住在石室裏的詩人叫施氏," which even if you don't read Chinese you can tell is clearly not the same at all, and needless to say it's not pronounced "shi shi shi...".

But on a broader scale, the "purely phonetic writing doesn't work for Chinese" argument doesn't hold water. First off, there's the obvious rejoinder that Chinese people, including illiterate Chinese people, are able to speak Chinese without having to resort to pen and paper all the time, in both colloquial/casual situations and refined/high class situations.

Second, people tend to way over-exaggerate the degree of homophony in modern Chinese. You might hear of examples like the fact that 一 "one", 依 "according to", 醫 "doctor/medicine", 衣 "clothing" are all pronounced yi in the first tone, and if they were all written "yi" then how would we ever differentiate between them? However, what this argument omits is the fact that precisely because Chinese, especially Mandarin, has such a constrained set of syllables modern standard Chinese is largely disyllabic. "Clothing" is 衣服 yifu, "doctor" is 醫生 yisheng, "according to" is ”依據“ yiju.

This isn't to say that adopting a phonetic Chinese script would be totally painless. It is absolutely true that the continued use of characters has contributed to a somewhat terse formal written style that relies a bit over-heavily on classical Chinese expressions. But on the whole, there is nothing so sui generis about Chinese that it couldn't be written with an alphabet, in particular if it marked tones, like Vietnamese.

Second, there is really no comparison between English's irregular orthography and Chinese orthography. I've written this elsewhere on the blue but it takes schoolchildren in the Chinese-speaking world years to achieve full literacy. Now of course we have English language and literature classes in K-12 in the US (and in the analogous years in the rest of the Anglosphere) but you're not learning new letters of the alphabet for years.

The fact is that Chinese orthography requires an incredibly more significant degree of rote memory than an alphabetic orthography. An example is best: sure, you might forget how to spell "diarrhea" (was it "diarrhae?" or maybe "diarhea"? or how about "diarrhia?") but clearly all of these misspellings are very close to the truth and in 95% of cases people are going to know that you meant "diarrhea" when you wrote "diarrhia."

Contrast this to a Chinese person who has forgotten how to write 噴嚏 “sneeze" or 尷尬 "awkward," neither of which are particularly unusual vocabulary words. If you've forgotten how to write the characters point blank your rate of success in writing them correctly is basically zero. (I hasten to add that written Chinese is a bit more systematic than many people think: there's a large degree of regularity and you can often make educated guesses about what a character looks like if you have some idea. But it's by no means a phonetic syllabary.)
posted by andrewesque at 11:32 PM on December 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

andrewesque, in those cases what do Chinese people write? In Japanese, there is always the fallback of kana when one cannot recall how to write a particular kanji character, but I always wondered how this is handled in Chinese. Pinyin?
posted by armage at 1:37 AM on December 25, 2015

armage: I think it depends on cultural groups, but for me I'd substitute with the pinyin, or the English word if I'm talking to people who know both languages. Or struggle to find a synonym.
posted by destrius at 9:44 PM on December 30, 2015