Re: Nice comment, Adam! (was: beautiful scripts)

From: "SuomenkieliMaa"

> --- Adam Walker wrote:
> > Which, of course, means that just like in Chinese
> > those "denser" characters
> > become illegible blobs with a bad printer or dirty
> > typeface.  Sometimes
> > reading my church bulitin can be SO intriguing . . .
> > here a blob there a
> > blob everywhere a blob blob eieio.  Same thing holds
> > true for the
> > interoffice memos at work.
> Nice comment, Adam, and one that I agree with!  When I
> look at a Japanese newspaper, I sometimes cringe
> because of the "un-balance" of the characters.  I
> mean, kana (katakana & hiragana) remain quite
> well-balanced, but those darned imported pictograms &
> other kanji -- albeit quite handy at times -- can
> really make the page look like it's crawling with
> spiders.  Then again, though, Japanese kanji tend to
> be simplified (although not the simplified Mao-version
> now on Mainland China), so I doubt they look as nasty
> as the Chinese chars still being incorporated in
> Taiwan!
Hey, steady there -- I'm a traditional character fiend. I think the key to
Adam's comment is "bad printer". Faxes can wreak utter havoc. Church
bulletins, xeroxes of xeroxes, high school tests (they used a paper so
porous, they might just have well been printing on paper towels -- even the
o's, e's, and c's on my English tests looked like Snoopy noses), and just
about anything printed by the Taiwan Esperanto Society are bad bets, to be
sure. But decent mags and the daily papers had many-stroked characters
coming out quite nicely. The "yu4" of "hu1yu4", "to call for", "to urge",
"to appeal", is thirty-two strokes and pops up quite frequently in political
articles -- never recall it being a big blob. And when I changed from
mild-mannered high school teacher to translator and we moved from the land
of mimeograph to ink-jet, why, a whole new world opened. :)

Kou