Re: Chinese writing systems

Steg writes:

>Actually, talking about Chinese characters...
>I don't know if it'll survive, but i got this message (which i am now
>responding to) with a random hanzi in it!  Third line from the top of
>Florian's paragraph, the first word is (at least on my screen)
>"r{hanzi}amier".  Having only taken 2 semesters of Japanese, i don't
>recognize it (also it's pretty small), but it uses the 'door'(?) radical
>you find in "hear", and then inside it there's something that looks like
>the one Japanese uses for the |sei| in |sensei| (teacher) and |gakusei|
>(student), except without the little smitchik on the upper-left.  It may
>have a little smitchik in the lower right part.
When hanzi like that pop up, you can't trust 'em. I faced this
problem all the time when I lived in Taiwan (with Microsoft Chinese).
Any diacritic mark generated (most often) unattested characters (try
and read a Hungarian online newspaper that way, I dare you). The
problem seems to be that I sent something out with an e, accent aigu
(e'); Florian received it as something weird and it got sent back to
the list that way.
The word intended, as someone earlier pointed out, was "re'camier", a
variety of chaise longue into which people swooned (hence the
expression "fainting couch").

With back of right hand gently covering my firehead, I am

Kou