Re: Moi, le Kou (was: verbs = nouns?)

From: "John Cowan"

> Hmm.  Does this mean that they would *mishear* it (as ke1 or whatever),
> or that most Chinese speakers don't know how to read the ideograph?
> I would assume the latter, but what does "mangle" mean in this context?
Misread. In simplified characters as used in the mainland, the 'bow' radical
could easily be confused with the 'horse', especially  if you were expecting
the more commonly used latter radical. On the more literate side of the
divide (don't know the emoticons for a highly sarcastic snigger), even
there, the "qu1" (district) phonetic is only going to generate "ou1" or
"qu1" as possible readings of this character. Mishear? No. I would stand on
people's chests condor-like 'til they got it right (I'm not this aggressive,
really I'm not). This character *is* available on computer, so once I got it
registered into hospital and tax records, voilà, it was official. Doing that
on the mainland was near impossible (but then, going Japanese in Japan was
equally undoable).

Kou