Calling all cinophiles

[andrewducker]

Considering how precise Japanese and Chinese calligraphy looks to me, I'm wondering - do they have the concept of fonts, bold or italic? Or do their characters just look exactly the same each time (within reason).

And if not, do they find the fact that the latin alphabet varies so much confusing when they first encounter it?

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

a] Did you want an excuse to use the word "cinophile"?

b] Surely a larger, heavier variant of a character is in bold... It's not character-set specific.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh no: the caligraphy doesn't always look the same!

There are various different recognised styles, from seal script, which is fairly blocky and used for, well, seals, to grass script, which is incredibly stialised: I've seen grass script-style scrolls for sale with notes next to them saying "This poem is something to do with fish, but that's the only character that we can read...."

[figg.livejournal.com]

Considering that japanese people have four writing systems:

Kanji : The ideographic characters.
Katakana / Hiragana - sylable alphabets (abjads?)
And romanji

And they go from left to right, right to left and top to bottom.

Yes- they do have bold or italic.

They also have modern, and classical styles.

Caligraphy is much more valued over there and a part of culture.

One that hasn't been killed by desktop publishing.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Sinophiles, pu-lease!

[garunya.livejournal.com]

Regarding preciseness - Chinese/Japanese handwriting is as varied as it is in those using the latin alphabet... a lot of your average, everyday Chinese handwriting is appalling, and one of the main reasons stroke order is important is that it helps identify badly written characters.

[chillies.livejournal.com]

The first thing is that a "font" is a consistent set of character glyphs belonging to a typeface. Arial is a typeface; the letters a-z, A-Z and punctuation marks in Arial 12pt normal weight is a font. In latin scripted publications, there's a load of cultural signifiers that have built up around characteristics of typefaces. Check out the Asterix books for great examples of this: each of the languages the Gauls come across is written in a typeface characteristic of those peoples. Other signifiers refer to the formality of the message (don't write Acts of parliament in Comic Sans).

I had to get a document translated into cantonese, punjabi, urdu, hindi and bengali. Our document had different sizes, colours and even typefaces to emphasis headings, subsections etc. but the translators only had a single font family and had to rely on size and/or colour to differentiate. The problem is that Quark v6 DTP package doesn't do non-latin characters (well, doesn't do unicode) and translators have to use something with a crappy font management system.

I'd say that the reason "they all look the same" is lack of familiarity on the viewers' part. A standard install of MacOS X has a font book with 14 Chinese font families, some of which have different weights. Whilst I can describe the differences between the typefaces, I hvae no idea of the cultural characteristics that are associated with the differences.

[babydyke-82.livejournal.com]

your main photo is really scary. I like the last one better. X x

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's loads and loads of different fonts out there.

There's also three kinds of writing styles, essentially the equivalents of block capitals, printing, and cursive joined up writing.

Mind you in Japanese you also have hiragana and katakana as well as kanji, but from what I saw in China the font concept is alive and well there too.

[gleisdreieck.livejournal.com]

Sorry to wander in on this conversation (after a brief sojourn through a famous bitchfight between two of your old girlfriends) but:

Just as there are two major font families for Latin-based alphabets (serif and sans-serif), so there are two main font families for CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) writing systems: Mincho (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincho) (serif) and Gothic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Gothic_typeface) (sans-serif).

Basically it all comes down to variable width on strokes, and squiggles at the end of each one. Within these two families, there are of course hundreds of variants. Hiragana and Katakana are nothing to do with fonts - they are distinct characters at the Unicode level.

[andrewducker]

Cheers for that.

Just wondering, but _which_ bitchfight? The massive one on my journal from last November is still a private entry.

[gleisdreieck.livejournal.com]

How many are you aware of?

I guess this one escaped the realms of private LJ entries :-( or possibly :-) Im not sure.