When I want to tell people who have no great interest in the
topic how to distinguish typical Chinese from typical Korean,
I tell them that Korean (i.e., hangul) is never particularly
complicated, and has lots of circles and ovals, while Chinese has
neither. Quite crude, granted.

Shortly after I invested in the Unicode 3.0 book, I started to
scan the CJK "corpus", including the Unified Extensions. To my
considerable amazement, I discovered (P. 608) U+3AB3 and U+3AC8,
both of which (at least in the typeface used to set the book)
include ovals. I'm curious why these two contain ovals, when they
are so rare in CJK. There must be some reason. As usual with my
queries, it's only curiosity, and (also as usual) I'm delighted
to have the opportunity to ask!

My best regards, indeed.

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
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