On 22/10/05, Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote:

>
> After seeing these examples of "correct" and "incorrect", I'll no longer
> be anywhere nearly as willing to think that hanzi/CJK are "designed" for
> minimal confusion and misreading.
>

Yes, there is a false perception that native CJK readers never have
any problems distinguishing between similar characters as they have
been trained to know the correct stroke order of every character (this
view was expounded on the Unicode list recently when talking about
homographs and Internationalized Domain Names). What they forget is
that native Chinese readers read Chinese in the same way that native
English readers read English, that is by looking at the general shape
of the glyphs and extrapolating the correct character from context;
people only stop to carefully look at the exact form of the character
when there may be some doubt as to what is written. Misreading of
Chinese characters by native (and educated) readers is just as common
as for English.

Andrew