Re: VL Gothic odd characters
On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 11:27 +0900, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote
... the difference of the style you are talking is something like
traditional vs modern preferences. It appears that, for whatever
reason, the designer of VL Gothic chose the traditional style for
this particular one. However, I don't think it is a bug; it is a
matter of preferences.
I never said it was a bug (I think someone else used that word). I
just said it was an odd feature. Thanks to the Ministry of Education
page that you showed me, I have now learned that these are examples of
kanji where the printed form can differ from the accepted handwritten
form.
> My teacher told me that if any student wrote these kanji in the
> VL-Gothic way, they would be corrected.
I'm not sure what your teacher actually said, but I believe you
misunderstood her explanation.
What she said is consistent with what several Japanese people have
told me. The VL-Gothic forms of soto/GAI, uchi/KA, etc, would be
regarded as wrong if a student hand-wrote them. Teachers would correct
them to the customary handwritten form. However, it seems that there
is more freedom in printed fonts than in handwriting. There are some
fonts that use the handwritten forms. But VL Gothic is not one of them.
I'm not sure what you want, but just as an example, you can
download
a PDF copy of the latest (revised last year) Joyo kanji hyo (List of
regular use Kanji)... it is a part of definitive document of modern
Japanese orthography for legal/official uses, issued by the Prime
Minister.
http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/kokujikunrei_h221130.html
This is a very useful resource, thank you. Indeed, my Japanese is
nowhere near as good as your English, and I had to get help in reading
it. At the top of p7 it talks about kanji where there is a difference
between the handwritten form and the printed form (at least in some
fonts). The list there includes the kanji I asked about (soto/GAI and
uchi/KA) as well as some other well-known cases where printing can
differ from handwriting, such as hito/JIN, i(ru)/JYU, hachi/YA.
Actually a vaguely analogous situation exists in English orthography
too. The handwritten form of lowercase "g" and "a" is the
"single-storey" version, but many printed fonts use the
"double-storey"
version. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G
However, it would be very unusual to use the double-storey versions of
these letters in handwriting.
Many thanks for your help.
Mark