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Comment by HuShifang | Hacker News Reader

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.

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Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being commonly used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji

Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode displays ㅈ/ㅅ, but they're not written like that. It's a common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect characters to be written like they're displayed on a computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written here. [0]

[0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Or...

This is a stylistic/typeface difference between sans-serif and serif text. Some people do write like that, most people don't.

I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings. It's always been the handwritten version as depicted.

ㅅ almost looks like 人 [0] (인) on computers (looks like 1 stroke to beginners), but when handwriting it is 2 strokes. ㅈ is also 2 strokes (personal handwriting aside) and looks rather different.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9

ㅈ is three strokes; not sure what you mean by personal handwriting aside, but the 'stroke' is a designation of hand movement, not a count of curves that makes up the character.

> I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings.

Here's[0] someone's history of Korean typography which points out that the ㅅ may come from 훈민정음 Hunminjeongeum [1], which indeed has ㅅ .

Also perhaps you haven't seen middle school kids obsess over handwriting with multicolored pens ;)

[0] https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=designmage&logN...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye#/media/F...

Hmm? I don't think anyone considers ㅈ as three strokes, unless they're writing ㅈ like printed font. When handwritten, the whole フ-like shape is one stroke, and the small attachment is the second stroke.

Traditionally, one stroke means one movement between the brush touching the paper and lifting off - for example the Chinese character 弓 has three strokes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BC%93#/media/File:%E5%BC%...

Looks like it’s both 2 and 3 획 when handwritten. I know people who write with 3 strokes; I do with 2.

https://ko.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ㅈ https://namu.wiki/w/ㅈ

人 is 2 strokes tho

Sorry, I meant that it looks like 1 stroke to beginners. Visually ㅅ looks similar to 人 on computers but in handwriting it's different.

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