Character of Letters Not Lost, but Sometimes the Meaning Is

Summary

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The Latin alphabet, 26 letters long, serves the needs of people from Argentina to Romania and of course, our USA. It is functional, if not strikingly beautiful. A practiced hand, however, can coax some pleasing shapes out of it, an art called calligraphy. And hundreds of professional fonts are available to the editors of your books and newspapers. They add a serif here, a loop there. This column is probably going to be written in Times New Roman, a familiar, practical font.

But nothing compares to the beauty of a completely different way of writing -- the pictographs and ideograms (characters) -- used by the writers of China, instead of an alphabet. So vast is the supply that I am told few are the natives who know them all.

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Extract

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Character of Letters Not Lost, but Sometimes the Meaning Is

Some are simple: "Three" is written with three short lines parallel to each other. Others are complex -- a window into the very thou...

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