Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Calligraphy
I watched a long documentary on the life of Steve Jobs in which they interviewed the calligraphy expert who helped Jobs develop various fonts for the Apple. The calligrapher said he refused to write in any fashion except by hand and he lamented the decline in handwritten documents. I am teaching myself Chinese Hanzi (simplified, not traditional) by stroking characters with my finger on an Android screen and letting an app called Hanzi Recognizer find them. Stroke order is essential. Even if what I write/stroke resembles the character exactly the search engine will not find it because it uses the order of the strokes as part of the search. I had my personal reasons for choosing simplified (used in mainland China) over traditional (used everywhere outside mainland). I have watched youtube videos of master Chinese and Japanese calligraphers at work. There is a kind of beauty in these logographs and a mood which arises during the practice of "painting" the characters. However, most Chinese speakers have cell phones and use pinyin phonetic methods to bring up the Hanji characters and so gradually I think the skill of stroking characters will vanish. There are input methods which allow the finger to stroke and do not require pinyin but still, stroking by finger is different from the ink brush which allows so much more style and expression.
